In the 1930s, Patrick Hamilton wrote three autobiographical novels—The Midnight Bell, The Siege of Pleasure and The Plains of Cement— about life in a pub on the Euston Road. The central characters are a barmaid and a barman and a prostitute who comes in for a restoring gin. The trilogy is a measure of Hamilton’s grasp of hope and dismay in ordinary people, and a hushed noir conversation that brings Marcel Carne and Carol Reed to mind. Here it is, as a BBC TV series, tenderly adapted by Kevin Elyot and directed by Simon Curtis as a gallery of dreaming faces. It looks like Bill Brandt photographs, with a slow bruising of color beginning to seep in. The score (by John Lunn) brings the romance of the era back. The décor is drab to the last, repaired stitch, and there are three bright new faces— Bryan Dick, Sally Hawkins, Zoe Tapper—like flowers that have just heard of frost. –DT (U.K., 2006, 150m)