It Always Rains on Sunday Review

• 10th Nov 2012

The latest of Studiocanal’s releases of Ealing films is the dark noirish It Always Rains on Sunday (1947). The film is set within a 24 hour period on a typical dull wet Sunday in Bethnal Green, London and focuses on the Sandigate family. The day before a criminal, Tommy Swann (John McCallum) has escaped from Dartmoor Prison and makes his way to the home of the Sandigate’s as many years before he had a fling with the mother of the household, Rose (the brilliant Googie Withers) who has since married the respectable George Sandigate (Edward Chapman). There is a wonderful flashback sequence to a fresher and blonder Rose as a local barmaid dating the suave if roguish Tommy Swann. Finding him in the family’s old Anderson shelter Rose agrees to shelter him. When the rest of the family goes out for the day Rose puts him in the conjugal bedroom to feed him and dry him off. Inevitably those old sparks return and she eventually sleeps with him. In the meantime the elder daughter (Susan Shaw) from George’s previous marriage is carrying on with a married band leader (Sydney Tafler) while an assortment of other East End gangsters are also on the periphery to the central drama.

This film is often described as Ealing’s darkest film but instead I prefer to see it as perhaps one of the studio’s most realistic dramas. The book of the film was written by Arthur La Bern who also went on to be the author of the book ‘Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square’ which was adapted to the screen for Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), also a very London based thriller about a tie strangler around Covent Garden. Of course Ealing, the studio which made this film is best known for its lighthearted if black comedies, but this pre-dates the first of those, Whiskey Galore (1949) by a couple of years. It was made shortly after the end of the war and while Britain can claim some moral superiority for winning the Second World War it was a left a broken country. Following the ‘excitement’ of the war Britain entered a period of ennui and austerity and the working-class lives of the Sandigate and even their boredom trying to hang on to their East End working-class traditions was proving hard. In this respect it is worth freeze framing any of the exterior or interior shots and take a look at the building, locations, objects and furniture which make up the family home. This film is a fabulous piece of social history of a time with now very few remnants. Withers plays her part as Rosie with suitable weathered resignation until this handsome rogue from her past appears to give it some romance and opportunity for escape, no matter how remote and risky that may be. In this sense it’s also a very daring film that dares to take risks.

Starkly shot in very much a film noir style, it is never the less also very British, nee even very London film. Although it was set in Bethnal Green and mentions the Jewish family moving from the East End to the new Jewish quarters of Stamford Hill it was actually filmed between Chalk Farm and Kentish Town with the finale chase sequence filmed around the shunting yards in Stratford, an area which no longer exists but is now the site of the Olympic Park. In many ways, as already mentioned this film is very much a document of a London past and refuses to romanticize that past. Although the East End criminals (some trying to palm off stolen roller-skates) may seem caricatures, even romanticized, never the less do represent a type of under class criminal no longer around.

As for the extras on the disc, as well as the standard trailer and stills gallery there are a couple of concise and wonderfully considered brief documentaries: a locations documentary showing the areas which exist where the film was shot as well as film historian Ian Sinclair and Liverpool director of working-class life Terence Davies talking about the film and praising its many merits and observations, merely highlighting the fact that this is a largely a sadly neglected film and dare I say it one that should be up there with the best films to ever have come out of British cinema and most certainly one of the best examples of working-class life made in post-war Britain.

Chris Hick