Though British critics of the time hailed The Small Back Room as a welcome move by the Archers toward realism, they thought the giant whisky bottle a throwback to the kind of excess they continued to find suspect and un-British about the Archers’ work. […] Powell, a master at employing Britain’s few natural cinematic settings, chose Chesil Beach, with its wall of shifting pebbles, as a fiendish environment in which to take a bomb to pieces. He was delighted to note afterward that this seventeen-minute sequence lasts almost exactly the same amount of time as the climactic dance in The Red Shoes. But though brilliant, the sequence is overshadowed in cultural memory of The Small Back Room by the famous expressionist nightmare in which Sammy mistakenly believes he has been abandoned by Susan and imagines the whisky bottle growing to a towering size and bearing down on him. The Archers’ favorite designer, Hein Heckroth, created this at Powell’s instigation, partly to rival Salvador Dalí’s dream sequence in Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945).
— Nick James (Criterion)
Synopsis: At the height of World War II, the Germans begin dropping a new type of booby-trapped bomb on England. Highly skilled but haunted bomb disposal officer Sammy Rice must overcome his personal demons to defeat this new threat.