FILM & REVIEW Really unusual wartime drama from Powell and Pressburger. The Germans are dropping booby trapped bombs that don’t explode on impact but only if they are handled. Several children have been killed this way and Captain Stuart (Gough) is tasked with recruiting scientist Sammy Rice (Farrar) to investigate . He is a embittered man with a artificial foot that causes him considerable pain that the pills don’t help but whiskey does. - but he becomes out of control on the stuff. He is involved with Susan (Byron) who puts up with his surly moods as she is in love with him but he doesn’t make it easy. He also fights bureaucracy and the military and chafes under the leadership of Jack Hawkins. Meanwhile more bombs are discovered so they need so find one before it blows up. It’s got a very strange feel to it….Powell has said that a lot of the lighting and camera angles came from German Expressionism and a lot of the dialogue from minor characters seems almost deliberately stilted. Farrar is just superb in the tortured role with Byron matching him in intensity with a superb whiskey influenced surreal dream sequence which is quite remarkable and an edge of the seat bomb disposal sequence towards the end which is as good as I’ve seen. Add in Sid James and Robert Morley as the comic relief and you have an overlooked gem - 4/5
Ultra-realistic and harrowing adaptation of Nigel Balchin's novel which explores the mental traumas of research and development staff during WWII. The boffins. David Farrar plays a bomb specialist who leads a group of scientists working in munitions. They are a small department which has to fight for resources and status.
It's an entirely masculine environment. And all the men live with extreme stress. Farrar lost a foot in an explosion, and is in a constant struggle with the whisky that brings him oblivion, while being called out to investigate the German trick bomb which has been killing his colleagues.
The men suppress their emotions and have no way of communicating their fears. Farrer needs to determine the mental state of one of his team, but is only able to hold a short discussion on detonators. There is sense that there is no way of knowing how broken they are because their customs are entirely built on not showing how they feel.
This must be Farrar's best performance. Kathleen Byron is his girlfriend, and unofficial therapist. Her emotional aura has an uncanny mystical strength. While the story is procedural and realistic, the visual style is expressionistic. This might have seemed overwrought, if Powell and Pressburger hadn't created such a convincing hell.