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The dreary weather forecast fits a collective mood, England out of the war and into noir shadows. Sorting the raffish from the drab in London's East End, a dozen or so characters crossing paths or not, "nice way to spend a Sunday morning." The housewife (Googie Withers) was once an adventurous barmaid engaged to a sharpie (John McCallum), he's sent to Dartmoor and she settles for an older dullard (Edward Chapman). The bomb shelter turned supplies shed in the garden is one memento of the Blitz among many, the escaped convict is found there to rekindle her flame, a pan from mirror to window dissolves to a high-angled view of a teeming street bazaar that cranes down to the pipe-smoking detective (Jack Warner). The heroine's stepdaughters have dramas of their own, one (Susan Shaw) is an aspiring songbird involved with a married bandleader (Sydney Tafler) and the other (Patricia Plunkett) is a plaintive doe tempted by a petty gangster (John Slater). Jaded missus (Betty Ann Davies), underworld bumblers (Jimmy Hanley, John Carol, Alfie Bass), tenacious reporter (Michael Howard). "If you're still looking for a story..." "Thank you very much, I'm not." Robert Hamer weaves it all together beautifully, a sharp eye on a studio terrarium closer to Carné than to Reed. Working-class rituals on a damp dawn, plus the rare privilege of reading the newspaper in bed. "Any murders?" The blind trumpeter in front of a pub, kids being pests with the harmonicas they got from a philandering husband, an unlucky passerby's dentures dropping into a puddle during his brush with the fugitive—details in unusually dense textures. The upshot is a grudging reconciliation with domesticity following a squashed escape, with Withers' face at the end as memorably hurt as Celia Johnson's in Brief Encounter. With Jane Hylton, Meier Tzelniker, Frederick Piper, Hermione Baddeley, David Lines, Nigel Stock, John Salew, and Gladys Henson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |