Review of Hour of Glory

Between Film Noir and Cassavetes lies...not much. But definitely both this film and Nicholas Ray's In A Lonely Place. Those couples! Their tension stretched to - and almost beyond - the breaking points. That's the mastery: those who find this film dull just...haven't been there. Rarely has a film been so well titled - it's so claustrophobic!And how it all connects: the crippled Sammy with his temper and his drinking problem, and at the same time, with his ineffable mastery. What a great character - so modern in his total impossible - ness.The luminous Sue, photographed so artificially, with the light shining on her face like in some early Sylvia Sidney movie where she's working in a luncheonette, or something like that. And how can you not love those touches of looming surrealism - Teutonic? I don't think so. It's more like Powell saw Chien Andalou right after it came out and was marked forever - besides the clocks and bottles in the "surreal" sequence, that close-up of the bomb on the beach. And I love all those "exotic" (for Great Britain) locales when the film finally opens up - I'm reminded of I Know Where I'm Going. The relentlessness of this film is its genius. But would you say this film looks forward to things like This Sporting Life? I wouldn't, because there's plenty of humor in this film. Powell and Pressburger understand that rubbing the viewer's faces in non-stop misery can just create numbness, and that the humor creates a space of something like distance, where we relax for a moment before plunging again into the gloom of people who obviously love each other, but who have great difficulty in communicating. Oh, that moment when Sue takes both her photo and her kitty away! If that doesn't create an empty feeling in the pit of your stomach...well, maybe you're lucky.