It Always Rains on Sunday

Plot

The film concerns events one Sunday (23 March 1947, according to the announcement blackboard at the local underground station} in Bethnal Green, a part of the East End of London that was suffering the effects of bombing and post-war deprivation.

Rose Sandigate (Googie Withers) is a former barmaid married to a middle-aged man (Edward Chapman) who has two teenage daughters from a previous marriage. She is a bossy, strident housewife, coping with the difficulties of rationing, near-slum housing and a drab, joyless environment. A former lover, Tommy Swann (played by John McCallum, who soon afterwards married Withers), jailed some years earlier for robbery with violence, escapes from prison and is discovered by Rose hiding in the family's air-raid shelter. He asks her to hide him until nightfall. Rose initially refuses but, clearly still in love with him, eventually allows him to hide in the bedroom she shares with her husband, after the other members of the household have gone out. She then keeps the bedroom locked.

However, it proves extremely difficult to keep the presence of the escapee a secret in such a busy, bustling household – particularly with her former lover intent on seducing her. It is Sunday morning and the lunch must be cooked, the girls admonished for their misdemeanours of the previous night and the husband packed off to the pub out of the way. The strain is intolerable and as the day progresses, the police net closes, after a newspaper reporter interrupts them, as Tommy is about to flee, and soon tips off the police.

By nightfall her secret is out and a panic-stricken Rose tries to gas herself, while the prisoner is cornered in railway sidings and arrested by the detective inspector (Jack Warner) who has been patiently tracking him. As the film ends, Rose is in hospital recovering, and reconciles with her husband, who then returns alone to their home, under a clear sky.

Reception and reputation

The film was one of the most popular movies at the British box office in 1948.

In the decades since its release, the reputation of It Always Rains on Sunday has grown from that of a neatly engrossing slice-of-life drama to a film often cited as one of the most overlooked achievements of late-1940s British cinema. Writing in Films in Review in 1987, William K. Everson described the film as "the definitive British noir", while a series of screenings in New York in 2008 as part of a British Film Noir season elicited tremendous praise from American critics, many of whom were previously unacquainted with the film. Scott Cruddas of The Village Voice described it as "a masterpiece of dead ends and might-have-beens, highly inventive in its use of flashbacks and multiple overlapping narratives, and brilliantly acted by Withers and McCallum". The New York Sun's S. James Snyder observed: "When things go from gray to pitch black in the film's final moments, building to a climax that links the anguish of a prison inmate with the daily routine of a working-class wife, (the film) delivers an existential wallop for the ages". David Denby wrote in The New Yorker: "A fascinating noirish look at life in London's East End...the scenes between Withers and McCallum are stunningly erotic", while Stephen Garrett of Time Out summed the film up as: ""Absolutely exhilarating! A bleak thriller realised with utter vibrancy, Robert Hamer's savoury stew of London's lower class roils with an emotional brutality and precision that most films don’t dare attempt, let alone achieve."

The film was given a theatrical re-release in the UK during 2012. Peter Bradshaw reviewing the film in The Guardian commented: "The film is in many ways a precursor to kitchen-sink movies like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – and that huge, teeming market scene bears comparison with Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis."