IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY (1947)

Unusual for a film this influential/copied to remain freshly felt and powerfully effective.  But this post-war ‘kitchen sink’ drama (about half the film actually in the kitchen) builds character & suspense out of well-observed working-class rowhouse detail, like a period piece made at the time so it doesn't feel dated.  It’s where dissatisfied second-wife Googie Withers gets the shock of her life when one-time flame John McCallum, just escaped from prison, shows up hiding in the old air raid shelter asking for help.  Sunday means the whole family (dull, older husband, grown step-daughters, young son) will all be out and about which gives them a chance to get away with . . . with what?  A change of clothes?  Rekindled romance?  A getaway future?  Certainly not happiness, life just too bleak.  Everything clicks here, the nearly realistic settings, the bitter relationships and past passion between former lovers.  With three or four more on-going interrelated little dramas playing out concurrently in neighborhood pubs, shops and street corners.  Quite a busy Sunday, plenty for nosy police detective Jack Warner to check on.  A breakthru for director Robert Hamer, whose next was the darkly comic KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS/’49, here pacing two-hours of plot into a tidy hour & a half yet not seeming to skimp.  (The films not only showing Hamer’s remarkable range, but also cinematographer Douglas Slocombe's.)  Sympathetic to every lying soul in the piece, and even to the only two people who don’t constantly lie: Withers’ nice dull husband, and the Music Shop wife whose unfaithful husband is making a play for one of the unhappy step-daughters.  Plus, a little bit of Yiddish from East End Jews!  Just three words, one repeated (shiksha); one mispronounced (schlemiel).  The film an unexpected treat from little Ealing Studios, better known for their British Everyman Comedies.  Here, an Everywoman Tragedy.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: During the character build-ups, Hamer gets in and out of a couple of flashbacks without the soft focus or wavy line transitions commonly used at the time.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Co-scripter Angus MacPhail, a past & future Hitchcock collaborator, brought even more realistic middle-class tone to Hitch’s habitually underrated THE WRONG MAN/’56.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-wrong-man-1956.html