Powell and Pressburger’s HOUR OF GLORY is a patriotic paean to the unsung heroes during WWII, namely, the boffins evaluating new weapons in London, referred to as “the back room boys”, borne out by its original UK title “THE SMALL BACK ROOM”.
Things start a tad cloak-and-dagger as Captain Dick Stuart (Gough, uncharacteristically zippy) seeks professional help from scientist Sammy Rice (Farrar) about newly discovered lethal mines dropped by Nazi bombers. And this will lead to a nail-biting finale where Sammy must defuse a thermal flask with a double booby trap at Chesil Beach, whose tautly educed suspense well predates Kathryn Bigelow’s THE HURT LOCKER (2008).
Sammy is something of a wreck, drowning in self-pity because of his disability (he lost a leg) and booze, though he is high-functioning but has neither gumption nor zeal for life, which becomes his obliging girlfriend Susan’s (Byron) cause for concern. It only takes the dangerous mission near the end, looking death in its deadly eyes and overcoming his mortal dread to resurrect his self-worth and rebirth as a good fellow. For once, Farrar painstakingly maps out Sammy’s benevolent but tormented psyche with commendable reserve and commitment.
The supporting cast is also quite game. As Susan, Byron is assigned a stereotyped role as a secretary and a helpmate, whose sole purpose is to put Sammy back on his mettle. Still, she betrays sophistication and her shadowy mien and earnest solicitude make Susan a blue-chip foil. For the sterner sex, Jack Hawkins plays a bureaucrat superior with almost oleaginous caprices and Cyril Cusack’s Corporal Taylor evokes appreciable compassion for that precious gentleness ingrown inside a human being out of his diffident shell.
Forfeiting the stupendous, ravishing Technicolor of their prior chefs-d’oeuvre (such as THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP, 1943, BLACK NARCISSUS, 1947 and THE RED SHOES, 1948), Powell and Pressburger return to monochrome and strut their stuff to build a world of war-time severity and immediacy with amazing shadow play, prioritizing resilience and defiance over oppression and terror. Meantime, their visual artifice of psychologizing Sammy’s dipsomania instantaneously harks back to Hitchcock’s Daliesque sequences in SPELLBOUND (1945) and foreshadows the Kafkaesque distortion in Orson Welles’ THE TRIAL (1962).
Part THE LOST WEEKEND, part THE HURT LOCKER, part a sobering romance, part jingoistic boosterism, HOUR OF GLORY is not Powell and Pressburger's strongest effort as it loses some stream in its multi-headed directions, but it is also better than most UK productions of its time, supplanting the stuffiness with some wondrously constructed shots that is what makes a Powell and Pressburger's picture a must-see for cinephiles.
referential entries: Powell and Pressburger's THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (1943, 8.2/10); "I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING" (1945, 7.5/10); Billy Wilder’s THE LOST WEEKEND (1945, 7.9/10); Alfred Hitchcock’s SPELLBOUND (1945, 8.2/10); Orson Welles’ THE TRIAL (1962, 7.7/10).

Title: Hour of Glory
Original Title: The Small Back Room
Year: 1949
Country: UK
Language: English
Genre: Drama, Thriller, Romance
Directors/Screenwriters: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
based on the novel by Nigel Balchin
Music: Brian Easdale
Cinematography: Christopher Challis
Editor: Clifford Turner
Cast:
David Farrar
Kathleen Byron
Jack Hawkins
Michael Gough
Cyril Cusack
Milton Rosmer
Walter Fitzgerald
Michael Goodliffe
Emrys Jones
Sid James
Leslie Banks
Elwyn Brook-Jones
Geoffrey Keen
Anthony Bushell
Renée Asherson
Robert Morley
Bryan Forbes
Rating: 7.6/10
Cinema is dead
2024-12-08 14:32:06
Virgil
2024-09-28 22:55:54
麦田圈212
2024-07-01 22:00:14
一粒家田米
2024-05-16 16:08:06
近旁
2024-01-06 22:02:46
再禁言我必卸载
2024-01-05 11:12:34