The Passing of the Third Floor Back

1936-01-27
Sound
91m

The diverse tenants of a London boarding house find their lives transformed by a mysterious and kindly stranger.

Conrad Veidt's arrival at his down-at-heel London digs in this film echoes the dramatic first appearance of Ivor Novello in Hitchcock's The Lodger, made nine years earlier. This is no doubt due to the fact that one of this feature's co-writers was Mrs Hitchcock herself, Alma Reville. The film's female characters are particularly well-observed and, as well as being a terrific story (from the play by Jerome K. Jerome), the film beautifully evokes lower-middle-class life in the 1930s.

Forgotten Features

A hand-picked assortment of hard-to-see British feature films, featuring mischievous mermaids, murderous minors and military mayhem.

Thanks to decades of DVD and online publishing, not to mention archive revivals and restorations, more of Britain’s screen heritage is available today than ever before. You might even be forgiven for imagining that the whole of British cinema is now just a click away.

But much of that history - from the silent era to the relatively recent past - remains out of reach. This selection from the vaults, hand-picked by the BFI's curators, goes some way to remedying that. These fresh rediscoveries offer something for all tastes: whether futuristic fantasy, battle-of-the-sexes comedy, subversive provocation or an Indian-British rarity.