The Patrick Hamilton Appreciation Society discussion

I think It Always Rains on Sunday by Arthur La Bern really needs its own thread...





Set over a single day in 1939, It Always Rains On Sunday captures the East End of London shortly before the start of the Second World War. The book is centred around the residents of Coronet Grove, its focus the Sandigate family. People go about their lives, heading to the local church and pub, while those looking for excitement are drawn to the bright lights of Whitechapel. Rose – a former barmaid in The Two Compasses – is married to George Sandigate, twenty years her senior, the thrill of her time with villain Tommy Swann firmly in the past. Church bells ring as small-time crooks plot in the pub, a newspaper headline telling Rose that Swann has escaped from Dartmoor.

It Always Rains On Sunday is the atmospheric debut novel of Arthur La Bern and features a large, colourful cast of characters. Dreams and reality clash as arguments rage, gangsters lurk, madness simmers, violence is threatened. Sex and death hang heavy in the air. Described as a predecessor to Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, the film adaptation was a great success and It Always Rains On Sunday remains a classic of British cinema. The book and its author were likewise lauded, and La Bern would go on to write a series of largely London-based, working-class gems.

This from London Fictions...

I've just been reading the latest of the London Books new editions - Arthur LaBern's 'It Always Rains on Sunday'. And it really is excellent. First published in 1945, it's set in a working class corner of Whitechapel across a single day - a wet Sunday - in 1939. It's got a great sense of place, and a large and lively cast of East End wide boys, Jewish traders, girls on the make, barmaids on the pull, police on the prowl and an escaped convict on the loose. It sounds like a potboiler. And it is - a very good one.

As Cathi Unsworth's introduction explains, the novel was turned into a good 1947 Ealing movie - that's where the black-and-white photo comes from (you can guess who's the escaped jailbird). Another of LaBern's novels was the basis of Hitchcock's 'Frenzy'.

Absolutely deserving of Mandatory Reading status!

I’ve just finished reading…




"It Always Rains on Sunday" by Arthur La Bern

It’s wonderfully written, exciting, compelling and awash with atmospheric period and location detail, in short if you have any interest in London writing, or the 1930s, then this book is another essential read. Right up there with London Belongs to Me, Hangover Square, The Angel and the Cuckoo, and The Gilt Kid.

Click here to read my review

5/5

The film version can be viewed at the BFI for £3.50....


http://player.bfi.org.uk/film/watch-i...

The British New Wave came a decade earlier than advertised with Robert Hamer's downbeat postwar thriller. In a dank East End of ration-book misery, dosshouses and black marketeering, a world-weary housewife is shaken by the sudden reappearance of an old lover, now an escaped convict on the run. Restored by the BFI in 2012, Robert Hamer's solo directing debut is now recognised as one of the classics of British cinema's golden late-1940s.

At its centre is a career-best performance from the great Googie Withers (who married her co-star, John McCallum, a few months later), but the film is packed with compelling characters, from a trio of comically inept petty hoods touting knocked-off roller skates to a pair of chalk-and-cheese Jewish brothers - one a flash local bigwig, the other a pitiable dreamer and low-rent Lothario. It's utterly convincing in its portrait of a drab postwar East End in a vice of austerity, with a claustrophobic tension thanks to Duncan Sutherland's grimy art direction and Douglas Slocombe's quasi-noir cinematography. (Mark Duguid)

https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/def...

Might be of interest to those in or around London.

Nice on CQM


And, if you're not near London you can watch it online via...

http://player.bfi.org.uk

....for a £5 per month subscription