Come to a screening of 'It Always Rains on Sunday'!

The author Iain Sinclair is introducing a rare Time Out screening of an Ealing Studios classic set in the 1940s East End

We’re approaching the middle of our ten-week season of screenings to celebrate some of the most enduring films from these isles. Last week, Jonathan Pryce introduced a lively screening of Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ at the Cineworld Haymarket, leaving audiences wondering about the punchline of his teasing recollections of working with Robert De Niro back in 1984. The previous week, the actor David Morrissey, soon to play Macbeth in Liverpool, kicked off our season by introducing a screening of one of his favourite films, Nicolas Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Now’.

Next week, we’re going back to the 1940s. On Tuesday April 12, we’re showing one of Ealing Studios’ lesser-known masterpieces, Robert Hamer’s ‘It Always Rains on Sunday’ (1947). This is a rare chance to catch Hamer’s stirring portrait of Bethnal Green life in the post-war period, complete with rationing, rowdy pubs and crowded two-up, two-downs.

It unfolds over one dismal but exceptional Sunday as the past catches up with struggling housewife Rose (the brilliant Googie Withers), when her ex-lover Tommy (John McCallum), a fleeing convict, turns up at her home asking to be hidden.

The clash of experiences and the threat of discovery are thrilling in ‘It Always Rains on Sunday’. On the one hand, we’re watching a busy portrait of East End life, as kids run up and down stairs, the wife prepares food and the husband pops out to the pub, and all the while we’re building up to a terrific, night time noir ending and a nailbiting chase across a railway yard that is one of the great scenes of all British cinema.

We’re very pleased that the writer Iain Sinclair, author of books such as ‘Downriver’ and, most appropriately, ‘Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire’, has agreed to come and introduce the film. Click here to visit his personal website.

For tickets, please go to www.timeout.com/live