I jump on a bus feeling like a fugitive who’s finally managed to give his followers the slip. I’m starving, like most escapees do. I grab a sandwich on the way. Egg and cress is my favourite, as I am sure all London knows. Outside of Holborn Station there’s a fruit and veg stand, and it drizzles. While I walk down the narrow Parker Street, I still wonder how come it took me so long to discover its existence. The programme of The Garden Cinema is as fascinating as its story, that of a man who had enough money to open a cinema, and passion to actually do it. I go to the bar while I wait for a couple of friends. I am early on purpose, so I can seat, let the day fade in a book and—as they don’t serve decaf, which was my first choice—a glass of vodka.
Moments later my company shows up. More drinks and nibbles for them. I am fine after my solo sip and read. As we leave our scarlet booth, go past the bar again, make a stop at the loo, and finally get into the screening room, I breathe in almost afresh the modernised art deco style of the spaces. And as the b/w opening cards appear on the screen on the dusty notes of a suave soundtrack, the transition to London’s Forties feels incredibly seamless.
It Always Rains on Sunday is a remarkably intricate and well structured tangle of subplots, where the main storyline—of a jailbreaker finding shelter at his once fiancée, who has meanwhile married someone else and got three times busy—only looms quite unnoticed over the lively swarming of an East End scarred by the Blitz. The contrast between the preoccupations of the many characters of the former—ultimately petty, by comparison—and the dramatic tone of the latter, is the driving force of the film. Many laughed at Hamer’s humorous intercalations and cringed at its brutal account of the postwar hardship. They giggled one last time at a rudimentary special effect involving a miniature train, and were certainly touched by its picaresque traits as they gently surfaced.