It Always Rains on Sunday

An ordinary Sunday in Bethnal Green in the east of London. Rose Sandigate is married, has two stepdaughters and a son, and a life that is orderly and colourless. The morning paper reports an escaped convict: Tommy Swann, the man she was with years ago. In the afternoon she finds him in the shelter in the back garden. Robert Hamer directs. Googie Withers plays Rose and John McCallum plays Tommy. It is an Ealing production. What it does was considered new in British cinema. It takes the shape of a manhunt and spreads it across an entire neighbourhood: Sunday breakfast, black market traders, a record shop, the pub, the rain. Crime is the main line, and the film buries it inside a portrait of a community. Rose is unusual for the period too. Neither victim nor bad woman, she is written as someone moving on boredom and regret, and Withers plays it without softening anything. The most cited passage is the railway yard chase at the end. Night, steam and shunting lines: it is regularly named as the English equivalent of noir. Who it is for: viewers who like postwar British cinema and realistic neighbourhood narrative. Who it is not for: there are many subplots and several go nowhere. For anyone wanting a main line, it is scattered.