Doors 7pm
TICKETS £7 ADVANCE (click here) £9 ON THE DOOR
A benefit event for the Horse Hospital, £1 of each ticket sale will go towards Save The Horse Hospital.
IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY
Arthur La Bern
LONDON BOOKS PRESENTS: PUBLICATION OF CLASSIC NOVEL CELEBRATED WITH SCREENING
Celebrate the return of Arthur La Bern’s novel back into print for the first time in decades with a screening of the 1947 Ealing classic.
LONDON BOOKS are proud to announce the return of the original 1945 novel that spawned Ealing’s smash-hit Robert Hamer production. Published in hardback format on 25 May 2015 as part of its London Classics series, It Always Rains on Sunday is set over one turbulent day in Bethnal Green, with events spiralling out from the Sandigate household in Coronet Grove, where a delicately balanced domestic equilibrium is primed for explosion.
Former barmaid Rose has traded in her days serving at The Two Compasses for the safety and security of marriage to George, twenty years her senior. Together they have raised their own young son, together with George’s two daughters from his previous marriage, now teenagers with ambitions of their own. When Rose takes her usual Sunday morning look at The News of the World, the front page news turns her world on its head. Her former lover, wide boy Tommy Swann, has broken out of Dartmoor prison and is on his way home.
Drenched in period austerity and the stifled hopes of a generation, La Bern’s portrait of East End life is one in which madness simmers, violence flares and shysters lurk on every corner — but there is also solace to be found in the souls brought together on the narrow, bustling streets between Petticoat Lane and Whitechapel. Born into poverty in turn-of-the-century Islington himself, La Bern effortlessly evokes the drama, trauma and tension of everyday, ordinary lives in a form of soap opera noir familiar to readers of Patrick Hamilton, James Curtis and Alexander Baron.
La Bern’s debut novel was quickly adapted for the screen by Ealing’s genius maverick, Robert Hamer (Kind Hearts and Coronets), with his favourite leading lady Googie Withers in the role of Rose and her real-life husband John McCallum as Tommy Swann, as well as Jack ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ Warner as Detective Sergeant Fothergill, Alfie Bass, Jimmy Hanley and John Carol as the resident spivs and Sydney Tafler as Morry Higham, the bandleader with ‘sax appeal’. Withers’ mesmerising performance as the conflicted Rose made It Always Rains on Sunday the box office hit of 1947. Now widely considered one of the greatest achievements of early post-War cinema, one leading critic described the film as the ‘definitive British noir’.
The screening will be preceded by a screen talk by novelist Cathi Unsworth, who has written the introduction for the new LONDON BOOKS edition of It Always Rains on Sundays, about Arthur La Bern’s life and the differences between the novel and the film of the story. Books will be available to buy on the night, and £1 of every ticket price will go towards the Horse Hospital’s fighting fund to keep London’s only truly independent arts space running. There will be a bar all evening and a soundtrack of 1940s classics to swing the night away!
Screening courtesy of STUDIOCANAL
For more information on the book, please go to www.londonbooks.co.uk
For more information on the DVD/BluRay please go to www.facebook.com/vintageclassicsfilm