Michael Powell's best known films are spectacular, sensual, fanciful. The others are quiet, retiring, almost secretive. Even, disappointing; until odd details tease your mind, and gradually the simplicity reveals its depths.
Born 1905, Powell was a country boy (Shropshire, Kent). His father was an efficient, modernising, farmer, with a flair for gambling. His lively mother loved country hikes and English poetry. Film-struck at 16, Powell quickly landed a studio job, under Rex Ingram, a cultured Hollywood director, who, bored with Tinsel town, had made MGM. bankroll his independence on the French Riviera. Starting out as mop-boy, Powell swiftly learned (and/or taught himself) the A to Z: from location scouting to final re-editing, from comic acting to stunt-doubling, hand-holding the camera and improvising stories on location...
When sound loomed, Ingram's operations faltered; but British production shot from stagnation to booming chaos. Powell found his way home, took stills for Hitchcock (and helped him rewrite Blackmail), sold scripts, and shot up the ladder. In 1931, age 26, he was virtually his own co-producer, and began to direct B pictures, at greased lightning velocity. In five years later he directed 24 films, including some A's (for Michael Balcon), and many Quota Quickies, which he often lifted far above their class. The critics were impressed: one called him "a red-hot talent shot molten into the world".
Most movies of those days now look pallid, with their lash-up decor and flattish lighting. But Powell's best are crammed with sharp, rich, detail, thanks to his gimlet eye, and flair for first-rate scripts. They're the best descriptions I know of sides of English life which Korda's epics and Grierson's documentaries can't reach. Many, unexpectedly for Powell, are realistic, intimate, sour or nourish. Crown Versus Stevens is a Simenon-like crime story, about suburban discontents. In The Love Test, male scientists gang up on a feminist colleague. Her Last Affaire probes adultery and murder among British politicians. Red Ensign, a top-of-the-bill A pic, tackles the shipbuilding slump. Some of the bad films have enormous charm, like Lazybones (a treat for camp cultists and fans of PG Wodehouse), and Rynox (a bizarre whodunit; and for me a Desert Island movie). Film Four, Carlton Cinema, whoever, wake up and run the lot...
By 1936, Powell had got stuck in the Quickie rut. He bounced himself out of it by steaming off, with cast and film crew, to a distant Scottish island, to make The Edge of the World, about the dying days of a rural community. After months on location, they sailed home to find the film company, also, dying, sunk by yet another sudden film-biz slump. Edge shot into the history books, but Powell spent nearly two years, chafing at unemployment.
Desperate, he considered emigrating to Hollywood. In the nick of time, Korda made him part-director of two contrasted movies. The Thief of Baghdad, an Arabian Nights adventure fantasy, is so magical, exuberant, and poetic, that critics treat it as a Powell film. Powell gave due credit to the Brothers Korda and to (uncredited) scenarist Miles Malleson (who also acts in it, as a Blimpish Caliph who covets a clockwork flying horse). Powell was always wary of auteur theory; he reckoned his films' creator was his whole team. The Lion Has Wings was a documentary, hastily thrown together, while Korda was flat broke, in the first days of the war. It's not all bad, but so much of it is, that Goebbels got a copy and liked showing it in Berlin, for camp laughs.
Through Korda, Powell met Emeric Pressburger, who'd been scripting films in Hungary, Germany, and France. Like many '30s refugees, he became a staunch Anglophile. He saw the English through European eyes; while Powell saw Europe through English eyes. They were soulmates-because-opposites, for 20 years. Pressburger's was a unique gift, for rule-breaking storylines, like Colonel Blimp, which rambles all over the place, yet never loses speed and thrust. Pressburger designed the necklace, Powell cut the jewels...
They began with two spy thrillers, The Spy in Black (1938), Contraband (1940) and 49th Parallel (1942). The first two feature that great star duo, Conrad Veidt (of Caligari and Casablanca) and Valerie Hobson (of Bride and Frankenstein and Kind Hearts and Coronets). The picaresque plots, gritty atmospheres, and tart personalities, the films hold their own against the British Hitchcocks. A third spy-and-sea story, 49th Parallel, got government backing, and, propaganda-wise, proved a very heavy hitter (Target: U.S. Anglophobia and complacency about Nazism). It's a powerful adventure story, with "acting battles" between world-class heavy-weights (Laurence Olivier, Anton Walbrook, Raymond Massey, Leslie Howard ... ). Akin to Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur, it knocks spots off them both.
In 1943, Powell and Pressburger set themselves up as The Archers, and their seven "golden years" began. Their films made small fortunes, critics loved them, two Allied government (English and free Dutch) were supportive, and so was J. Arthur Rank. At that time he was the ideal patron of whom film producers had dreamed. His organisation was richer than most Hollywood studios, artistically non-interfering, generous to a fault. P&P tackled a constant worry, shared by all democrats, though undeclared in movies. How to fight this war with necessary ferocity, yet stay civilized? In 49th Parallel the single-minded Nazi almost wins through. England's Colonel Blimp falters, for clinging to obsolete rules. In One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, the aircrew get things right: they fight with neither hate nor guilt, they stick together, and they work out their own right balance between democracy and leadership. Then came P&P's "trilogy" about the impending peace. In A Canterbury Tale four conscripted people discover their own spirituality, and dethrone a puritanical magistrate. The heroine of I Know Where I'm Going finds her way from city capitalism to organic community and its mysterious powers. In A Matter of Life and Death (1946) a RAF pilot and poet, an all-round "Renaissance Man", is beset by visions of a Next World which, though well-meaning, is too grey and impersonal.
A Matter of Life and Death offers a drastic view of English history and the end of Empire. Nevertheless, the English film industry chose it for the first ever Royal Command Film Performance. Many of its themes - especially, the relation of "Englishness" and madness - reappear in Black Narcissus (1947), where a team of Anglican nuns, whose "Sister Superior" is Deborah Kerr (Powell's lost love?), must confess defeat by the pagan East - and their own humanity. Many Powell films centre on "team of loners". They stay loyal to others across great distances; or, they balance a subtle inner madness with loyalty and self-discipline. The Red Shoes is a long, slow, cool, film about artistic teamwork, yet, its 18-minute ballet sequence is a blazing delirium. Montagewise, it can swap punches with anything devised by Eisenstein (In certain ways, it's subtler and richer, aesthetically and humanly - but that's another essay).
In 1947 several disasters hit Rank's group so hard that from then on, the accountants took over. P&P led the exodus of talents to Korda. The Small Back Room (1949) mixes British noir and Expressionism. But then Korda charmed Goldwyn and Selznick into co-production bungles over Gone to Earth and Elusive Pimpernel. They started Powell's reputation, as (a) the most difficult, and rude, man in pictures, (b) OTT about style, and (c) out of touch with the Great God Box Office. (For connoisseurs like Scorsese, they're - caviar). Tales of Hoffman could have triumphed at Cannes, but Korda wanted cuts. According to rumour, Powell's icy refusal goaded Korda to yell, "I'll see you never vork in pitchers again!" (Both Powell and Korda, when they chose to be charming, were irresistible; but when they were rude, they were horrid).
Korda might have calmed down, in time, but Powell was off on his new track. Hoffman was a quantum jump, a new kind of Art Spectacle, mixing opera with ballet with costumes and decor like modern art with Pure Cinema. Now he talked Stravinsky, Matisse, Dylan Thomas, and other modernists, into working together, with him, on short films which would mix all the arts into "Pure Spectacle" - a "show" of the mind's eye. But the money never quite forthcame, the idea was too strange (Oh, Rosalinda! was a doomed, though fascinating, experiment). After five wasted, and costly, years, P&P reverted to the beaten track. The Battle of the River Plate (1956) used half the US Mediterranean Fleet, had another Royal Command Performance, and made Rank's a ton of money. (It has quieter themes too, about Fancy and Intelligence in War...).
In 1960, Peeping Tom, a new kind of horror film, intimate, realistic, Freud-literate, proved too horrible for English "good taste". The myth is that it scuppered Powell's career, though his filmography proves it didn't - the trouble was this four "eccentric flops" and now this... Powell's lesser films combine limitations and riches (much like late Orson Welles). My favourite is The Age of Consent (1968), which, initially disappointing, gradually reveals a sort of humiliated finesse. Co-producer James Mason plays the kind of painter who fascinated his and Powell's generation: a shy, inarticulate, bewildered, unsocialised Bohemian, whose whole mind is in his loving eye for this baffling world. Peeping Tom is the "cruel" film, The Age of Consent is the mellow one.
The cult of Peeping Tom helped Powell's" rediscovery" by a "New Wave", of filmgoers, critics, and artists (K. Russell, K. Anger, Scorsese, Coppola, Jarman...). Since then, another "younger generation" has tuned in on his quieter, gentler, side: A Canterbury Tale, that slightly mysterious pastorale, has become a thoughtful cult.
Ray Durgnat [-]
