"The Small Back Room was Powell and Pressburger's only really serious look at the contemporary British scene in the 1940s°dealing with the latter days of the war°.As a piece of filmmaking it was one of their best, and as a dramatic thriller it was realistic, moving, satiric, and (particularly in its prolonged climax of the defusing of a bomb, a tour-de-force) almost unbearable in its suspense." (William K. Everson) Another British scholar in America, David Thomson, writes: "This war is an ordeal seemingly designed to test and torture the repressed emotions of the central character, Sammy Rice (David Farrar), a wounded romantic°who is the nation's best dismantler of insidious enemy mines washed up on England's pebbly shores°.Powell understood (Farrar's) darkness and put it next to the burning eyes of Kathleen Byron: their glances of desire are like a fuse and a flame, trying to touch."