The Small Back Room

Powell and Pressburger followed up the success of The Red Shoes with a work in an entirely different vein, the cynical, claustrophobic black-and-white noir The Small Back Room. Frequently drunk and always embittered, a handicapped World War II bomb-disposal expert (David Farrar) has only his coworker and lover (Kathleen Byron) to keep the terrors and his careerist supervisors away, until a sinister new Nazi booby-trap bomb arrives to truly test his limits. All low-angle, deep-focus photography, chiaroscuro lighting, and moody romanticism, The Small Back Room “achieves an oppressiveness as massive as [Fritz] Lang’s” (Raymond Durgnat).