It Always Rains on Sunday
| It Always Rains on Sunday | |
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Original British quad poster
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| Directed by | Robert Hamer |
| Produced by | Michael Balcon |
| Screenplay by |
Angus MacPhail Robert Hamer Henry Cornelius |
| Based on |
It Always Rains on Sunday by Arthur La Bern |
| Starring |
Googie Withers John McCallum Jack Warner |
| Music by | Georges Auric |
| Cinematography | Douglas Slocombe |
| Edited by | Michael Truman |
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Production
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| Distributed by | GDF (UK) |
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Release date
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Running time
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92 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Box office | over £400,000 (UK) ($US $1.6 million) |
It Always Rains on Sunday is a 1947 British film adaptation of Arthur La Bern's novel by the same name, directed by Robert Hamer. The film has been compared with the poetic realism movement in the French cinema of a few years earlier by the British writers Robert Murphy, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and Graham Fuller.
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.
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Wikipedia