It Always Rains on Sunday (1949)

One of my all time favorites.

Expected more

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This fairly realistic and exciting post-war British picture is a model example of its kind. It's well-written, well-directed, (by Robert Hamer), and very well acted by a cast of British stalwarts and in many ways it prefigures the kitchen-sink movies of the late fifties and early sixties. John McCallum is the escaped convict who hides out in the home of former girlfriend Googie Withers who is now married to older Edward Chapman and is stepmother to his problematic family, (in real-life McCallum and Withers were married for 62 years).If its mix of location work and studio sets lets it down slightly it's nevertheless a very good picture of a tightly-knit East End community and was remarkably grown-up for its period. It also manages to keep several related plots on the boil at the same time without feeling over-egged. Maybe not quite the classic some people claim of it but outstanding all the same.

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.

Stunning film reminiscent of "Brief Encounter." Rain-drenched, with a brilliant panoply of well-observed characters drawn from working class London life, "It Always Rains on Sunday," tells the story of a woman whose marriage to a man she respects but doesn't love is severely tested when an escaped convict, and former lover, asks her to hide him from the police. Loved the noirish use of flashbacks, and the restless movement of the camera from scene to scene and character to character among a cross section of the London lower classes, including petty criminals, shopkeepers, Jewish mobsters and jazz musicians, each in some way interconnected.What Film Noir does best, to me, is to portray the struggles and sufferings of ordinary people with as much dignity and compassion as those of the famous and important. "It Always Rains on Sunday" portrays the heroine's dilemma with enormous feeling, as she glimpses her life as it might have been. Googie Withers and John McCallum are excellent as the former lovers reunited for an all too brief time. The two actors married in real life, a much more felicitous ending than that of the lovers in the story. Not to be missed.

This is a poor man's London Belongs To Me and although there's nothing much wrong with it the question remains why bother. Norman Collins wrote a superb valentine to London in London Belongs To Me and it was adapted for the screen around the same time as this effort which is unfortunate as this one will always come off worst in direct comparison whereas a larger gap might have been beneficial. Collins' Dulcimer Street was located in South London and the Sandigate's home is in Bethnal Green whilst Ealing, where it was made, is in West London; so much for that. One thing is clear from the opening scene; the only escapism here is in the shape of Tommy Swann who kick-starts the action by escaping from Dartmoor and lights out for Bethnal Green and sanctuary with the faithful (he hopes) Rose (Googie Withers) who has married, since he went down, a colourless husband who treats her well. None of the women in Bethnal Green are having much fun; the elder of Rose's step-daughters, Susan Shaw, a good-time girl manque' is involved with small-time shop-keeper cum musician Sydney Tafler, who is married and only interested in a bit on the side, whilst younger daughter - Patricia Plunkett in her first film - catches the eye of Tafler's spiv brother, John Slater, who offers her a job 'up West' which will probably evaporate once she comes across. The usual suspects are wheeled out, wooden Jimmy Hanley, Alfie Bass, Vida Hope, Hermione Baddely, Frederick Piper and a pre-Dixon Jack Warner as the cop charged with tracking Swann (John McCallum) down. In 1947 it was probably good solid entertainment; shame London Belongs To Me eclipsed it.