This summer Rialto Pictures (who L.A.
Times/N.P.R. film critic Kenneth Turan refers to as “the gold
standard of reissue distributors”) will release new 35mm prints of
Richard Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday (United
Kingdom, 1947). Anyone with a soft spot for films put out by Ealing
Studios and featuring excellent black-and-white cinematography (provided
by Douglas Slocombe, who was nominated for 10 British Oscars – winning
them for The Servant, The Great
Gatsby, and Julia) should take note.

Dilys Powell, writing for The Sunday Times (London), November
1947, gives my favorite summary of the film:

“The story is many-stranded: an escaped convict, the married woman
who shelters him, the love-affair of her step-daughter, the intrigues of
the local dance-band leader, the dealings of the local fence and the
local pin-table proprietor, and, threading and re-threading through the
plot, the stratagems of three scrubby crooks, fighting a losing battle
against the law, the price of drink and the difficulty of selling a
lorry-load of stolen roller-skates. It cannot have been easy to unite
all these elements in a coherent film. Yet the joins are rarely
noticeable, and for the most part It Always Rains on
Sunday seems to move with fluency.

“I believe this is the result, not merely of the skilful linking of episodes, the
articulation as it were of the plot’s skeleton, but also of the
solid background detail. The grey streets, the music-shop, the pub, the
market-stalls these, indeed, are drawn in with assurance. But there is
something more: an amused, a devoted attention to the tiny decorations
of the everyday, to the chattering neighbour, the darts game and the
black cat brushed with an exasperated gesture off the sofa-head. These
trifles mark the difference between the studio set and the room lived
in: and an audience convinced of the realism of the scene it watches
becomes submissive to the movement of the story.”

The “background detail” that Powell refers to is so
evocative that it turns Bethnal Green, the London borough where it was
shot, into a leading character within its own right. The extensive shots
reveal much of these bombed slums of East London before it was
redeveloped in the sixties. Wikipedia notes that Bethnal Green was one
of the poorest slums in London and its western end (along with the
neighboring Whitechapel area) provided the stomping grounds for Jack the
Ripper. It was also the site of “the worst civilian disaster of
World War II” when 173 people died in the tube station during an
air raid alarm where one woman slipped, due to wet and dark conditions,
and her fall triggered a crowd crush. Then, during the sixties, Bethnal
Green was home to the infamous twin gangsters: the Kray brothers.
Gentrification only came recently at the beginning of the 21st
Century.

Rialto Picture’s press notes
for It Always Rains on Sunday give some nice background
for director Robert Hamer:

“Born 1911 in Kidderminster, the son of actor Gerlad Hamer. He graduated from
Cambridge in economics and dabbled in poetry. Perhaps surprisingly with
that background, he began in films in 1934 at the bottom as a number boy
(the board for scene and take number was not yet attached to the
synchronizing clapper on British sets), eventually being promoted to
editor, cutting among others, Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn.

“He first directed The Haunted Mirror, one of the two best episodes in
Dead of Night (1945), then the Victorian melodrama Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945), and It Always Rains on Sunday in 1947 – all of which featured
actress Googie Withers. Two years later he made his most famous film,
the comedy of murders Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). In the first four films with Hamer, Alec Guinness played all eight of Dennis Prices’ victims.”

Other talents to look
for in It Always Rains on Sunday are composer George
Auric (who scored all of Jean Cocteau’s films, many Ealing
comedies, Roman Holiday, Rififi, and
The Wages of Fear, to name but a few) and actress
Googie Withers (whose “distinctive first name was either an Indian
nurse’s affectionate nickname for her – it means
‘pigeon’ in Hindi – or was a childish mispronunciation
of her actual given name ‘Georgette’”). I’ll
also mention actor Edward Chapman, but mainly for the digression it
allows me (also gleaned from the press notes) that note how “In
the wake of Sir John Gielgud’s morals arrest in the 50’s,
Chapman circulated a petition to force him to resign from Equity.
Laurence Olivier reportedly kicked him out of his dressing room when
Chapman asked for a signature. Perhaps ironically, he was cast opposite
Robert Morley in Oscar Wilde as the Marquis of
Queensbury, the man who outed the playwright.”