Review of Hour of Glory

I certainly can see why some people refer to this movie as a small masterpiece. I did not go into it expecting big things like the previous Powell/Pressburger classics "Black Narcissus" and "The Red Shoes". However, rather than find this to be an interesting psychological drama about one man's battle with alcohol due to pressures in his professional life and a handicap that has obviously made him bitter, I found a rather claustrophobic, talkie drama that for the most part failed to hold my interest and left me scrambling to find my way back when all of a sudden things began to really happen. The sudden appearance of a giant booze bottle overshadowing its leading man (David Farrar) reminded me of things that audiences had already seen on screen in films prior to this: Ray Milland's withdrawal in "The Lost Weekend" and Gregory Peck's nightmares in "Spellbound". Having been bored for 90 minutes when this came up, I found myself chuckling at it. But then it got serious when the film began to deal with Farrar's profession and all the chat that had gone on before: defusing a bomb found on the beach. This comes in the last ten minutes of the film, and is as nail biting as everything else before was sleep inducing. Had the first 75% of the film been more like this and filled with less exposition, I would certainly find it a masterpiece.