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Film Noir defies definition, plenty disagree whether its a movement, genre, style. Perhaps its more usefully conceived as a sensibility, a world view, an attitude. In which case the words pessimism, determinism ie characters lacking choice their lives are predetermined, doom, gloom, the past coming back to affect the present all spring to mind. Its possible to see a cycle of films with remarkably consistent features in terms of visual style emerging in U.S primarily and to a lesser extent the U.K and France in the forties and fifties. While most noir films have a male as the central protagonist, a male who is invariably weak and flawed, a number of these films, such as Mildred Pierce, have a female protagonist. Noir manifested itself differently in Britain, combining with elements of what was to become known as kitchen sink or social realism and frequently concerned with social class.

This film uses the claustrophobic interiors of the terraced house to great effect. The noir style of long shadows, oblique angles, becomes more evident in the final climax, not really needed early on since the interiors work effectively without lighting effects. Melancholia drips through this like the rain of the title, Googie Withers is terrific, her face a mask of dreams, desires pushed away, disappointment etched over her features through her hard make up. How different she is in appearance to the femmes fatales of the U.S movies, bustling round the kitchen in her pinafore, then later on the almost military smartness of her utility dress when she attends Tommy. As a character shes every bit as strong however as her American counterparts. Like Mildred Pierce, she's strong in a domestic setting, when the usual convention for women in noir is to take them out of the domestic, placing them typically as nightclub singers or gangsters molls. In details I ll acknowledge this is on occasions cheesy and dated. Scratch at the surface however and its a fascinating exploration of the social tensions emerging after World War Two. How were people to adjust to life in peacetime? Were they able to return to the rigidly prescribed roles they d had prior to the war? Ealing studios produced a number of films which now can be seen to share many affinities with American Film Noir, this is one of the most interesting and rewarding.

A rather splendid 1947 b/w film from the Ealing Studios. I find a lot of these films a little too sentimental and the acting a bit too stagey but this is a real surprise. Great dialogue, convincingly conveyed and together with super cinematography combine to make this a truly enjoyable if nostalgic view. The locations are more Camden than the East End, except for glimpses of Whitechapel at the start but no matter, it all looks good and the views of the railway marshalling yard at the end quite stunning. There is a central story but is is intercut with others and the whole thing bounces along nicely. Even the kids are all right and the amusing bits still amusing. Really though this is a very believable view of London's East End just after the war. Bomb sites, rationing and everyone trying to make the most of what they had. Also there was a feeling that the cops and robbers weren't really that different from each other, just on different sides and the important thing was to survive. Well worth a watch.

i have to disagree with the other reviewer. this a good, solid drama that captures the mood of post war london expertly. the stories mesh together well and the performances, with one notable exception, are first rate. the atmospheric photgraphy adds to the overall feel of the piece and the climax is very exciting.

"London Live" t.v. channel no 8 are currently showing a season of Ealing Films and not just the well known comedies for which they were better known.I had obviously seen these comedies but on 1st June 2015 I saw "It Always Rains on Sunday" (1947) for the first time.I was familiar with Googie Withers from the time of her support role to Margaret Lockwood in the Hitchcock film "The Lady Vanishes" (1938).Talking of this great director one James Hitchcock has given a definitive user review dated 7/9/05 (first above) which satisfactorily explains the plot and other production values for which I commended him.Yes the film set rain machine was very much in evidence to add verisimilitude to the film title.A few reviewers from foreign parts I notice had an understandable problem with the London vernacular accents but it was obviously produced with the home market in mind as were many American movies.Being a 69 year old Londoner myself I understood all the East End dialogue, having worked in Stratford near Bethnal Green myself.In line with IMDb.com general average I rated it 7/10.

The film was made and set in the bleak environment of post-war east London and shows Robert Hamer to be an extremely talented and sophisticated film maker. Unlike Dearden and Relph, Hamer does not impose a moral framework on his characters. The film shows two sides of adultery between Googie Withers and the escaped convict and between her daughter and a Jewish shopkeeper. What makes this film stand out is its intentioned 'realism' and complex character portrayals. This little known classic is probably one of Ealing's finest films.

These are stories of various people one Sunday in London. Tommy Swann escapes from prison. He tries to hide at his former girlfriend Rose Sandigate but she is now married with a tired boring life and bratty step-children. Cops are in pursuit. There is a shooting, and an employees-only party in a closed nightclub.

This is a rather modern way of story telling. These are interconnected stories of connected characters with an overarching narrative. Some of it is more compelling than others. I got lost with some of the characters. The miniature railyard sequence is a bit laughable. Obviously, somebody screwed up with the shot although I think the sequence would be fine without the miniature. All in all, it's an interesting British movie.

A superb study by Ealing studios, of a working class family, in the east end of London, after the 2nd World War. Googie Withers plays a harassed housewife, who during one Sunday lunchtime, discovers that her old boy friend, Tommy Swan, has broken out of jail and is in need of help.Local policeman Jack Warner is given the task of hunting him down. This film gives the viewer a fascinating look at life in England, in the late 1940's and early 50's. Look out for one scene, featuring the milkman, delivering milk, and his horse, walking up the centre of the street, and knowing just when to stop and when to go. Well worth watching.

John McCallum (Tommy) escapes from Dartmoor prison and seeks out his ex-girlfriend Googie Withers (Rose) for food and clothing to help him on his way. Googie is now married to Edward Chapman (George) and lives with his 2 daughters and a son of their own. I think? The son seems a bit old but I think that's the relationship as he refers to Googie as 'mum'. We get involved in their claustrophobic life in their community where everyone seems to know each other. It's the East End of London and everyone is 'salt of the earth'. You get spivs, gangsters, family life and detective Jack Warner (Fothergill) on the trail of McCallum. Googie and McCallum do get together in real life but things are different in this film.

The main plot follows the escaped convict storyline but this film is also about family life with characters having their own agendas. Which room is the best room in the house to hide an escaped criminal? You won't believe where Googie directs her ex not only to hideout but also to have a kip! We see McCallum's true feelings towards Googie unravel in the later stages of the film and there is quite an intense final scene as he makes a break for it. I watched the film on a Sunday. And it was raining.

This film portrays the post-war East End atmosphere like few other films. Its characters appear to be typical East End characters - the frustrated housewife, adventurous schoolboy, local spiv, small-time gangsters, Jack Warner as the archetypical detective, patrician father-figure - just a few of the memorable characters whose lives intertwine on a bleak, rainy Sunday afternoon in London. There is more to these characters than meets the eye, as the plot unravels.

A note on the music: a cheery theme that is repeated throughout the film, as the setting returns to the Sandigates' terraced house, apparently called "Theme without Words": as so often with Ealing films, it adds to the setting a very fitting background.

An interesting and intriguing contemporary Ealing drama directed by Robert Hamer and starring Googie Withers, a partnership continuing from their previous collaboration on "Pink String And Sealing Wax". Again, Googie's no goodie in this movie, playing Rose Sandigate, the sulky and rather surly wife to her much older anything-for-a-quiet-life husband, George, played by Edward Chapman. They live with his three children from one presumes an earlier marriage in fairly cramped style in a common-or-garden terraced house in Bethnal Green, London, the establishing shot of which recurs throughout the film to indicate the passage of time.

Food rationing is still in force, but some sort of normality is returning to the local community in the post war rebuilding era, with shops and nightclubs reopening for business. Perhaps unsurprisingly, local crime is on the increase too, although striving to keep the peace is local cop Jack Warner, policing the beat some fifteen years or so before he ended up doing the same on a weekly basis on TV as Dixon Of Dock Green.

It's Sunday and a rainy one at that, but no ordinary Sunday as a local convict escapes prison and goes on the run, turning up unbidden at his old flame Withers' door, seeking food, shelter and money from her so he can complete his escape abroad. There are other sub-plots at play too, one taking in the doings of a local gang of petty hoodlums, one of whom in particular is slightly unhinged and another, a flashy musician who also runs the local record shop but who cheats on his wife with the oldest Sandigate daughter.

For the first three quarters of the movie, there's more concentration on the melodrama, but in a sometimes surprisingly modern fashion, almost anticipating the kitchen-sink British realist movement of ten years later, as for instance when we're left in no doubt that Rose, up till then the iciest of wives, caves to passion and sleeps with the runaway con or when the playboy saxophonist finds there's no longer any cake to have and eat as his wife publicly exposes his infidelity in front of his much younger mistress.

However, fine and sometimes gritty as all this is, especially the scene where an old man is clubbed down in the street and we see his false teeth fall from his mouth into the rain-soaked gutter, it's all change in that last twenty minutes or so when Hamer goes dark and presents a thrilling chase scene involving cops and robber which ends up at a deserted railway station. Hamer's almost noir-ish tableaux and moving camera for this extended sequence might seem as if they belong in a different film but instead make for an exciting change of pace before the viewer is returned to that same pacifying shot of the everyday street, suggesting normality, at least of a kind, has returned to its occupants.

Withers again is good value as the haughty housewife forced by one event to confront her past, present and future, her soon-to-be real-life husband John McCallum gives an edge to his performance as the desperate runaway which might also explain the ardour in their clinches, while dependable old Jack Warner punches in his card just as you'd expect him to as the diligent, pursuing cop.

A many-faceted film, with more than a few surprises up its sleeve, I'd happily watch this any old day of the week.

Ealing Studios are chiefly remembered nowadays for their string of classic comedies made between 1946-55 but they also put out several notable pictures in other genres - including the justly celebrated horror portmanteau DEAD OF NIGHT (1945) - and this noir-ish melodrama is definitely one of their hidden gems. Although the plot per se is no great shakes - an escaped convict hides out in his by-now-married ex-flame's household - the idea was still fresh at the time and the film's marrying of the realistic and evocative recreation of daily life and surroundings (here being the seamier side of London's East End) with the exciting chase thriller format was much admired in its day and, in hindsight, very influential.

The good cast is headed by the formidable Googie Withers as the embittered housewife whose life of drab domesticity comes crashing down around her with the sudden reappearance of her lover (John McCallum, and Withers' own real-life husband-to-be) who demands food and shelter until he can skip the country; her much older, unassuming husband is played by frequent Norman Wisdom sidekick Edward Chapman and the pursuing police detective by the ubiquitous Jack Warner who cornered such roles in British films of the era, most notably in Basil Dearden's THE BLUE LAMP (1950); Chapman's three children are each having problems of their own and their frequent comings-and-goings in the house during this particular Sunday (the film is set all in one day) brings long-suppressed tensions to the fore.

Even without the eye-catching use of the medium of somebody like Carol Reed, the film is beautifully handled by the talented but ill-fated Robert Hamer - who, among other things, would later direct that which is undoubtedly Ealing's most famous comedy, KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS (1949) - and the climactic sequence (expertly lit, as always, by Douglas Slocombe) in which all the various strands of plot and secondary characters are seamlessly woven together is simply exquisite.

Optimum Releasing also included a featurette with film historian George Perry - who, incidentally, introduced THE BIG SLEEP (1946) at the recent National Film Theatre screening in London I attended; unfortunately, I encountered some playback problems on my Pioneer DVD player even before the start of the main feature but the R2 disc played without a hitch on my cheap HB model.

I watched this film when it was first released at my local cinema in Hackney. It was the first film that I had ever seen which showed an East End which I could recognise as the one I knew. All the characters were recognisable and true to life. One caveat thought, we see the husband having a hipbath in his kitchen (true to life), but I did wonder where all the hot water came from.certainly not from the tap!, Although I grew up in Hackney, within walking distance, all my immediate family came from there and, as I discovered later,many generations earlier too. Very much a Jewish East End too. This sounds like a cliche, but most of my best school friends were Jewish boys (NEVER jewboys which was pejorative ). It was a delight to see it again, I must search around to find a good copy on DVD. I lovely film which took me back seventy years or more to my boyhood.

This is one of those "slice of cockney life" films so beloved of post war British filmmakers.It belongs in a time capsule along with "Picturegoer","Illustrated","Lilliput" and "Health and efficiency". It's so wonderfully silly and full of British thesps struggling bravely with their dipthongs and glottal stops. I don't think anybody actually says"Blimey guv'nor,yore a toff and no mistyke" but that was probably due to an oversight.However,there is some slight connection with real life in the 1940s that overrides these criticisms and makes it quite compelling in its absurd way.60 years ago London comprised of dozens of autonomous communities like the one shown in this film.They were separated by clearly defined social and physical boundaries.If a boy from Bethnal Green was walking out with a girl from Poplar,say,she would have been viewed with some suspicion by his friends and family. Together with Stepney,Bethnal Green,Poplar and Bow have merged into The Borough of Tower Hamlets.Half a century of Town Planning and Social Engineering has seen the community become ghettoised and divided along racial and religious lines that not even the most pessimistic East Ender could have foreseen.So in these black and white images we have a portrait of a society that - all unknowing - was on its way to extinction. The major problem I have with "It always rains on Sunday" is the casting of Miss G.Withers and Mr J.Macallum in the lead roles.I'm not sure what they're speaking but it certainly isn't cockney.Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell comes to mind. Jack Warner,Sidney Tafler and the great Meier Tzelnicker walk away with the film,masters all of what is now called "Estuary English". When you look at this and "The Blue Lamp" you are seeing the first stirrings of British Noir Cinema if I may use so grand a term.As such,both films have been hugely influential on subsequent generations of artists and countless TV soaps. Every film of course is a Time Machine,and here,preserved,is a Britain on the verge of the Welfare State,populated by people many of whom were still suffering from the deprivations of the Second World War,a male - dominated society where a considerable amount of the community had outside lavatories and no bathrooms,everybody smoked and the local copper could give you a clip round the ear without being thought a fascist brute because everybody knew what real fascists were. If you remember this era with some affection - however grudging - the chances are you already know "It always rains on Sunday". If it seems like a recounting of some Dark Age then you might find as L.P. Hartley said,that the past is a foreign country,and whilst it might be worth your while to take your passport and visit,you wouldn't want to live there.

I watched this dated melodrama last night.Whilst parts were of interest,quite frankly much of it was mundane and the dialogue was in no way related to what you would expect to hear in the East End.I should know as my late father and his family originally came from the East End.As a Jew I found that the dialogue ,particularly of Sidney Tafler was stereotypical and unlike anything I ever heard when I was young.No one spoke that way.I am surprised that Michael Balcon allowed the totally unrealistic dialogue into the script.Tafler seemed to be constantly shrugging his shoulderd and making actions with his hands.I cannot see any such scenes being shown in a film today thankfully.So in part I have to say I found this film to be an embarrassment of earlier attitudes.It is well produced but is unrepresentative of the East End that I saw in the late forties and early fifties.

It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), co-written and directed by Robert Hamer, is a film noir movie set in London's working class East End. The film is dated in many ways--London, two years after the end of WW II, is not the London that we know in the 21st Century. We can still see evidence of bomb damage, rationing still applies, and there's a sense of community where everyone knows everyone else's business. Police and petty criminals engage in banter: Joe runs a lunch wagon where criminals tend to meet. A detective sergeant stops at the wagon for information. Joe: We don't cater to the criminal classes. Detective Sergeant Fothergill: Turned over a new leaf?

Several plot lines run through the film. An escaped convict--scarred after being flogged with a cat-o-nine-tails--turns up at the home of a woman he once loved, and who loved him. Rose Sandigate, played by the talented and beautiful Googie Withers, has since entered into a practical marriage with a man 15 years older than she is. We enter into her life, along with the lives of her two step-daughters, her son, three petty criminals trying to get rid of stolen roller skates, and some Jewish good guys, bad guys, and not-so-bad guys.

The production values aren't great, and the lower class accents sometimes call for subtitles. Nevertheless, the central plot element of an escaped convict, who returns to find that the woman he loves has married while he was in jail, is as compelling now as it was 60 years ago.

Finally, the powerful scene of detectives chasing a man through the train yards in the dark, was surely known to Carol Reed when he directed "The Third Man." Reed's scene, set in the sewers of Vienna, took place miles away from Hamer's London. Even so, in compelling action and suspense, they have a great deal in common.

This film is set in the Jewish East End of the 1940's, A part of London that has changed dramatically, It is interesting in a social history sense but for a film it is rather lacking in narrative drive. The characters and performances are interesting but the story has nowhere to go. Women are treated rather badly and called 'bags' and 'mares' and are often portrayed in an unflattering light. It was probably quite shocking at the time. The film abounds with wonderful character actresses such as Hermione Baddeley, Vida Hope and Gladys Henson who are always a pleasure to watch and leads Googie Withers and John McCallum make the most of their roles.

It is already listed but if you want to see the street where the family was "living" go to Hartland Road, just off Chalk Farm Road, just north of Camden Market. It is amazing how little has changed! (except the price of property!) It is odd to think that the street in which the film was set in such a period of shortages is now so close to such overt consumerism!

Also nice to note that is the fact that "Rose"- Googie Withers and "lover boy" John McCallum married each other for real in the year that the film was made and are still alive and married to each other today!

I wonder if films which are so "depressing" could be made today. Maybe the audience is just not there anymore. Conditions have improved since then and film-makers have to relate to their current audiences (usually under 25!)

Dynamic British romantic thriller with a cracking script and an outstanding final reel, crammed full of delectable performances from a fine group of character actors. Above the title are the ever-excellent Googie Withers and charismatic Australian hunk John McCullum: they married soon after shooting was over, which certainly goes some way to explaining their on-screen chemistry. With them is dear old Jack Warner, whose folksy old copper in the TV series DIXON OF DOCK GREEN used to irritate me when I was a child, but here he's playing a detective with a bit of grit in him, and it's a pleasure to discover that Mr Warner was perfectly up to the task. Of the supporting cast, Edward Chapman deserves mention for his self-effacing but nevertheless affecting performance as Ms Withers' husband.

There is a certain amount of caricature in the writing (and perhaps in the playing too) of a couple of roles, but on the whole the script succeeds in delineating personalities rather than types, unusual in a film of the period presenting a mainly working- and lower-middle-class milieu, a good deal of it filmed (by the great Douglas Slocombe) on location.

Director Hamer's final reel is a daring chase followed by a strangely affecting coda. The chase is slightly marred by the intrusion of a couple of model shots which the sequence could easily have done without. But it says something about the power of Hamer's vision that he imagined long shots at those points: it was just unfortunate that the only way to achieve them was by using miniatures.

Highly recommended.

Well made thriller which really brought the period to life. Jack Warner already looked too old to be a tough cop on the beat though. And he was still playing Dixon of Dock Green nearly 30 years later! Quick q: the odd little sports car nicked by the fugitive, KMD 727 - any idea what it was? Thanks!

Melodramatic (and that's a compliment), and Googie Withers is

wonderful. Watch out for the buckets of fake rain falling only on the

actors in a sunlit street, though. PS - in England it's usually the

other way round.

xxxx

I am a great fan of British black and white films,but sometimes the little things spoil it a bit. It rains a lot in this film,and it is so artificial,and annoying. You can see The water on one part of the pavements,but not on the other. This is common on films of the time.

Early on there is a piece with a car going through the London streets,and it is a poor model. It was late 40's ,so I suppose people just accepted it,at the time.

But that aside I like the story,and Google Withers and John McCallum had great on set chemistry.

They were together for many years.

Worth watching, a time when things were difficult for a lot of people after the war.