
It Always Rains on Sunday. 1947. Great Britain. Directed by Robert Hamer. Screenplay by Angus MacPhail, Hamer, Henry Cornelius, from the novel by Arthur La Bern. With Googie Withers, John McCallum, Jack Warner, Susan Shaw. Music by Georges Auric. 35mm. 92 min.
The first major hit of the famed Ealing Studios, and considered one of the greatest of all British noirs, It Always Rains on Sunday frames a single day in the domestic life of a war-torn East End neighborhood after the escape from Dartmoor Prison of a desperate criminal (John McCallum) and his entanglement with an equally desperate housewife (Googie Withers). Shot by Douglas Slocombe (who would photograph the Indiana Jones films over 30 years later), the chase across a rainswept rail yard is among the most compelling film noir sequences in movie history.