MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

UK 1941
d: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Carlton Visual Entertainment (Region 0 uk)

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Commissioned by the Ministry of Information in hopes of swaying public opinion in favour of America's entry into the war, this now seems a little dated in patches, with the characterisations all too self-consciously tailored to the propaganda notion of providing a cross-section of ethnic types united in their resistance to Nazism (Leslie Howard's stereotypically laconic Englishman suffers most). But the episodic account of a stranded U-Boat crew's brutal foray into Canada still grips (Emeric Pressburger's script is beautifully structured), and the running debate on democracy versus dictatorship is conducted in terms far from simplistic. What really lifts the film, though, is what David Thomson calls 'a primitive feeling for endangered civilisation': a feeling very much akin to the passionate concern for England's green and pleasant land which flowered in the marvellous "A Canterbury Tale" three years later.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Retitled "The Invaders" for American release, this 1941 film is a typically perverse and entertaining propaganda piece by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The plot structure—a German U-boat lands in Canada, and the crew must try to make it across the U.S. border before they're captured—forces the audience to identify with the enemy's point of view, and the forces of freedom are represented by a series of oddballs and misfits—including Laurence Olivier in an out-there performance as a French Canadian fur trapper, and Leslie Howard as a poetry-reading recluse who lays down his volume of Shelley to take on the intruders single-handedly. Somehow, all of this deliberate inversion and eccentricity ends up being more stirring than most straight propaganda films—and certainly a lot more imaginative and suspenseful.
— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
•••••
Pressburger proved an enthusiastic propagandist. As he later said, "Goebbels considered himself an expert on propaganda, but I thought I'd show him a thing or two." This is despite the fact that Pressburger's own status in Britain at the time was as an 'enemy alien'. On returning from Canada he found himself imprisoned and threatened with deportation, until Powell and the MOI intervened.
Pressburger's script, which won him an Academy Award for Best Original Story, charts the progress of a German U-boat crew stranded in Canada after the sinking of their craft off Hudson Bay. As the six crew members, led by the unflappable Corporal Hirth (Eric Portman), struggle to reach the neutral territory of the United States, they encounter a series of opponents, who serve to contrast Canada's democracy and ethnic diversity with the Nazis' moral bankruptcy.
The ruthless Hirth is a far cry from the more sympathetically portrayed German officer played by Conrad Veidt in Powell and Pressburger's earlier "Spy in Black" (1939). Unburdened by doubts in himself or in his philosophy, he has no patience with weakness or sensitivity. But his arrogance is his undoing, for he repeatedly underestimates his opponents. The other Nazis each have their own distinct characters, and there is even a 'good Nazi', which attracted some criticism at the time.
German actress Elisabeth Bergner, the only woman in a leading role, jumped ship after shooting a few scenes in Canada; it became clear she had only signed on to get to America. Fortunately, she was very effectively replaced by the unknown Glynis Johns. Two other stars, Laurence Olivier and Raymond Massey, almost pulled out, and the MOI threatened to pull the plug due to budget overspend. When Hollywood giants David O. Selznick and Samuel Goldwyn showed an interest, however, J. Arthur Rank stepped in and provided the rest of the money. He - and the Treasury - made their money back comfortably: a success at home, the film became the biggest British hit to date in American cinemas.
"49th Parallel" was the first of two collaborations between Powell and Pressburger and the already highly regarded editor David Lean.
— Mark Duguid

One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing

(Never have so few done so much for so many. )

UK 1942
d: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Universal Pictures Video (Region 2 uk)

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Though not top-notch Powell & Pressburger, an ambitious low-key wartime thriller that totally transcends any propaganda considerations, thanks to sharp characterisation and imaginative scripting. The crew of a British bomber sent out on a mission to Europe (by air controller Powell, making a symbolically revealing guest appearance) are forced to bale out and make their way back overland through the Low Countries. No simple task, given that - as so often in Powell's movies - the enemy is not merely external but also internal: tensions mount among the Brits, while distrust abounds in their dealings with apparently sympathetic Dutchmen. Rather like 49th Parallel without the epic sweep, an impressively directed and beautifully performed piece of work.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
When the crew of a British bomber bails out over occupied Holland, they are sheltered by the Dutch resistance. Using Holland as a stand-in for occupied Britain, Michael Powell here examines the threat of "everyday fascism" (BFI). In reviving this rare Powell film at a recent Museum of Modern Art retrospective, William K. Everson noted: "The theme of the bailed-out aircrew, fighting their way home through occupied territory, and encountering local underground freedom fighters, was not altogether novel in 1942. Hollywood had recognized the dramatic and showmanship possibilities in the theme the previous year, and...Raoul Walsh's Desperate Journey, a superficially identical film...came out at virtually the same time.... "Nevertheless, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing was a popular success, and was one of the earlier British war films to successfully combine the characteristics of the documentary with the qualities of the traditional narrative film.... British wartime audiences were more than sated with documentaries for training, informational and propagandist purposes, but when well-done, as here, the mating of documentary with narrative could be a tremendous morale-booster...and its reminder of the activities of the Dutch underground was not only a solid propagandist boost for an ally, but rather more believable than the Warner Brothers claim of a solid resistance movement within Germany itself. "One of Our Aircraft Is Missing is still a solidly entertaining movie...however, it no longer has the topicality and sense of urgency that gave it such punch in 1942, and perhaps its main interest today is in the astonishing array of talent both in front of and behind the camera.... The cast includes the names of many notables on the way up (Peter Ustinov and Roland Culver among them).... Even Michael Powell has several scenes near the beginning as the jaunty Dispatching Officer ('Off you go, chaps!').
— PFA

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

(Leben und Sterben des Colonel Blimp [de])

UK 1943
d: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Carlton Visual Entertainment (Region 2 uk)

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At a time when 'Blimpishness' in the high command was under suspicion as detrimental to the war effort, Powell and Pressburger gave us their own Blimp based on David Low's cartoon character - Major General Clive Wynne-Candy, VC - and back-track over his life, drawing us into sympathy with the prime virtues of honour and chivalry which have transformed him from dashing young spark of the Nineties into crusty old buffer of World War II. Roger Livesey gives us not just a great performance, but a man's whole life: losing his only love (Deborah Kerr) to the German officer (Walbrook) with whom he fought a duel in pre-WWI Berlin, then becoming the latter's lifelong friend and protector. Like much of Powell and Pressburger's work, it is a salute to all that is paradoxical about the English; no one else has so well captured their romanticism banked down beneath emotional reticence and honour. And it is marked by an enormous generosity of spirit: in the history of the British cinema there is nothing to touch it.
— CPea, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Churchill's famous opposition to "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" has probably done most to crystallise the image of Powell and Pressburger's wartime epic as a subversive thrust at the military establishment. ... if there is one thing that "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" resists, it is being cast in any anti-establishment role. Its restlessness, its élan, its stylistic variety and dazzle have more to do with a quest for an establishment role that is worthy of it. The film is an implicit demonstration of the conservative impulse behind much formal experimentation in art — the anger at what is outmoded, at what has lost its power to enshrine those values considered eternal. ... One thing that makes the film's argument so ambiguous, mystical and difficult to grasp is that it conflates too many qualities — of political ideology and national character, for instance — and assumes that military conduct can be discussed in purely spiritual terms, without reference to political or historical circumstances, or even to technology. ... "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" is in a sense playing at soldiers, playing at myths of nationhood. What gives it such uncanny power as a myth in its own right is that it uses its own disrespect for narrative, visual and thematic decorum to create a national fiction that is too 'ecstatic', contradictory and shifting to be called propaganda.
— Richard Combs, Monthly Film Bulletin
•••••
It's almost impossible to define this 1943 masterpiece by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It was ostensibly based on a cartoon series that satirized the British military class, yet its attitude toward the main character is one of affection, respect, and sometimes awe; it was intended as a propaganda film, yet Churchill wanted to suppress it; it has the romantic sweep of a grand love story, yet none of the romantic relationships it presents is truly fulfilled, and the film's most lasting bond is one between the British colonel (Roger Livesey) and his Prussian counterpart (Anton Walbrook). Pressburger's screenplay covers 40 years in the colonel's life through a series of brilliantly constructed flashbacks, compressions, and ellipses; Powell's camera renders the winding plot through boldly deployed Technicolor hues and camera movements of exquisite design and expressivity. It stands as very possibly the finest film ever made in Britain.
— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
•••••
Pressburger's script portrays, with a mix of sympathy and exasperation, a well-meaning but hopelessly out-of-date old man, who stubbornly fails to recognise the nature of the enemy and the cost of failure. The film is an implicit criticism of an officer class which insisted on seeing the war as a game, fought according to 'gentlemen's rules'.
The film so incensed Winston Churchill - who saw it as unpatriotic and a threat to morale - that he tried to have it banned and, when he failed, did his best to spoil its success overseas. Nevertheless, "Blimp" was a great success.
Roger Livesey, until then an all-but unknown contract player for Alexander Korda, managed to convey Wynne-Candy's development over forty years with the help of little more than make-up and a shaven head. In an early sign of the playfulness which would increasingly characterise the Archers' films, all three of the women in his life were played by the 21 year-old Deborah Kerr.
— Mark Duguid, BiFi
•••••
Churchill's famous opposition to "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" has probably done most to crystallise the image of Powell and Pressburger's wartime epic as a subversive thrust at the military establishment. ... if there is one thing that "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" resists, it is being cast in any anti-establishment role. Its restlessness, its élan, its stylistic variety and dazzle have more to do with a quest for an establishment role that is worthy of it. The film is an implicit demonstration of the conservative impulse behind much formal experimentation in art — the anger at what is outmoded, at what has lost its power to enshrine those values considered eternal. ... One thing that makes the film's argument so ambiguous, mystical and difficult to grasp is that it conflates too many qualities — of political ideology and national character, for instance — and assumes that military conduct can be discussed in purely spiritual terms, without reference to political or historical circumstances, or even to technology. ... "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" is in a sense playing at soldiers, playing at myths of nationhood. What gives it such uncanny power as a myth in its own right is that it uses its own disrespect for narrative, visual and thematic decorum to create a national fiction that is too 'ecstatic', contradictory and shifting to be called propaganda.
— Richard Combs, Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1985, vol. 52, no. 619, pp. 256-257
•••••
The England which Powell celebrates is a very upper class one and today The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp survives less on account of its overt meaning than for its visual elegance and narrative zest and its indication of such typical Powell obsessions as the casting of Deborah Kerr as all three redheads in Candy's life.
— Roy Armes, A Critical History of British Cinema. New York 1978, p. 221
•••••
Formellement, "Colonel Blimp" allie la virtuosité à l'émotion la plus subtile, le grand spectacle à l'intimisme et à l'extrême sobriété. ... le réalisme de l'oeuvre est constamment imprégné d'une poésie insolite et presque fantastique. Toute cette richesse formelle s'inscrit harmonieusement dans une oeuvre au baroque sobre et délicat ... qui obéit, par ses mouvements rapides et lents, à une structure quasi musicale.
— Jacques Lourcelles: Dictionnaire du cinéma. Les films. Paris 1992, pp. 311-312
•••••
By making Englishness to some extent 'obvious', a technique condemned by the 'Programme for Film Propaganda', the Archers illustrate symbolically how such Englishness functions as an idea, and question it philosophically. They do not neatly map 'British life and character' onto 'films of heroic actions' but instead problematize the connection between the two categories. Both films ask us to examine how such 'life and character' may be manifest, and how these might link with 'heroic actions'.
Mock-heroism becomes one means of examining national character: the advantage of a mock-heroic register is that it enables the film-maker simultaneously to celebrate and to satirize national virtues. The two protagonists, Clive Candy and Peter Carter, could both be viewed as types: Clive is the Good Soldier and Peter, as Ian Christie has argued, represents the ideal aviator and poet. However, the ways in which their individual heroism manifests itself are perhaps less obvious than we might expect from such archetypal characters. 'Obvious' characters, stock types, offer the potential for subversion, through subtle alterations and challenges in how the 'obvious' is presented. Consequently, and counter to the Ministry of Information's decree, it is through such characterization that 'heroic actions' are considered. Both films are embedded within a world at war, but the conduct of warfare is curiously de-centred, and human responses to strange, testing situations take its place. "Colonel Blimp" and "A Matter of Life and Death" prize other human qualities beyond stiffness of the upper lip and playing of the game. However, although an exaltation of such qualities in a 'national character' to the exclusion of all else is questioned in these films, these qualities are not cursorily dismissed. Powell and Pressburger considered nationhood and patriotism with compassionate detachment, and this approach resulted in two extraordinary films that offer thought-provoking perspectives on the cultural and cinematic representation of 'Englishness'.
— Sarah Knight, University of Warwick
•••••
... after an expenditure of over $1,000,000 the film was completed and released in England in July 1943. Reviewers hailed it as “a magnificent production, consistently human, spectacular and discursive and always entertaining,” with praise being lavished on its superb use of Technicolor, the production design, and especially the performances by the three leads. Roger Livesey, as Clive Candy, was singled out for honors for his amazing portrayal, aging convincingly and sympathetically from an idealistic young officer to a bald, overweight, querulous old man.
Due to Churchill’s hostility, however, the picture did not reach the United States until mid-1945, and then in a 153-minute version (ten minutes shorter than the British release). After a brief and unsuccessful first run here, "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" was further trimmed to a running time of 93 minutes, which prompted film critic Archer Winston to complain that “cut almost in half . . . it has lost much of the quality that made it unique . . . it jumps from event to event without doing them complete justice.” It was this version that remained in theatrical circulation for years, eventually ending up on television. But even in this fragmented, mutilated form, it had the power to intrigue and influence a younger generation of American film lovers. Director Martin Scorsese, who saw Colonel Blimp as a child in New York, remembers being impressed by the direction, by the indirect manner in which story points were made and by the curious credit “Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.” It was a curiosity shared by many other younger film lovers all over the world. This eventually led to a major reassessment of the work of these two unique and gifted filmmakers by the British Film Institute in the early 1970s. It was at this time that a new, complete full-length print of "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" was first put on public view in London and then later shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
— Ronald Haver

A Canterbury Tale

UK 1944
d: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Criterion (Region 1 us)

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Michael Powell's extraordinary film proceeds from the faintly bizarre story of three characters (a land girl, a British sergeant and a US sergeant) who, arriving by the same train in a small Kent village, make friends and set out to unmask the mysterious 'glue man' who pours glue on to the hair of girls out late at night with servicemen. But the film shows a sharp awareness of the tensions underlying a country community in wartime - from rural resentment of the influx of outsiders to more long-term fears of the decay of a traditional social order. An assertion of stability to counterbalance these is provided by Powell's almost mystical sense of historical continuity, epitomised by Canterbury Cathedral and the Pilgrims' Way as captured in Erwin Hillier's lyrical photography. Though infuriatingly difficult to categorise, the film is bold, inventive, stimulating and extremely entertaining.
— AS, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Very nearly plotless, this 1944 film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger represents one of the few times the narrative cinema has approached the lyrical ideal. Crossing wartime Britain, a group of travelers—including an American GI, a young woman from London, and an English officer—linger in a small farming village, ostensibly to solve a peculiar mystery (someone is putting glue in the local girls' hair), but really because of the spell (quite literal, in P and P's mystical vision) cast upon them by the countryside. Over the hill lies Canterbury Cathedral, and as parallels begin to emerge with Chaucer's pilgrims, the characters find themselves being drawn to it, for a soft-pedaled climax that represents the fulfillment of their individual quests. Strange and wonderful.
— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
•••••
The notion of a misogynist (who possessed goodness knows what other English vices) who messed up girls' hair-dos was a piece of erotica not well understood, or at least admitted in 1944. 'Not till 33 years later,' Powell wrote in his autobiography, 'was "A Canterbury Tale" recognised as one of our most original, iconoclastic and entertaining films.' Also, he might have added, the most beautiful outdoor production of its period, with Erwin Hillier's camerawork catching the radiant look of the land in the last years before post-war despoilation. Press shown on May 9, just three days after the Normandy landings, its happily coincidental use of a martial peal of Canterbury cathedral bells taking over from the hymn 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' felt like a boon and a blessing - and still does.
— Alexander Walker, London Evening Standard. 23 Feb 2000
•••••
There is a moment of linkage (a jump cut) at the beginning of A Canterbury Tale where the falcon loosed by a medieval Knight on a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral soars in the sky, then becomes another kind of soaring bird, a metal one, a World War II fighter. This elegant montage binds together two times, linked by the same sky above the same land, and brings out a sense of continuity that is dominant throughout the film. There is a sense of time not as a series of ruptures (as war is a rupture or earthquake, as Thomas Colpeper [Eric Portman] calls it) but as something that flows continuously. Time flows through the land like a river, be it the Stour or the Mississippi, a river feeding the land but always moving through it, a pilgrim on route to the sea. ...
This journey from being stuck (and stickiness) to freedom is echoed in the way the film is shot. Frequently the camera moves forward from doorways or arches, out of darkness and into light. The first view of Colpeper in the courtroom is one such example, and these moments stand out because the rest of the film is shot so gently. At two hours, this film takes its time. The pace of the narrative seems to echo the rhythm of country life, its shape the twists and turns of country lanes. Moments that seem irrelevant, Peter and Bob playing catch in the street, for example, are among the most magical. Individuals and incidents that play no part at all in the plot are given time and space: the fight between the children, the relationship between Bob and Horton. These are the things that are being defended, and attacked. Prudence Honeywell, the farmer, is also given time. When she says to Alison “I'm still a maid”, the phrase is remarkable, because we understand her whole life, her love of the country, her disappointment, her honesty. The word itself, maid, meaning both unmarried woman and virgin, harks back to Chaucer, reminding us of the constant link between then and now.
The film begins with the prologue of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", read by the actor Esmond Knight, who also plays the pipe-smoking soldier, a comedic role, and the village idiot, a much stranger character. The village idiot is found on the road where Alison was attacked by the glue man. He speaks with an odd stutter that makes people laugh. In the dark we can't quite see him. Then the soldiers go back to the camp and Alison and Bob return to the Hand of Glory, and we see the village idiot in deep focus further on up the road, standing strangely like a scarecrow, his arms moving in an odd gesture that echoes the hands of a clock. We never see him again. This mystery is never explained. But the mystery, the image of it, of time made human, remains, a distillation of the film – the past, the future, the road, the land, the strangeness, and the beauty.
— Tamara Tracz, Senses of Cinema July 2005
•••••
Another major sequence, the lantern-slide lecture, is also conducted in semi-darkness, with only the projector light for illumination. This is the first clear articulation of the film's particular mysticism (here primarily that of the Christian church, of course, in contrast to "Black Narcissus" and "I Know Where I'm Going": whatever the context, this spirituality was a major concern for Powell-Pressburger at the time). Colpeper, framed in semi-silhouette against the circle of light on the screen behind him, talks of his feelings of kinship with the early pilgrims who visited Canterbury to "ask for a blessing or secure penance". His audience, including our trio of investigators, is rapt, and Colpeper - glueman or not - clearly emerges as the film's heart. In turn, the circle of light prefigures the halo effect that strikes Peter Gibbs when, after Colpeper has admitted to being the glueman and explained his motives, the train to Canterbury bursts out of a tunnel and we cut immediately to a shot of the spires of the cathedral. ...
Floods of light also burst into the derelict caravan stored in war-ravaged Canterbury, when Alison joyously pulls down the moth-eaten curtains at the news that her dead lover is in fact alive, making the scene not only spiritual (a visual metaphor for her 'blessing') but amazingly sensual too, with its implication that the caravan will in time be a place of rapture. Powell's use of light in these ways is reminiscent of Murnau's; and while there is no close stylistic link between the two directors, Powell's attempts to create a 'pure' cinema arguably make him one of the few true heirs to the Mumau tradition. A scene with Alison and Bob Johnson, where they each talk about their lost love the aching emotional beauty understanding that mark many of Murnau's great scenes. And Powell's use of the tracking, craning camera to introduce Colpeper, alone behind his desk in the town hall, is a marvellous visual embodiment of the concept of 'judge', suggesting all the irrationality, imperiousness and (typically) the loneliness implied by that word.
From this first shot of Colpeper to the scene on the train where his reasons are finally explained, the film's view of him is slowly modified to allow for understanding and even a certain pity. ... But there is another dimension to Colpeper's character. As John Russell Taylor suggests ('Sight and Sound', Autumn 1978), he is "a mischievous and unpredictable force of nature, one of the dark gods ... working at once to disorient and in the long run effectively to reorient people, destroying in order to create". Hence the 'satisfaction' contained in the penance.
— Chris Wicking, The Monthly Film Bulletin, No. 126, p 67
•••••
Powell was not satisfied with the film. This is him writing in the second volume of his autobiography, "Million-Dollar Movie": "Why is it that legend is more potent than reality at stirring the emotions? Why do the songs and tales of our fathers and mothers touch our imagination more than our own personal experience as children? When I agreed to make 'A Canterbury Tale' I expected that it would be a far more personal film than it turned out to be. I was working, creating a story in the county I was born in, the 'garden of England', a chalky country of bare downs and shallow valleys, of chestnut woods and little chuckling streams, of slowly turning water and windmills, and white-capped oasthouses with the bittersweet smell of hops drying in the kiln. All this I knew from childhood, yet somehow I failed to get it on the screen."
He was right in this respect. The edenic Kent he remembered was thankfully for us - transfigured in "A Canterbury Tale" into a place less easily encapsulated into the bucolic calendar photograph he describes. The immediacy of making the movie in wartime and Powell's virtuosity as a metteur-en-scene cut through his nostalgia, enabling him to create something far more interesting. For all its pastoralism, "A Canterbury Tale" is a film on the edge of noir that never quite takes the plunge. Stylistically, it is a long flirtation with Expressionism: Alison silhouetted at the station as she stubs her cigarette out; Colpepper silhouetted by his projector's beam at the lecture; tightly lit closeups on the main characters' eyes; a deep-focus shot of the village idiot (Esmond Knight again) standing in mist at the end of a lane. Erwin Hillier's lambent cinematography is a virtual shadowplay.
— Graham Fuller, Film Comment 1995 v31 n2
•••••
Powell subsequently described "A Canterbury Tale" as his version of "why we fight"; it was an exploration of the spiritual values for which England stands, testimony to the belief that the roots of the nation lie in the pastoral and to the idea of England as synonymous with freedom. He also called it a "crusade against materialism". The England evoked by "A Canterbury Tale" is the England of Chaucer and Shakespeare, a rural England of half-timbered cottages and stately country houses, quiet, leafy churchyards and rich hopfields, an England whose spirit resides in Thomas Colpeper, gentleman farmer, magistrate, historian and archaeologist, a man who understands England's nature and seeks to communicate her values. It is a film, on the one hand, of astonishing tranquillity and entrancing visual beauty and, on the other, of riveting power and mystical suggestiveness. Superbly photographed at genuine Kentish locations, it hymns the beauties of the countryside, which are seen as timeless and unchanging. The film recreates the Canterbury pilgrimage for a trio of latter-day visitors in search of spiritual peace. The timelessness is encapsulated at the outset, as Esmond Knight reads the introduction to Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" in Old English and the camera moves in on a map of medieval England to rest on the road to Canterbury. Then, amid laughter and the jingle of accoutrements, Chaucer and the pilgrims are seen riding along the Pilgrim's Way, the camera picking out individual faces. A falconer unhoods his bird, which flies away; it dissolves into a plane sweeping over the same countryside; the director cuts back to the falconer's face, but it is now the face of a man wearing modern army uniform. The narrator merely underlines what the camera has shown us - the land is still the same and the people are the same. But here are new pilgrims now - and troop carriers lurch suddenly into view. For all this, the spiritual values are eternal; a return to them will bring peace of mind. It is why we fight.
— "British Cinema and Society 1930-1970" by Jeffrey Richards

I Know Where I'm Going!

(Ich weiß wohin ich gehe [de])

UK 1945
d: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Criterion (Region 0 us)

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Alongside "A Canterbury Tale", Powell's most eloquent tribute to the mysteries of the British landscape. Hiller is the headstrong young girl who travels to Scotland to marry a wealthy but elderly man, only to be confused and distracted by the presence of dashing young laird Livesey. Full of well-integrated symbols (islands, hawks, a whirlpool) and lyrically shot in monochrome by Erwin Hillier, it's all quite beautiful, combining romance, comedy, suspense and a sense of the supernatural to winning effect.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
It's a lovely, lyrical, gentle, totally civilised film, meticulously crafted and designed, very much a labor of love, yet approached with that casual affection which often begets major films. ... Curiously, film-makers and film-making students - contemporary ones at least - are impatient with the film and actively dislike it. They feel that films have to 'say something' - and since the 'message' of this film is obvious and predictable from the beginning, the journey to the film's end seems a waste of time! Such an attitude of course robs them of a great deal of charm, some marvellous location photography, a remarkable special effects climax, many rich and warm characterizations, and interesting insights into British and Scottish character and social strata. It's a lovely film which brings forth added delights with each re-viewing, and of course the marvellously vibrant acting of Wendy Hiller (with Pamela Brown running a close second) is a major asset in itself. ... Two post-scripts to ward off inevitable frustrations with this film: the oddly familiar little girl who appears exactly at the halfway mark is Petula Clark, now better known as a recording star and night-club singer. And if the haunting theme melody seems familiar even if you haven't seen the film before, it's probably because the Nicholas Ray "They Live By Night" appropriated it for 'it's' theme!
— William K. Everson
•••••
It was perhaps the pair's most personal film to date: a metaphysical love story which confirmed their continuing departure from Britain's realist tradition. IKWIG (as the Archers themselves referred to it) is a full-blown critique of materialism, continuing themes identified in "A Canterbury Tale", to which it is, in many ways, a companion piece.
In both films, a city girl is transplanted into a rural environment and comes to question her preconceptions. But whereas Alison in "A Canterbury Tale" is already sensitive to the spirituality of rural England, Joan, the single-minded young heroine of IKWIG, takes some time to wake up to the essentially self-denying effect of her material ambitions. Alison is a willing traveller on the path to self-discovery; Joan resists until the elements - and her long-suppressed feelings - have drained the fight from her.
Joan is a complex character, whose desperation to fulfil her goal - marriage to a wealthy industrialist - ends up risking not only her future happiness, but the lives of herself and others. Wendy Hiller's performance is such that although Joan is at times insufferable, we warm to her as she gropes towards self-knowledge.
Like Alison, Joan is guided on her spiritual journey by a mysterious stranger. Torquil (Roger Livesey), the absentee Laird of Killoran, is, however, a more straightforward and less sinister figure than Canterbury's glue-man. He is a gentle and patient man, easy in his environment, with a calm wisdom which is the mirror of Joan's recklessness.
The film's strange atmosphere - the plot abounds with superstition, folklore and curses - confused audiences at the time. In retrospect, however, IKWIG is one of the duo's best films, with excellent performances from Livesey and Hiller, and beautiful cinematography from Erwin Hillier.
— Mark Duguid, BiFi
•••••
Pressburger recalled that the script for "I Know Where I’m Going!" seemed almost to write itself. It included many elements close to the filmmakers’ hearts: Pressburger’s concern for the fate that shapes individual lives and his belief that “kindness rules the world, not money,” combined with Powell’s deep love for the Scottish islands and his technical virtuosity, here required to combine location filming and studio special effects for a spectacular whirlpool sequence which brings together all the film’s themes—moral, mythic and elemental—in a thrilling climax. ...
It is this that makes it distinctively modern. Martin Scorsese recalls first seeing it just before he started shooting "Raging Bull" and being “overwhelmed by its illustration of love laced with mysticism.” Modern, yet also timeless. At the end, Joan and Torquil emerge purified from the tests they have undergone, like the lovers of a latter-day "Magic Flute".
— Ian Christie

A Matter of Life and Death

(Irrtum im Jenseits [de])

UK 1946
d: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Carlton Visual Entertainment (Region 2 uk)

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One of Powell and Pressburger's finest films. Made at the instigation of the Ministry of Information, who wanted propaganda stressing the need for goodwill between Britain and America, it emerges as an outrageous fantasy full of wit, beautiful sets and Technicolor, and perfectly judged performances. The story is just a little bizarre. RAF pilot Niven bales out of his blazing plane without a chute and survives; but - at least in his tormented mind - he was due to die, and a heavenly messenger comes down to earth to collect him. A celestial tribunal ensues to judge his case while, back on earth, doctors are fighting for his life. What makes the film so very remarkable is the assurance of Powell's direction, which manages to make heaven at least as convincing as earth. (The celestial scenes are in monochrome, the terrestial ones in colour: was Powell slyly asserting, in the faces of the British documentary boys, the greater realism of that which is imagined?). But the whole thing works like a dream, with many hilarious swipes at national stereotypes, and a love story that is as moving as it is absurd. Masterly.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
'A stunning, subversive masterpiece' (Ian Christie), this legendary (and more than a little bizarre) Powell and Pressburger tour-de-force stars David Niven as destined-to-die British aviator who, by angelic mistake, escapes certain death, and lives to falls in love with a young American woman (played by Kim Hunter). When the mistake is discovered Upstairs, a celestial tribunal is convened to decide the hero's fate: will he be allowed to remain on earth, or must he make haste to heaven? The film was commissioned by the British Ministry of Information, to enhance British-American relations, and was screened at the first-ever Royal Film Performance. The jaw-dropping production design, by Alfred Junge, includes a mammoth stairway-to-the-stars, peopled by history's dead. In what was perhaps a playful jab at prevailing cinematic norms of realism, and at socialist ideas of utopia, the film reverses "Wizard of Oz" colour-coding by presenting life-on-earth reality in sumptuous Technicolor, while the afterlife in heaven is rendered in blander black-and-white.
— PFA
•••••
The film was finished in 1946 and such was its ideological importance that it was given a Royal Command Film Performance on 1 November 1946 at Metro-Goldwyn Mayer's huge 3000 seat Empire Cinema in Leicester Square. According to Powell, this was the first Royal Premiere that had ever taken place in Great Britain. Thus, the Royal Family, a prestige American cinema, and a British film promoting Anglo American understanding, were manoeuvred together into one headline-capturing event. According to Powell, the projection of the film was almost an anticlimax after all the glamour of the Royal Family's arrival; and the scenes set in the monochrome after-world evoked only a puzzled interest. Some laughter was evoked by the remark of Conductor 71, who, on finding himself once again on earth in a florid grove of rhododendrons, says ironically to himself, "one is starved for Technicolor up there!" As Powell noted in his autobiography, from that moment he felt that his technical audacity was justified: "film was what I had always thought it was - wonderful fantasies superimposed upon life". Would the mass audience accept this definition? There is little evidence either way. According to Powell, when his film was shown next day at the Odeon, Rank's flagship on the other side of Leicester Square, the audience was much more appreciative than that at the Royal premiere.
What did the film mean? The vexed question of the film's fantasy element and the relationship between the twin worlds of Technicolor and monochrome preoccupied many critics in the 1940's and has continued to do so. John Ellis has suggested that many of the hostile contemporary critical responses to "A Matter of Life and Death" were predicated on a realist aesthetic. Other critics of the 1940s, however, gave an overtly political reading to the film. For the Robsons, those right-wing maverick critics, for whom the purpose of the film was "to create mischief between us and the Americans", the monochrome Heaven contained an extended metaphor for Hitler's "New Order" in which, "since Powell and Pressburger dare not come out openly to proclaim the Germans as the Herrenvolk they find the Americans a convenient sub-conscious substitute as the Herrenvolk". More recently, Raymond Durgnat has claimed that the monochrome heaven represents Powell and Pressburger's rejection of a socialist bureaucracy. A similar view ho been advanced by Nicholas Pronay, who argues that it was through "A Matter of Life and Death" that "the quintessential case against the planned society was first put after the war by Brendan Bracken's and Alexander Korda's proteges from the days of Sir Joseph Ball onward" and that the film celebrates an untidy individualism and criticises rationalist utopianism.
In contrast, however, John Ellis has argued that in separating form and content the critic ignores the most subversive aspect of the film, which is the challenge it throws down to the conventional mode of representing the "real world" of the narrative. Such interpretations of the film are valuable; but what needs to be stressed is the complexity and the coherence of the ideological case made by Powell and Pressburger. "A Matter of Life and Death" is important because it represents a bid for intellectual power on behalf of a small elite intelligentsia. Powell and Pressburger are attempting to formulate, for old-style Tories, a response to possible post-war reforms. In "A Matter of Life and Death" they summon to their aid a range of cultural and literary resources, the most prominent of which is that of the English Romantic movement. In their attitude to individuality, history, and art, Powell and Pressburger replicate the ideas of Burke, Blake, Wordsworth and Keats. These writers were well assimilated into British cultural life; but here they were given an additional conservative "gloss". In "A Matter of Life and Death" Peter Carter's subjectivity is structured so as to embrace the whole of culture and human history. With the closing of his physical eye before the operation, we are granted access to his "mind's eye", which contains both monochrome and Technicolor worlds, as well as the collected wisdom of Plato, Sophocles, and Bunyan. The film displays Peter's subconscious as the fertile location of that individual psychic power which provides social cohesion. Its propaganda aim is to suggest that what binds Britons and Americans together is their common history and their shared definition of individualism and culture.
B.S., the cultural critic of "Kul'tura i Zhizn'", objects in classic Marxist terms that the relationship between the film's earthly, material plane and its idealist, spiritual one is not dialectically conceived. For him, "A Matter of Life and Death" is devoid of any philosophical understanding. It is tendentious, and serves as an expressive example of the artifices of propaganda to which supporters of the Anglo-American bloc were resorting. It was these accusations of propaganda which caused such amazement both in the British Embassy in Moscow and perhaps even in the Northern Department of the Foreign Office. The British Embassy had told the Russians about the film through its weekly Russian language newspaper, British Ally, which largely consisted of translations from articles in the British press. Although the Foreign Office clearly had a quite sophisticated understanding of the propaganda potential of feature films, as is evidenced from much of its pre-war work, the Moscow Embassy was clearly shaken by the interpretation which the critic of Culture and Life had put upon the film.
There is a double irony in the Embassy's assumption that Powell and Pressburger would have been surprised to learn from the Soviet critic, 'B.S.', exactly what their motives were. Firstly, as we now know, B.S. was more perceptive than the Embassy could know. He, or she, was not misrepresenting, nor even genuinely misunderstanding the film, by recognising it as an example of Anglo-American propaganda, whose purpose was to "instil into the mind of British audiences the necessity and inevitability for Britain to follow in the wake of American policy". But secondly, by calling upon the shared concepts of individualism and culture which they felt were shared by the American and the British people, Powell and Pressburger were also laying their film open to the charge of overt propaganda by those who did not share those same concepts. B.S.'s response to the film, precisely challenged those shared premises of individualism and culture, around which the film-makers sought to unite the British and the American peoples; principles which were also shared by the British Embassy staff in Moscow. The dominant propaganda paradigm of that time, of a passive audience which would be influenced by a subtle propaganda vehicle such as "A Matter of Life and Death", was already being called into question. Social researchers were developing a new, more sophisticated paradigm, which recognised that people would only take from such a vehicle those aspects which fitted in with their own world view. Those which did not, they would reject, as B.S. so clearly demonstrates.
Today, it is ironic to realise that in 1947, the readers of "Kul'tura i Zhizn'" may have had a clearer understanding of the intention of the makers of the film and their patrons in Government than had either the staff of the British Embassy in Moscow or the British cinema-going public.
— Sue Harper, Vincent Portler, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1989 p 181
•••••
"C'est mon film le plus réussi, déclare Powell lui-même : perfection technique, tours de passe bien maîtrisés. Il est d'autant plus fascinant à mes yeux que toute cette histoire se passe dans un contexte médical et naît dans le cerveau tourmenté du personnage central. Ainsi, chaque image se trouvait toujours médicalement justifiée." ...
Certains exégètes n'ont pas manqué de voir dans l'Autre Monde proposé par le film, avec sa société futuriste, mécanique et planifiée, une Utopie comparable dans son totalitarisme, à l'Ordre Nouveau hitlérien. Ecartelé entre la vie et la mort, Peter Carter incarnerait donc l'Angleterre elle-même, chancelante, hésitante et blessée, tentant malgré tout de conserver son intégrité de pays libre au sein de la tourmente.
Dans cette optique, l'envoyé céleste, aristocrate français décapité sous la Terreur, " frivole et décadent ", n'est autre que le Collaborateur français qui risque d'entraîner la Grande Bretagne vers la chute. Et c'est en fin de compte l'amitié fidèle, attentive - l'amour entre un Anglais et une Américaine qui sauvera l'Angleterre - Peter Carter du danger fasciste...
Entre-temps, d'anciennes victimes de l'impérialisme britannique - un Indien, un Boer, un Chinois, un Irlandais, et un Américain tué durant la Guerre d'Indépendance - auront fait le procès du Royaume-Uni déchiré par les tendances internes d'une politique discutable mais assujettie à la marche de l'Histoire.
L'Américain accusera l'Angleterre, entre autres, de la décadence de ses traditions aristocratiques. Mais au début du film, les auteurs auront pris soin de montrer, sans insistance, la légèreté des Français (l'envoyé céleste) et la vulgarité américaine (le goût immodéré pour le chewing-gum et le Coca-Cola)... Prouvant, somme toute, la mesure de la mentalité britannique, équitablement partagée entre le frivole et le trivial, l'Ancien et le Nouveau continent. Et louant ainsi, par ricochet, l'individualisme salvateur, l'amour en Technicolor, et non le Collectivisme en noir et blanc d'un Univers rejeté aux ultimes images dans les oimbes de l'imagination d'un poète dont le cerveau fut traumatisé par la guerre.
— Roland Lacourbe, L'Avant Scène Cinéma N° 258, décembre 1980

Black Narcissus

(Die schwarze Narzisse [de])

UK 1947
d: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Network (Region 2 uk)

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Interesting to compare with another version of a Rumer Godden story, Renoir's "The River", in that whereas Renoir shot on location in India and created an almost documentary feel to his film, Powell refused to go to the Himalayas and shot at Pinewood, coming up with a heady melodrama that treats India as a state of mind rather than a real country. A group of nuns lead a tough, isolated existence in a mountain convent, and find themselves psychologically disturbed by all manner of physical phenomena: extremes of weather and temperature, illness, a local agent's naked thighs, a young prince's perfume purchased, ironically, at London's Army and Navy stores. As temptation draws the women away from their vocation, they fall prey to doubt, jealousy and madness. Powell's use of colour, design and music was never so perfectly in tune with the emotional complexities of Pressburger's script, their talents combining to create one of Britain's great cinematic masterpieces, a marvellous evocation of hysteria and repression, and incidentally one of the few genuinely erotic films ever to emerge from these sexually staid isles.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Powell and Pressburger's delirious melodrama is one of the most erotic films ever to emerge from British cinema, let alone in the repressed 1940s - it was released just two years after David Lean's "Brief Encounter" (1945), with its more typically 'British' story of desire denied.
Starting from a controversial novel by Rumer Godden - an Englishwoman living long-term in India - Powell and Pressburger fashioned a taut melodrama of unusually fierce passions and barely contained erotic tension. Although the script never directly challenged the strict standards of the censors, it hardly needs saying that the repressed desires of nuns was not a common - or safe - subject for a British film in 1947.
Deborah Kerr, in her third film for Powell and Pressburger (following "Contraband" (1940) and "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" (1943)), was nominally the star of the film, playing the emotionally detached Sister Superior, secretly tormented by memories of lost love. But it was an extraordinary performance from the barely-known Kathleen Byron as the deranged Sister Ruth which really stood out. Byron had played an angel in "A Matter of Life and Death" (1946), but there was nothing in that role which suggested that she was capable of a performance of such furious intensity. ...
With the help of designer Alfred Junge and cinematographer Jack Cardiff - both rewarded with Oscars - Powell convincingly created a Himalayan convent on a Pinewood soundstage, lending the proceedings a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere. An oppressive jungle scene was filmed in a Kent tropical garden.
— Mark Duguid, BiFi
•••••
if there is little action on the surface, emotions are seething just beneath it—or, more accurately, just behind it, in the form of the fantasy landscape that Powell and his collaborators have created out of purely cinematic means. Despite its dazzling visual sweep, not one frame of Black Narcissus was filmed on location. Instead, the film was shot at the Pinewood studios in suburban London, with a few day trips to an Indian garden in Sussex. The mountains and the castle are the creations of production designer Alfred Junge, with matte paintings executed by Peter Ellenshaw; the special effects were coordinated by W. Percy Day, who had apprenticed with Melies, and the magnificent color photography, surely among the finest work ever produced for the medium, is the contribution of Jack Cardiff. ...
For Powell, who had always placed great value on music in his work, "Black Narcissus" is perhaps his breakthrough to a musical conception of the medium (his next film would be "The Red Shoes"). Despite the great wit and character of Pressburger’s dialogue, "Black Narcissus" is a film that develops almost entirely through formal rather than dramatic means. The carefully developed tensions between monochrome and color, between closed, coherent spaces and aching, cosmic voids, reach a crescendo in the bravura climactic sequence. It is enough to see the bright, red lipstick that Sister Ruth has put on to know that the apocalypse is near.
— David Kehr

Black Narcissus

(Die schwarze Narzisse [de])

UK 1947
d: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Criterion (Region 0 us)

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The Red Shoes

(Die roten Schuhe [de])

UK 1948
d: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Criterion (Region 0 us)

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In outline, a rather over-determined melodrama set in the ballet world: impresario (Walbrook) 'discovers' dancer (Shearer), and makes her a slave to her art, until young composer (Goring) turns up to offer her a lifeline back to reality. But in texture, it's like nothing the British cinema had ever seen: a rhapsody of colour expressionism, reaching delirious heights in the ballet scenes, but never becoming too brash and smothering its own nuances. And if the plot threatens to anchor the spectacle in a more mundane register, it's worth bearing in mind the inhibition on which it rests: the central impresario/dancer relationship was modelled directly on Diaghilev and Nijinsky, and its dynamic remains 'secretly' gay.
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"The Red Shoes" is... an explosion of color - garish, undried, and vibrant with the feeling that is bitten back in the story and the playing. ... (It) was the demonstration of Powell's craze for total cinema - color, story, design, music, dance. ... If anyone ever bought dancing shoes because of the film, that's fine. It seems to me more impressive for ... its cinematic equivalent of the Andersen fairy tale and its rapture with Art. (It) captivates young people because its zeal is so close to nightmare: the ballerina cannot stop dancing. ... "The Red Shoes" is theatrical and fanciful, but Anton Walbrook's rendering of the Diaghilev figure reflects Powell's conception of the artist as outcast/scold/prophet to an indolent world. ... The artist's dedication is close to destructiveness: his vision is never more romantic than when it refuses to yield to real obstacles; he is most tender and wounded when he cannot share the sentiments of other people. For all its rainbow dazzle, and despite the frenzy of backstage collaboration, "The Red Shoes" glorifies the pained but magnificent isolation of the artist.
— David Thompson, Boston Phoenix
•••••
"The Red Shoes" was a landmark dance film because it was the first film to transcend dance's theatricality and move into “pure cinema”. As a mise-en-abyme, the film's structure and production provided a concrete example of how films about dance productions could be interpreted more evocatively. It gave rise to countless musicals, most notably the various Gene Kelly/Vincente Minnelli/Stanley Donen musicals "An American in Paris" (1951), "Singin' in the Rain" (1952) and "The Band Wagon" (starring Fred Astaire, 1953). As Ian Christie has stated, “Before 'The Red Shoes', there were films with dance numbers. After it, there was a new medium which combined dance, design and music in a dreamlike spectacle.” The fact that Gene Kelly screened the film numerous times for MGM executives in order to get "An American in Paris" green lit, is testament to "The Red Shoes"' brilliance.
However, at its first closed screening, "The Red Shoes" was despised by Rank Organisation executives who heavily backed it at a time when government quota requirements for British cinema were at an all time high due to an embargo placed upon the importation of American films. Coming in at roughly 100% over budget, they considered the ending of this adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen story too gruesome and nihilistic in the stiff upper-lipped era of postwar rations and gritty cinematic realism; in short, as something very un-British and un-fairytale-like. Just like "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" (1943), it was received as an unexpected “sustained assault on good manners and good taste”. According to crew members present at the Rank screening, the executives did not bother to hide their contempt for the picture. In an unprecedented gesture, they rose from their seats and left in silence. Anticipating a public backlash, Rank denied "The Red Shoes" a premiere and theatrical posters for its first UK release were never produced. The film played at a West End cinema for ten days before going into a short-lived limited general release.
However, most of the immediate critical reception of the film in the UK, and later abroad, suggests that the Rank executives had a myopic, ultra-conservative view of its product and its independent production company, The Archers. For instance, Picturegoer called it, “an uncommonly beautiful film […] one that you certainly should not miss, even if you are one of those who say 'Ballet bores me'. The Archers, always enterprising, once again have broken new ground. […] In sensitively used Technicolor, marred only by some daubs of blood in the closing scenes, it provides a feast of beauty and some fine acting.” Supposedly, even the Royal Family greatly appreciated the film despite its ending. After a private screening at Alexander Korda's house in London, the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were said to have been, “all devastated by the ending of the picture, […] and thanked him with tears streaming down their faces for showing them 'such a lovely – boohoo! – picture'”. ...
Ultimately, it is Powell's cinematic preoccupation with his (re)presentations of Moira Shearer as ballerina, daughter, dutiful and loving wife, that fascinates and haunts me. Repeatedly moulding her under various points of view, these sublime yet troubling moments abound throughout the film and are all the more exquisite because they also speak of her imminent doom. Today, "The Red Shoes" remains not just a visually stunning and complex film about art, ambition and libidinous desires, it is also intoxicating as a disturbing exploration, from a man's point-of-view, of what it might mean to be a “modern” woman, trapped between a lifetime of individualistic career ambitions and the desire for a contented home-life as a wife and mother.
— Karli Lukas, Senses of Cinema July 2005

The Small Back Room

(Experten aus dem Hinterzimmer [de])

UK 1949
d: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Warner Home Video (Region 2 uk)

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Powell made "The Small Back Room" just after "The Red Shoes", and was clearly looking for a 'homely', manageable subject after the lavish ambitions of the earlier film. He found it in Nigel Balchin's novel about a military bomb-disposal wizard, and turned in a thriller that would look like a masterpiece in the filmographies of most British directors. But it rests on a not-very-interesting dramatic idea: a man whose private life is in ruins (he's lost a foot in a bomb blast, is having trouble with his girlfriend, and is becoming alcoholic) gets new drive from the challenge of mastering a new kind of German bomb. And Powell's characteristic desire to ornament leads to the inclusion of some bizarre fantasy footage (when the hero suffers DTs) which simply doesn't belong in this context. It remains extremely tense in a workmanlike way, and full of good visual and syntactic ideas... but it's a fair way short of Powell's best.
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Michael Powell describes "The Small Back Room" as "A film I love. ... Very simply, an invalid scientist tries to discover how the tiny bombs which the Nazis are sending over England work. They look like toys and many children are killed when they pick them up. It is also the story of a hunted man who discovers a reason for living. I think that it is my best film."
David Farrar plays the crippled, alcoholic bomb expert, and Kathleen Byron his lover in this passionate, introverted film noir story of sexual longing and loneliness. "'The Small Back Room' was Powell and Pressburger's only really serious look at the contemporary British scene in the 1940s°dealing with the latter days of the war. As a piece of filmmaking it was one of their best, and as a dramatic thriller it was realistic, moving, satiric, and (particularly in its prolonged climax of the defusing of a bomb, a tour-de-force) almost unbearable in its suspense. ... Badly cut in its U.S. release - two complete sub-plots were removed - this is the full version of one of the most notable Powell-Pressburger productions. One of the few Powell films to deal in realistic terms with a contemporary theme, it was unfortunately not a success and was difficult to see even in England. There are one or two moments of typical P/P fireworks - especially an expressionistic delirium sequence - and some delightful comedy interpolations, but for the most part it concentrates on both the personal and 'career' problems of the back-room-boy scientists in the later stages of the war. The climax is one of the tensest thrill sequences ever put on film. And the acting from a distinguished cast is outstanding." — William K. Everson
•••••
One of the most remarkable aspects of "The Small Back Room" is its rendering of space and place. Powell and Pressburger's films are littered with moments where characters become aware of and then embrace their environments, often featuring majestic shots of figures dwarfed by or silhouetted against vast, often craggy landscapes. This film features such landscapes – or at least the suggestion of them – but represents them in an uncharacteristic fashion. Although it is often sparse in its composition, "The Small Back Room" comes across as the most crowded and claustrophobic of their works (though parts of "The Tales of Hoffmann", 1951, challenge this pre-eminence). This is unsurprisingly true of the hearth-like interiors of Sammy's apartment, but it is also an approach that is carried over into the natural landscape. An early scene features Sammy visiting Stonehenge for the testing of a new weapon. Despite the open and desolate setting, few shots in this scene give any sense of the vastness of the surroundings, or the sentinel-like qualities of the stones. This has much to do with the way in which cinematographer Christopher Challis frames both characters and their surroundings. Many of the shots in the film, and this scene, are closely cropped, with objects and characters' bodies/faces extending into the off-screen space. Stonehenge doesn't really appear as a singular entity, the immediately familiar arrangement of stones in the middle of a vast plain we are so used to seeing, but rather as a collection of overbearing and somewhat random monoliths. In contrast to almost all the exteriors of films like "A Canterbury Tale" or "I Know Where I'm Going!" (1945), it has nothing mystical about it. The film uses one of the most resonant symbols of British or Celtic mysticism as little more than a strange, arbitrary backdrop; a forbiddingly vast but still boxed-in exterior environment that both overwhelms and constricts Sammy. ...
"The Small Back Room" is also remarkable for its rendering of the frank and obtuse romance between Sammy and Sue (Kathleen Byron). As Powell has suggested, this is amongst his most intimate and close-up films. The discussion of space above indicates how this is achieved and reinforced visually, but the cosy and sometimes lacerating intimacy of the film is also propelled by the pictorial dominance of close-ups and mid-shots of objects and characters' faces. Although the film is marked by Sammy's perspective and experience – for example, we never venture into Sue's apartment which is just across the hall – it is equally concerned with the physical and mental relationship between the central characters. ...
For a film superficially concerned with the “art” of bomb disposal and the role of science in the bureaucracy of warfare, "The Small Back Room" is a surprisingly intimate and even domestic work. Despite the sombreness of many of its scenes – and the expressionism of its most derided sequence featuring Sammy's battle with a nightmarishly outsized and multiplied bottle – it finally emerges as one of Powell's most optimistic works, a rarity in his best British films after "A Matter of Life and Death". "The Small Back Room"'s final moments suggest the possibility of togetherness, a return to order and routine made all the more resonant by the simplicity and subtlety of the advances it claims.
— Adrian Danks, Senses of Cinema July 2005

The Elusive Pimpernel

(Das dunkelrote Siegel [de])

UK 1950
d: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Channel 4 TV (Region 0 uk)

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A reasonably faithful adaptation of Baroness Orczy's tale of the French Revolution and the debonair Englishman who spirited aristos out of reach of the Terror. Somewhat over-elaborated, especially in the lavish court sequences, it contrives to get bogged down in a marshy area somewhere between straightforward boy's adventure and classic P & P territory. Powell's original intention was to make it a musical, but Korda and Goldwyn objected; with relics of this conception surviving in the return to Orczy's adventure yarn, the result was that, as Powell commented, 'it really was a terrible mess'. Not terrible, since it is characteristically vivid and colourful, and sparked by bright flashes of sardonic humour.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Although "The Elusive Pimpernel" is a light-hearted romp that refuses to take itself seriously, it was the source of bitter recriminations and a subsequent lawsuit between its executive producers. The film was conceived as a co-production deal between Alexander Korda's London Films and Samuel Goldwyn, in which it was agreed that Goldwyn would fund half the film's production costs in exchange for US distribution rights. Korda had produced a version of Baroness Orczy's 'The Scarlet Pimpernel' in 1935 (d. Harold Young) with Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon, and Goldwyn anticipated a colour remake that would emulate some of that film's international success. However, like David O. Selznick, who had worked with Korda on "Gone to Earth" (1950), the American mogul hadn't counted on the free-spirited filmmaking of Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger and their long-term creative collaborators including production designer Hein Heckroth, editor Reginald Mills and composer Brian Easdale.
Powell's suggestion to make the film as a musical was less than enthusiastically received by Goldwyn and Korda, and Pressburger continued to struggle with the script until he decided to abandon his straight approach and opt for an altogether more playful style. The use of vibrant Technicolor and the light-treatment of the story anticipate later period swashbucklers such as Richard Lester's hugely successful "The Three Musketeers" (1973), but dismayed Goldwyn, who refused to pay his share of the production costs. Powell and Pressburger were obliged to re-edit the film, but this failed to pacify Goldwyn. He and Korda promptly sued each other for breach of contract and "The Elusive Pimpernel" was eventually released in America in a further truncated form (and in black and white) as "The Fighting Pimpernel".
Although both Powell and Pressburger were dissatisfied with "The Elusive Pimpernel", the film itself is highly enjoyable. It features stunning location work in Bath, the Loire Valley and on Mont St. Michel and there are numerous spirited and quirky moments, such as the intercut fireworks that suggest the force of Chauvelin's pepper-induced sneezes and the jaunty editing that visually echoes the rhythm of Sir Percy's poetry recitation in the Russian Baths. Hein Heckroth's understated sets (a few screens and pillars in the steam room for example) give precedence to the sumptuous costumes, with David Niven and Jack Hawkins' humbug-striped frock coats and frilly lace cuffs commanding as much visual attention as Margaret Leighton's elegant ball gowns and satin nightdresses.
— Nathalie Morris, BiFi

Gone To Earth

(Die schwarze Füchsin [de] • The Wild Heart [us] )

UK 1950
d: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Fremantle Home Entertainment (Region 2 uk)

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A film much maligned in its time, not least by producer David O Selznick, who issued an American version retitled "The Wild Heart", incorporating additional footage directed by Rouben Mamoulian and running only 82 minutes. Mary Webb's 1917 novel was the archetypal bodice-ripper - wicked squire, pious yokels, adultery and redemption - out of which Powell and Pressburger made a visually spellbinding romance. Christopher Challis' photography evokes Shropshire and the Welsh borders so that you can smell the earth. Menace, the bloodlust of the chase (of the fox or the outcast sinner), is omnipresent as trees bend and wild creatures panic before an unseen primal force. Cruelty besides beauty sweeps these pastoral vistas. Forget Jones' rustic English (Kentucky? Australian?) and the melodramatic clichés (boots trampling posies): the haunting, dreamlike consistency recalls that other fairy story of innocence and menace, "The Night of the Hunter".
— MHoy, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"... One of the great British regional films, and [it] marks one of the few occasions when we managed to break out of the studio and photograph the endlessly surprising, endlessly lovely British landscape in all its Technicolor strangeness. ... See the film again today and its melodramatic story soon recedes into the background. What ravishes the eyes and pierces the heart is an astonishing series of pastoral tableaux: the long shadows of birch trees as they lean into the wind against a sky of impossible blue; a bleak mountainside at twilight, its rocks sculpted into the semblance of contorted monsters; silvery trails of mist shrouding a desolate country house at dawn. Years later [DoP] Challis was proudly to claim that "the final result was, I think, one of the most beautiful films ever to be shot of the English countryside and in all its moods. Hours of patient waiting in rain, cold and sleet, for just the right angle of sunlight across a landscape, 5am calls day after day to catch the early morning mist: it was all so very worthwhile."
— Jonathan Coe, New Statesman: August 15, 1997
•••••
"The book resounds with elemental imagery through which states of mind and impending events are reflected in natural phenomena — not so much pantheism as Darwinian materialism, seeing physical drives rather than spiritual ideals as determining human life. Low-angled shots of black trees swaying ominously are accompanied by a soundtrack of hunting music, thudding hooves and chanting voices whose reverberations have almost physical impact, both evoking the Black Meet in Hazel's mind and creating a more general sense of dark, hostile forces threatening humankind. When the same soundtrack is heard over Reddin's relentless pursuit on horseback of Hazel, this is no facile symbolism. Hazel is attracted to what she fears most, as her reaction — a mixture of terror and exitement — shows; she is implicated in her own fate. The association of Reddin with the Black Huntsman, with the forces of death — manifested in his need to dominate, possess and control — is a reflection of his class as much as his masculinity. The film, like the novel, sees evil not as an abstract entity but as materially present in social institutions, in people's minds and hearts."
— Pam Cook, Monthly Film Bulletin, November 1986, vol. 53, no. 634
•••••
"... une fable superbe, d'une grande légèreté et simplicité qui contrevient à la réputation de complexité du cinéma de Powell. Une célébration magique de la nature. Œuvre harmonieuse sur l'harmonie universelle, le film est audacieusement littéral ... Le film devient fascinant en décrivant un monde où la sensation, le pur instinct, les forces telluriques, le magnétisme animal dépassent la raison et la passion. ... Plus profond qu'il n'y parait, le film est directement en prise avec les éléments. Voir la scène d'une grande poésie où Hazel invoque les esprits de la montagne a propos de sa relation avec Jack Reddin, hobereau ténébreux, chasseur un peu diabolique qui la poursuit de ses assiduités. Suivant scrupuleusement les instructions du grimoire hérité de sa mère, Hazel contourne cérémonieusement un rocher où elle a déposé son châle, dans l'attente d'une musique divine qui sera le signe favorable : scène d'incantation païenne inédite dans le cinéma hollywoodien, qui rappelle presque certains trips de Kenneth Anger revus récemment. Mais au-delà de l'opposition entre christianisme et paganisme, le véritable enjeu est la lutte entre le principe masculin l'instinct sexuel du chasseur — et le principe féminin — la terre, à la fois gouffre et matrice de la nature. Powell suggère cela avec grâce. Reste la pincée de perversion qui pimente le film. Notamment quand Reddin espionne, un sourire concupiscent aux lèvres, la jeune fille qui essaie des robes de princesse dans son château. Le Powell du Voyeur pointe alors le bout de l'oreille... Mais guère plus, car ce drame magique est avant tout une poétique leçon de chose.
— Vincent Ostria: Découvrir La Renarde de Michael Powell. Cahiers du cinéma n°511 - mars 1997
•••••
"Gone to earth", c'est peut-être le chef-d’œuvre de Michael Powell, en tout cas son film le plus envoûtant. jamais depuis Murnau et son "Nosferatu", la nature n'avait ainsi été saisie et restituée par l'artifice de l'écran dans son inquiétante splendeur. Tontes les images aux couleurs somptueuses de la campagne, des bois, de la montagne, imprègnent les éléments statiques d'une sorte de fébrilité intense et contenue qui ne cherche qu'à se manifester avec violence. Il s'agit d'une appréhension indéfinissable de l'univers que nul mot ne peut rendre pleinement, un sens de la création de l'atmosphère véritablement magique.
De même, les personnages portent dans la simple confrontation de leur aspect physique avec le cadre de leur évolution, l'épaisseur psychologique qui les anime et les lignes de force ultérieures de leurs destins respectifs : le châtelain domine les éléments tout en déchaînant à loisir leur fureur (la chasse aux renards, la meute de chiens), le pasteur engendre une reposante sérénité (le sermon dans la campagne, sa rencontre avec Hazel), Hazel enfin ne fait qu'un avec la nature ; fascinée par le vent soufflant dans les arbres (mais n'est-ce pas elle tout simplement qui le crée par sa seule présence ?), effrayée mais irrésistiblement attirée par la tempête, elle est le sujet docile et consentant qui obéit à tous les sortilèges, à des "directives " accessibles à elle seule dans la très belle scène purement fantastique de l'incantation dans la montagne.
C'est en fait un être plus proche du règne animal que du règne humain (pour une fois d'ailleurs, le titre français est plus explicite que le titre original : "La Renarde" c'est Hazel elle-même, et non - comme l'affirmait naïvement la publicité d'alors - le renardeau qu'elle a apprivoisé) : un élément perdu de la nature que ne séparent pas la carapace futile des traditions humaines ni le carcan de la civilisation et de la "respectabilité ". Un être primitif, naïf et sauvage, condamné dès le début à un prompt retour vers le limon originel. Elle mourra donc, en toute logique, en tombant dans un trou sans fond au milieu d'un champ qui, depuis les origines, attend son... retour
— Roland Lacourbe, Image et Son, n°251, juin-juillet 1971

The Battle of the River Plate

(aka: Pursuit of the Graf Spee [us] • Panzerschiff Graf Spee [de])

UK 1956
d: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Carlton Visual Entertainment (Region 2 uk)

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I'll Met By Moonlight

(Night Ambush [us])

UK 1957
d: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Carlton Visual Entertainment (Region 2 uk)

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After "Ill Met By Moonlight", then, the deluge. It would be foolish to suggest that the film - miserably renamed "Night Ambush" for U.S. release and cut by 11 minutes - is anywhere near the level of the team's masterworks. Even so, it's more interesting than legend suggests. The (true) story, set in occupied Crete in 1943, concerns the kidnapping of a German general (Marius Goring) by Cretan partisans led by a British officer, Patrick Leigh-Fermor (Dirk Bogarde). Film buffs will recall that the real Leigh-Fermor was one of the scriptwriters of John Huston's The Roots of Heaven (also the author of some bestselling travel books). Then again, the film seems to ask, who exactly is the "real" Patrick Leigh-Fermor - or the real anyone? Taking its title from a play concerned with dreams and disguises, magic and power, "Ill Met By Moonlight" is all about questions of identity.
— Peter Richards, Film Comment, 13th March 1995, v 31:n2. p37(4)
•••••
It's sad that Powell and his long-standing collaborator Emeric Pressburger were forced into the grind of British war movies so soon after they had managed to transcend the limitations of most local cinema in movies like "The Red Shoes" and "A Matter of Life and Death". Like their "The Battle of the River Plate", this is superior of its kind, but that isn't enough to lift it into the areas that Powell and Pressburger mastered a few years earlier. It's based on an actual incident in World War II: British officer Bogarde is working with partisans in occupied Crete, and decides to kidnap the German commander-in-chief to boost the war effort. General Kreipe (Goring) is duly hijacked and trekked across country by night into custody on a British vessel. The scrupulous reconstruction is all pluck, stiff upper lips and mutual respect for one's foe. It's distinguished by Powell's sense of landscape (as in "49th Parallel"), and by a vigorous Theodorakis score.
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
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In 1950, Emeric Pressburger read an extract from 'Ill Met By Moonlight', Stanley Moss's account of his adventures on occupied Crete during the Second World War, and immediately optioned its film rights. Michael Powell set off on a location scouting expedition to Crete, but it was another six years before "Ill Met By Moonlight" finally went into production. After leaving the Rank Organisation in 1949, Powell and Pressburger had briefly returned to producer Alexander Korda to make films such as "The Small Back Room" (1949) and "Gone to Earth" (1950). They then encountered a period of difficulty in securing financing for the projects they wanted to make, and by the mid-1950s were willing to contemplate a return, albeit a short-term one, to John Davis and the Rank Organisation. "The Battle of The River Plate" (1956), was a commercial success and chosen for the Royal Command Performance of that year (an honour that had been bestowed upon "A Matter of Life and Death" back in 1946). Davis then offered the Archers a seven-picture contract, but wary of committing themselves, they signed for just one picture - "Ill Met By Moonlight".
By 1956, the political situation in Crete had made location shooting unviable and "Ill Met" was instead filmed in the hills behind Powell's family hotel in the south of France. However, the poetic use of landscape that characterises earlier Archers' films such as "A Canterbury Tale" (1944) and "I Know Where I'm Going!" (1945) is evident in the atmospheric shots of the mountainous countryside, beautifully photographed in black and white by Christopher Challis, while Mikos Thodorakis's rousing score conveys something of the richness of Greek culture, the patriotism and bravery of its people and the rugged beauty of the Cretan landscape.
Michael Powell took mischievous delight in tormenting Davis with requests for actors such as Orson Welles and James Mason to play lead roles, but Dirk Bogarde, one of Rank's contracted stars, was eventually chosen to play Patrick Leigh-Fermor. His portrayal is flamboyant, charming and charismatic, although Powell later grumbled, "I wanted a flamboyant young murderer, lover, bandit... and instead I got a picture-postcard hero in fancy dress". Archers' regulars Marius Goring and Cyril Cusack, as the malignant General and the unwashed Captain, turn in strong performances that rather obscure David Oxley's adequate but anaemic portrayal of author Stanley Moss.
— Nathalie Morris, BiFi
•••••
And Patrick Leigh-Fermor, aka Major Paddy, aka Philidem - and, if you stretch your imagination just a smidge, aka Robin Goodfellow? - what of him? In the film's closing moments, he is far from being self-assured intellectual or dashing amateur adventurer or legendary outlaw of the hills. He's just a tired man who wants to go home and rest up. "How do you feel?" asks Moss. "Flat" is the reply. "You look flat!" says Moss. "I know how I'd like to look ..." murmurs Leigh-Fermor wistfully. Moss knows what he's going to say, and joins in the litany: "Like an Englishman dressed like an Englishman - and leaning against the Ritz bar!" It's easy to imagine them ordering drinks at that renowned watering-hole with all the suavity required by this little fantasy. Still, the film's last images of Crete receding in the distance, until all we can see is the sea, suggests that maybe Major Paddy's heart is really back in those hills in the "fair and fertile" land that has become as much a Powellian landscape of the mind for us as the studio-built Himalayan convent of "Black Narcissus" or the monochrome Heaven of "A Matter of Life and Death". And, as we depart both Crete and this film, we may reflect that being "dressed like an Englishman and leaning against the Ritz bar" would, for Patrick Leigh-Fermort constitute yet another disguise. After all, he was Irish.
— Peter Richards, Film Comment 13th March 1995 v 31:n2. p37(4