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Ill Met by Moonlight (1957)
Worth a look
The final film credited as being written, produced, and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger is the film that Powell called the worst of their partnership as The Archers. I think that's harsh (and, plus, you know, Gone to Earth is right there), but it's definitely the most straightforward and thinnest work the pair had collaborated on. A man on a mission tale set on Crete in WWII, it's an uncomplicated tale of daring-do with functional characters and pretty much no thematic depth. It's also solidly entertaining and perfectly acceptable as a piece of pop art. Sure, it doesn't have the technical flourishes of something like The Red Shoes or the depth of humanity of something like A Matter of Life and Death, but it works in its own little box well enough.
Major Patrick Femor (Dirk Bogarde) is an English army officer hiding amongst the Cretans on their island while its occupied by German forces. Femor has a daring plan, and he recruits the new arrival, Captain Billy Moss (David Oxley), to be his primary help in it. They will kidnap and sneak off the island the region's commanding officer, Major General Heinrich Kreipe (Marius Goring). Utilizing the locals, they set to figure Kreipe's schedule and the most opportune time to accomplish their goal.
Now, this is really little more than a man on a mission thing, so there's not a whole lot else to dig into aside from the plot and its mechanics, but that's not to say that there's nothing. The early sections, in particular, give a look at Cretan life that's interesting. Part Greek, part Italian, and all poor, it's an impoverished little island of long history dating back thousands of years (the film opens with a quote from Homer describing it), and the happy look of locals welcoming the new arrival is a nice look at a localized way of life. The film then delves into the details of the kidnapping for a bit, making it very clear what's going to happen, and then executing it with precision and some tension as we wonder if our heroes are going to get away with it.
And then the film keeps that going or the rest of the running time. Not to say that it's breakneck tension and suspense for the next 70 minutes or so, but the way off the island isn't as short or as straightforward as had been implied, the German forces very forceful in trying to get back their commander, and a delicate game of cat and mouse plays out as the band leads their quarry over the rocky hills of Crete to a southern beach where there's hope of meeting up with an allied boat.
The Archers' films and the central motif of people across sides coming together in the middle of conflict is still present here, but instead of developing into friendship like in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp or romance like in A Matter of Life and Death it becomes mutual respect. That doesn't become evident until very late because Kreipe is constantly looking for little ways to try and attract German attention without drawing attention himself from his captors. Sly smiles end up being the most to interpret for stretches of the film, and it works.
Of course, the film ends where it was always going to end. This isn't an unpredictable movie, coasting on some basic writing from Pressburger (according to Powell) and Powell's studied hand on set and location to film clearly and well while getting good performances. The actors are asked for too much, of course. This is men on a mission not men discovering their inner turmoils. The best performance probably belongs to Goring who has to hide his actions and knowledge while signaling to the audience that he's doing more than he's letting on. The resolution of the plot feels like it hinges on coincidence a bit more than I would like, a key character suddenly appearing at the exact moment that he's needed.
So, it's not deep. It's solid. I can see why Powell, considering his previous work, would feel so disappointed in the film. It doesn't have any of the flourishes or character depth of his previous partnerships with Pressburger. It was here where the two mostly separated (they'd work together on a few more films, though never credited the same way again), and it's a solid end to an extremely fruitful partnership. It's not their most memorable film, but I think it's worth checking out.
Oh... Rosalinda!! (1955)
Underrated and fun
Based on an operetta by Johan Strauss, Oh...Rosalinda!! Is a confection, a small delight of nothingness that flitters away from the mind as soon as it's done, but it's fun while it lasts. Reminding me of Lubitsch, this is Powell and Pressburger taking the formalism and theatrical influences of The Tales of Hoffmann and bringing them down a bit, going for more modest returns on more modest sets and with more modest emotions. I think the package ends up being a modest delight, a small concoction of music and some small dance dealing with masquerade, light revenge, and attempted infidelity that becomes fidelity.
Rosalinda (Ludmilla Tcherina) is married to the French Colonel Eisenstein (Michael Redgrave) in Cold War Vienna. Eisenstein played a trick on the local Dr. Falke (Anton Walbrook) by getting him drunk and putting him on a Soviet statue, causing a small controversy that reached Moscow newsreels. Of course, Dr. Falke actually recreated the event and brought photographers because his doctoral title is honorary only and he's just a man about town in his native city. He needed the publicity. However, the trick still irks him lightly, and Dr. Falke will have his revenge, and it involves getting the four-powers military tribunal to sentence him to several days in the barracks (effectively prison), making it worse by convincing him to go to a party that night instead of reporting on time, and involving Rosalinda. An extra wrinkle gets added with Rosalinda's old lover, the American Major Frank (Dennis Price) arrives in town and tries to use Eisenstein's time in jail to woo Rosalinda.
So, the whole situation is that Eisenstein is being convinced to go to the party of the Russian General Orlovsky (Anthony Quayle) because there will be pretty ladies, Rosalinda is taking Eisenstein's absence as an excuse to reignite her relationship with Frank. It's all about infidelity, but Falke is there to make things go right in his own underhanded and scheming way.
This is where the Lubitsch (and probably Wilder) comparisons come in. Falke starts the film as The Bat, being arrested and with his little masquerade mask, and his mission is to be this playful sprite causing chaos towards a harmonious end. This is technicolor Lubitsch ground, and it's fun. That's where I end up focusing for long stretches. There's not a whole lot going on. It's a series of excuses to go from one setpiece to the next filled with song and slightly naughty merriment. It ends up a largely plot-driven exercise, probably hindered by the machinations around Frank which feel so extraneous and not all that well integrated into everything else (he gets arrested by the four-powers police because they think he's Eisenstein even though he doesn't sound at all French and probably has identification papers, but he's talked into it by Rosalinda for reasons).
And that's where the charms lie. This is not a deep exercise in a look at rekindling love. It almost seems accidental at a certain point, but if Dr. Falke is a wayward sprite, there's room for him to have these sorts of extra influences outside of his direct control. This is probably me trying to fill in gaps with some head canon, but in a light and fluffy exercise of music and production design, it doesn't seem like a completely uncalled for reaction.
And I come away with it in similar ways that I came away with many of Lubitsch's by being unable to say more than, "Isn't this grand?" Well, not quite grand. It's fun. It's not as light on its feet as Lubitsch at his best. However, we do get Powell and Pressburger expertly filming in intentionally fake looking sets (painterly is the obvious direction) all while the actors get to have fun. There's precious little dancing (apparently a sticking point for contemporary critics, especially around Tcherina's lack of dancing) which is something of a surprise considering both The Tales of Hoffman and The Red Shoes, but it doesn't bother me too much. Well, honestly, the whole thing could have been more infectious with more dancing.
So, it's light, frothy, and a bit forgettable. It's about true love conquering, all while reveling in promises of infidelity. It shows that Powell and Pressburger had a definite vision of the perfect woman (Rosalinda goes redhead when she goes in disguise to the party).
I mean, this is a mostly forgotten entry in a mostly forgotten filmography, but for those who've enjoyed Powell's work on his best known films, this is ready for reappraisal. It's fun.
The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)
Composed Film
George Romero's favorite film, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's adaptation of the opera The Tales of Hoffmann is a formalistic exercise in craft, the sort of exercise in style that the Archers, as they used to be called, had been driving towards for some years. And you know what? I liked it. I liked it a lot. I've said more than once that some of their earlier films feel like the kinds of films that end directorial careers, veering so hard away from the naturalism so endemic in the cinematic language of the Western world that it made no sense that they were financially successful, and yet they were. It's unclear if this film was a financial success or not, though, honestly, at this point, it wouldn't surprise me too much if it made its money back.
Hoffmann (Robert Rounseville) is a poet having a love affair with the ballerina Stella (Moira Sheerer). During an intermission of one of her productions, he goes to a local tavern and regales the students with three tales of his lost loves, all observed by the ominous figure of Councillor Lindorf (Robert Helpmann). It's obvious from the framing of everything that none of the described love affairs are going to end well, so the film has this innate sense of melancholy to it as every sings every line and occasionally dances (mostly Helpmann). I mean, this is opera. It's grand emotions writ large with singing and dancing. It's right there on the tin.
So, the three tales are about Olympia (Sheerer again), Giulietta (Ludmilla Tcherina), and Antonia (Ann Ayars). Olympia is an automaton created by a toymaker (Helpmann) in Paris. Giulietta is a witch working with a black magician (Helpmann) in Venice. And Antonia is an opera singer promising to never sing again to honor the wishes of her father, Crespel (Mogens Wieth), while Doctor Miracle (Helpmann) schemes to kill her. The only real question for the audience is in the details of how Hoffmann will lose all three women, which, of course, he does because it's all a trio of flashbacks.
So, the joys of the film become its production and execution, and this is where Powell and Pressburger's craft becomes the film's chief asset. Each section is largely built around a singular large set where the actors are allowed to move around, dance, and sing (mostly dubbed, of course, only Rounseville and Ayars singing for themselves) in extravagant and ornate setpieces. The most enjoyable is probably the first with the shop decked in gold, the dancers mostly marionettes brought to life with magic glasses, and Sheerer doing a long series of en pointe moves in mechanical form (if this didn't inspire Fellini when he made his Casanova, I would be surprised).
The final two duke it out for which one is darkest with Hoffmann at one point losing his soul to a magic mirror in the second because his love of Giulietta is just a trick and Antonia is obviously going to end her section dead (it all but says so in the text introducing her). And yet, they're still both colorful, imaginative, full of life and vigor, and just wonders to watch.
By the end, though, emotional connections seem a bit muted because, well, opera. I don't think opera is often intended for deep, intricate emotions, instead veering us towards an obvious end with broad strokes and flare. And that's what The Tales of Hoffmann delivers which gets hampered a bit by the use of cinematic conventions of things like closeups that try to implicitly illicit certain emotional responses from audiences that staying 300 feet away from the stage can't do. Where Powell and Pressburger excel at adapting the opera to the cinematic medium is in the spectacle, bringing the dancing out beyond the borders of physical reality so that, for instance, Antonia can dance up stairs into heaven without a break, but it falters, ever so slightly, in heightening the base emotional connection because the material simply isn't built for it. Belting out emotions is not the same thing as conveying through performance.
Still, I get it. Much like The Red Shoes, I see the appeal and I get a lot of it. They're extravagant displays of cinematic bravado that I just wish I felt a bit more while watching. I enjoy the bravado a lot, but as the film gets to its final shots, Hoffmann exhausted by his tale and Stella taking the arm of another man, I don't feel much. It's kind of sad, but only kind of.
As a technical exercise, it excels. As an emotional journey, it functions. As cinema, it's a wonderful experience, but it could have been a bit more.
The Elusive Pimpernel (1949)
Moderately entertaining
What if Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made a Batman movie? Well, it'd probably turn out a whole lot like The Elusive Pimpernel. It'd be full of pretty gowns, balls, and more focused on Bruce Wayne's dandy cover than his skills as Batman. I mean, there's not one swordfight in this film. I was really not expecting that. Still, it's moderately entertaining but not entirely successful. Thriller mechanics are simply different from most dramatics, and I think many filmmakers who dip their toes into the thriller or adventure genre underestimate the challenges inherent in the genres, preferring to treat their exercises as extensions of drama rather than something with a different structural need to deliver a different audience experience. The creative pair manage to pull it together for the most part by the end, but it's not quite enough to save the film as a whole.
Revolution has engulfed France, and the mysterious figure of the Scarlet Pimpernel has been saving French nobles targeted by the mob and the Committee of Public Safety, represented by Citizen Chauvelin (Cyril Cusack). One of the early issues I have with this film is...I don't know where Chauvelin actually is. His early scenes I'm pretty sure are in Paris, but then he makes a decision to go to London because there's a party that very night he needs to attend...which he gets to without issue. So, was he always in London, and his discussion with Armand St. Juste (Edmond Audran) was at his house there, even though the plot, when it eventually manifests, is about saving Armand in Paris? I bet there's a scene missing.
Anyway, St. Juste (I have issues with the use of this name) is the brother to Marguerite (Margaret Leighton) who is married to the dandy Sir Percy Blankeney (David Niven) who is, of course, The Scarlet Pimpernel. He finds excuses of needing to recuperate at baths around England to sneak to France and do his work. He also spends times in real baths with the other elite of British society, including the Prince of Wales (Jack Hawkins), with whom he has a playfully antagonistic relationship, mostly around fashion.
The first half of this film is really largely plotless. We get two separate and repetitive examples of the Pimpernel rescuing people in France (I would recommend either combining them into one sequence or just cutting the first outright) and then a lot of focus on Marguerite. Her and Percy's relationship has soured heavily since they left France and she denounced some figures who went to the guillotine. He can't forgive her for that, and the refugees he brings back from France want nothing to do with her. I mean, this is solid stuff (I imagine it comes from the source novels by the Baroness Orczy), but it's presented in this dramatic idiom that when given such prominence in an adventure tale mostly just drags things down. The pacing (something I don't often gripe about) is just wrong here.
The weird thing is that the central plot, rescuing Armand, is introduced early. It just gets no attention for a long stretch, replaced, eventually, by some business around Chauvelin using a letter Armand had sent that contained some anti-revolutionary rhetoric as leverage over Marguerite to try and figure out who the Pimpernel is. So, essentially it's a distraction as Percy has to put on disguises to try and get his hand on the letter instead of going to France to save his wife's brother.
It's at about the halfway point where the film actually gains the overall character of an adventure story instead of a drama with some exciting bits thrown in here and there. It starts with the sudden need to make it to France, Chauvelin figuring out where and when the Pimpernel is going to depart for France from, Percy and the Prince of Wales getting into a race to Dover from London, and more. It suddenly has this drive, and we discover that some things set up in the first act shenanigans actually pay off in the final act, in particular the use of Mont St. Michel and its tides. I'm still disappointed that there isn't a single crossed sword, but Percy using his wits to win against Chauvelin is not unsatisfactory.
So, really, the film is alright. It's outside of Powell and Pressburger's wheelhouse, so the fit into the thrilling adventure is not quite right. However, they seem to be students of cinema enough to be able to adapt in the final act. Niven is the anchor of it all, and he's obviously just there to have some fun. He alternates between his dandy personality and that of the harder Pimpernel with ease, carrying the film on his back as best he can.
I wish Powell and Pressburger had studied adventure stories a bit more before finalizing their draft before filming, restructuring things and reprioritizing plot a bit more in the first half to give the film a clearer drive. It's never dull, though, it just never quite comes together despite the efforts of the final act.
Gone to Earth (1950)
I really don't think it works
For the first time in a long while, I was largely bored by a Michael Powell film. Adapted from the novel by Mary Webb, Gone to Earth is a rote, standard melodrama about a girl caught between two diametrically opposed lovers. This is The Red Shoes but without the fantastic sights to carry us along the route-one story structure. Considering the nature of David O. Selznick and how his output had degraded over the years since Gone with the Wind (Duel in the Sun is also very dull), it makes me wonder at his level of influence over the normally very independent Powell and Pressburger.
Hazel (Jennifer Jones, Selznick's wife) is a waif on the moors of the lands bordering Wales and England, living with her father Abel (Esmond Knight). She likes to run around barefoot, chasing after her fox, Foxy, dressed in red. Powell and Pressburger's films have always been kind of obvious, but here the imagery is just too on the nose. Yeah, she's the fox. The opening image of Foxy going to earth by running into a fox hole is going to get repeated with Hazel at some point, and considering what is about to play out, it's not hard to see how it all comes together.
Hazel goes into town to buy a new dress (a green one) and meets Jack Reddin (David Farrar), an esquire with land and a large house, on her way back. He gives her a ride back to his estate where he tempts her with fancy dresses from a woman who was presumably his wife before she presumably died, but she's saved from sacrificing her virtue to him by Reddin's manservant Andrew (Hugh Griffith) who lets her sleep in his own bed above the stables. A bit later, having been taken home safely, she attends a welcoming festival for the area's new parson, Edward Marston (Cyril Cusack), a single man who lives with his mother (Sybil Thorndike).
Part of my problem with how this melodrama plays out (I should note that I actually have a fairly robust history of defending melodrama in general) is how Hazel decides to marry Edward. They have one quick meeting where it's obvious that he's more smitten with her than she is of him, and then Hazel makes a promise to the mountain on which she lives that she'll marry the first man who asks. Well, Edward asks first, so she decides to marry him.
Now, the idea is that there's no real passion between Edward and Hazel while Hazel and Jack are more primal and natural fits. That's the idea, but we don't even get a scene of Hazel being won over by Edward's goodness. Instead it goes from introduction to proposal to acceptance, and the whole division of her passions never really materializes. It becomes this urging to be with the wild and rich Jack against her promise to the mountain to be with the mild-mannered and prim Edward. The tension of how she'll choose is simply not that present.
And this is where the technical daring of The Red Shoes becomes most obviously absent. The Red Shoes had a similar story of one woman caught between the two men, but at least that melodrama had the good sense of actually trying to build up the less natural of the two attachments to the man (the dancing side, the romantic side was given a bit of a short shrift). It was also masked by the technical prowess around the ballet sequences. We don't get someone analogous to the dancing in Gone to Earth. What we do get are wonderful views of the Welsh countryside, the sort of thing that Powell had been demonstrating wonderful ability to do since he'd filmed the remote Scottish island in The Edge of the World. I think the actual colors of the original Technicolor prints have aged poorly (sort of how the colors are all muted on all existing prints of John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk, also filmed in Technicolor), so the greens and reds don't pop anymore like they should (come on, Marty and the Film Foundation, restore this). However, it's still a good-looking film, and it's the chief positive of the film from beginning to end. Powell knew how to put a character in frame against a rugged and wild backdrop, especially in a hilly environment.
And yet, it's all in service to this rather dull, rote story. I was reminded again and again of David Lean's Ryan's Daughter, another movie in love with the wild reaches of Britain but unable to actually engage on emotional levels despite the craft. I have to return to the idea that Selznick might have had some influence over the production, though it seems like he was remote to it all and just sent memos that Powell and Pressburger ignored. No, I can't lay this at Selznick's feet. Powell and Pressburger were able to control things themselves, still their own producers, and they simply didn't make the story interesting enough.
Some praise has to go to performances, but I think the Jennifer Jones stans are a bit over the top in their praise of her performance. She's fine, but her accent fluctuates wildly. I can often get past that (like Barbara Stanwyck in The Plough and the Stars), but here it's surprisingly distracting. The best performance probably belongs to Farrar who's really just gesticulating manfully in every direction (he'd have probably made a good Heathcliff) while Cusack has the largely thankless role he plays well of the moral but passionless man.
So, it's mostly dull, but the story, while rote, flows well enough (I'd call it base functional) while the film is consistently pretty. I didn't hate it, but I was regularly unengaged by anything that actually happened on screen.
The Small Back Room (1949)
Psychological realism and suspense
The Archers lose their name with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger producing their newest film under their own names while they leave behind the colorful formalism of The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus for a stylized realism more in line with film noir visually. They also return to the war with an adaptation of the novel by Nigel Balchin, continuing to stay away from the front lines, this time focusing on one man working far from the front but still facing his own dangers. It's a more restrained work, a film one might call more mature than the stylistic excesses of their better known works from years prior, but probably not quite as successful.
Sammy (David Farrar) works for an office in London during WWII designing new weapons for the army. He also is being brought in to try and defuse booby-trapped cylinders that German planes are dropping across England, devices that are proving devilishly difficult to deal with without them exploding. In his office, headed by R. B. Waring (Jack Hawkins) works his girl Susan (Kathleen Byron) who has to deal with Sammy's constant bouts of self-destruction.
This is where the heart of the film is, recalling Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend in a different setting, with Sammy prone to drinking himself stupid at any kind of setback in a world where there's seemingly nothing but setbacks. This portrait of Sammy is what the entirety of the film hinges on, and it's solidly drawn, especially when taking into account his prosthetic leg that holds him back even further. He's earnest in his work, observing a weapon's test and coming away unimpressed or talking with one of his reports, Corporal Taylor (Cyril Cusack), about ways to rig the German devices under investigation that could lead him to an answer, but when night comes and he and Susan go to a club, he's due for a drink and things steadily, always spiral out of control.
I don't get really into this major thrust of the film too much, though, because it feels a bit diffuse with separate issues not quite connecting well enough while the central conflict of bureaucratic internecine bickering not really having the kind of weight I think it should have. Essentially, the future of the department comes under fire, threatened to be put under the charge of the Army directly under Colonel Holland (Leslie Banks), but the stakes are never quite clear, the repercussions never quite defined. The pressure on Sammy from these actions never feels quite palpable, and it's really the main thrust of the first hour or so of the film. I appreciate this look at a different side of the war, the laboratory based weapons' design deep in the heart of London, but it never really has the immediacy I think Powell and Pressburger were going for.
And then Sammy gets face to face with one of those booby-trapped cylinders on the beach, and the film becomes unbearably tense for a straight fifteen minutes. It's a great sequence as he methodically takes apart this device, the second of a pair that killed another defusal expert mere hours before he got off the train. It's quiet (there's no score across the whole film) as Sammy runs commentary over the radio to a girl writing down everything he says to document it, and he deals with loose pebbles, clamps, and wrenches as he has to find secret compartments, all with the knowledge that any false move could blow him up. Considering the kind of downbeat and realistic (stylized, it looks like film noir) film that has preceded it and the self-destructive nature of our main character (he even says that he wishes he had drunk less the night before in the middle of this), there's this mood that anything could happen.
And then everything is all right, across the board, and the ending kind of lost me a bit. It felt like something of a betrayal to the core concept, slapping on a happy ending that the central character was never working towards. It kind of reminded me of the unnaturally happy ending on the early adaptation of Nightmare Alley. The film is careening one direction, and then it veers off in another in the final five minutes.
Eh. It doesn't break the film by any measure. What preceded it was solid in its portrayal of bureaucracy in wartime wrapped up in a self-destructive personality who hurt and damaged everything and everyone around him. That set the stage for a quiet yet immensely tense sequence that might be one of the best in the creative team's entire body of work. On balance, it's a good film, but it's unevenness and odd direction of an ending hold me back from greater appreciation, from joining that small chorus that call it a lost Archers (without the name) masterpiece.
The Red Shoes (1948)
Composed film
Reportedly Martin Scorsese's favorite film (or, well, one of the legion he loves), The Red Shoes is absolutely the kind of film that kills directorial careers (much like A Matter of Life and Death). This is formalistic like One from the Heart, about an obscure subject like The Lone Ranger (this time it was ballet instead of a long-dead serial), and incredibly expensive for the time like Heaven's Gate. And Alexander Korda seemed to think it would have no audience, refusing any sort of serious rollout, leaving it for the British public to discover for themselves...which they did. No wonder directors love this movie so much. It proves that you can cast aside realism, spend way too much money, have complete control, and be incredibly individualistic in the commercial world of cinema and...succeed. It's not my favorite movie from The Archers, but it probably is the height of their technical and cinematic power.
My only real issue with the film is its story. It's not that the story is bad, but that it's wane. Everything is in place narrative to make the scenes concerned with story function well enough to get us through until the next, but the focus isn't there. It's on the technical side of things. The story as it is, though, revolves around the young dancer Victoria Page (Moira Sheerer) who becomes part of the Ballet Lermontov headed by Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) who also hires the young music student Julian Craster (Marius Goring) as a deputy composer. Vicky ends up caught between the two men as Boris demands total dedication to dance (to him) while Julian loves her and wants her to be happy but not under Boris whom he knows won't let her have anything else, including him.
This is the skeleton of a melodrama, but Powell and Pressburger are simply not that interested in developing it with any depth. Take how Vicky and Julian meet. They don't meet for about the first forty-five minutes, sometimes in scenes together and just never even seeing each other like when Julian shows up to the theater for his first day, gets stopped by the doorman, and brought up by the lead ballerina, Irina (Ludmilla Tcherina). Vicky shows up in the scene right before Julian and Irina meet, in the background, and then Irina leads Julian out. This is not bad, by any means, but it's just evidence of this curious choice to leave our two legs of the "love" triangle apart for an extended period of time. When they do meet, it's when Julian is given the task of completely rewriting the score of the eponymous ballet and Vicky is given the lead role that they first meet. They're given a couple of scenes to get to know each other, and then they're in love. It works. It's perfectly functional, but it's not that involving. It feels...wane.
And that's because the focus is on the business of the ballet. This is where things are the most interesting from how Lermontov runs his business, like not celebrating Irina when she decides to get married (her dedication is not to dance!), and his portrait of obsession that blends art and the control of his dancers. The showstopper is the ballets themselves, in particular the titular The Red Shoes performance that completely breaks theatrical rules in favor of cinematic ones. There is a line of dialogue from Julian that is probably there to offer some kind of justification (once you hear his music, you'll know where you're supposed to be, the ballroom in the specific instance of the discussion), but ultimately it's just an excuse for Powell and Pressburger to show off. I really don't mind, by the way, because this stuff is fantastic to witness.
There are double exposures putting Vicky in the red shoes that will always dance before she gets them from the Shoemaker (Leonide Massine). She jumps into them and are instantly tied. She floats in the air. The transitions from one set to the next make no logical sense in the context of a theatrical production. There are purely subjective moments like when she sees the Shoemaker turn into Boris and then Julian. It's a technical marvel on its own right, and something I feel like functions better at demonstrating the madness within Vicky, her duality between loving dance (represented by Boris' control over her) and her love of Julian than the extended ballet at the end of An American Paris does at...repeating that film's story at the ending.
The film's story follows standard melodramatic movements outside of that, though. Vicky and Julian marry. Boris sinks into a depression at having fired them both. He brings her back with a promise of one more performance of The Red Shoes. Julian leaves his own grand opening of an opera in London he wrote to confront her in Monte Carlo. The film ends in much the same way as the ballet.
I just don't feel much as the real story comes to an end. What I have in its place is this wonderful appreciation of the technical side of things, something that really does carry the film a very good bit, and a story underneath that works well enough, feeling more like straight melodrama than an elevation of it. I mean, this movie is really good. I just don't connect with it emotionally like I expect a great movie to do.
Black Narcissus (1947)
Style and technical flair
This movie...is not subtle. Like, at all. However, it is a testament to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's sheer talent that it gets as involving as it does. Essentially their Technicolor version of Vertigo, Black Narcissus is a Hitchcockian dramatic thriller of madness at great heights. Filmed entirely in studios and the outdoors around Pinewood in England, The Archers created a special effects marvel of the time that still holds up visually today, all while creating specific character portraits and sending them through the wringer that the source, the novel by Rumer Godden, established first.
Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), a member of the Congregation of the Servants of Mary, an order of nuns in India that take yearly vows instead of for life, is given, at a very young age, leadership of a new branch of the order in the Palace of Mopu. The palace was originally built by the current local general's grandfather to house his "women", his hareem, and is filled with salacious imagery. Along with her, Clodagh takes the perennial happy Sister Honey (Jenny Laird), the strong Sister Briony (Judith Furse), the gardener Sister Phillipa (Flora Robson), and the sickly Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron).
Now, I have to take note of casting for a second here. Kerr and Byron look...a lot alike, especially with their habits on. They look so alike that in a series of closeups, I had real trouble figuring out who was whom. I think that was entirely on purpose. The two characters end up mirrors of each other to some degree. Clodagh represents an effort to retain sanity and even sanctity in the house of sin that they've been stationed while Ruth gives in entirely to the madness of living hundreds of feet up in the air in a palace on a cliff while falling in love, instead of resisting, the sole white man in the area, Mr. Dean (David Farrar).
Dean functions as a go-between for the nuns and the general, and he's the sole masculine figure that features in their minds. He could be the handyman (fixing pipes and such) and offers them advice, especially around the difference in cultures and customs. One piece of advice seems harsh, to turn away any hopeless case from their dispensary because any death, no matter the cause, will be blamed on the sisters directly. And this is where the film's thematic heart lies: the clash of cultures. It's a common them in the work from The Archers, and it's obvious why the novel attracted them so much. There are a few cultures here clashing from the secular to the sacred to two different kinds of sacred against each other to Western against Indian. And the heart of it all is Sister Clodagh trying to remain stable in the face of her charge and the challenges coming at her from outside the order and within.
Ruth's steady decline into madness, the effects are what finally make her visually distinct from Sister Clodagh until she takes off her habit in favor of a deep red dress. This gets contrasted with flashbacks from Clodagh's life before she entered the order when she was a young woman in Ireland with a beau she had every intention of marrying. She's wearing green, has her red hair flowing around her and accepted emeralds from her grandmother as an early wedding present, but it was all for naught since the beau moved to America with no intention of bringing her along. So, she entered the order and went to India. This works in conjunction with Ruth's mental downfall, decreasingly deferring to Clodagh while growing increasingly ghostly in form.
A subplot of the film involves the general's son (Sabu) who comes to the convent for teaching despite the fact that the sisters will only teach children and older girls. He ends up falling for the local waif Kanchi (Jean Simmons) whom Dean brought to the convent for teaching and discipline since she won't stop dressing up and bothering him at his home. It becomes a piece of the puzzle where the Western sanctity has trouble meshing with the reality of Eastern existence, the inability to resolve the paradox represented by having a Catholic religious order in what used to be a hareem.
The film focuses in on the duality represented by Clodagh and Ruth, though, and that's where the film spends most of its time, especially in the final act, creating this phantasmagoria of sights and sounds as the confrontation becomes more acute. Again, this is not a tough movie to figure out, but the point is those sights and sounds along the way. It's a ride, and Powell and Pressburger give us the right grounding in our characters, in particular Clodagh, and then let things steadily unravel until its resolution.
A note must be made of the visuals. Famously, the film was entirely made at Pinewood, but the use of glass paintings is so much more believable than any blue screen effects like in Thief of Bagdad. There were two moments where I could see the seams (a bell swinging too high and getting behind the glass from the camera's perspective and the one use of blue screen that the post-production processes of the day couldn't matte exactly right). The rest are remarkably seamless with these fantastic photographs from India blown up and painted intricately to other matte paintings that blend in perfectly with the real-world elements. It's one of the best examples of the period special effects, a real feat especially considering the challenges of matching lighting.
So, it's a bit of a roller coaster. It's kind of obvious, but it's really fun in its own twisted way as it plays out. I wouldn't quite call this top tier Archer material, but it's close. It's a real testament to the technical prowess with a special shoutout to their regular cinematographer Jack Cardiff.
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
The Archers' Best Film
This is a film of such warmth and imagination that it sweeps me into its alternate reality of contrasting deep and bright Technicolor sights with its sumptuous black and white in equal turns. A tale of love in war, facing against death itself and bridging cultures, A Matter of Life and Death is a wonderful experience showing The Archers at some of their highest technical points while combining it with their innate narrative and dramatic skills. It honestly feels like the kind of film that kills careers, the going "out there" to such a degree that audiences don't get it and reject it. That it was so successful is a great little moment in cinema. It meant that The Archers could keep making strange, human sights for a while longer.
Master bombardier and squadron leader Peter Carter (David Niven) is in his bomber, his buddy Bob (Robert Coote) dead at his feet as the plane, on fire, heads steadily downward to crash, the rest of his crew having jumped. Without a parachute, Peter has no choice other than to sit there until the plan hits land or to jump out and make his own luck, but in those final moments, he gets the American army officer June (Kim Hunter) on the radio, and they fall in love over the course of a few short minutes. However, he's to die, jumping out to his death. Except, there's been an error in The Other World (hints of Here Comes Mr. Jordan). His conductor, 71 (Marius Goring), missed him in the English fog, so Peter survived the fall, washed up on shore, and met June on her way back to the country house she called home for the duration. This twenty-hour gap where he falls in love must be accounted for, and the Other World sends 17 to bring him back. Peter objects, demands an appeal, and 17 is off to do the civil administrative work of the afterlife.
An interesting thing about all of this is that the film leaves open the idea that it's all in his head. That 17 appearing is just a hallucination, and that's where the introduction of Dr. Frank Reeves (Roger Livesey) comes in. He's a neurologist that June has befriended because of his personal library that she borrows from, and she takes the two to meet each other, Reeves finding signs of a brain issue stemming from a concussion two years prior. The emphasis is on the reality we see of The Other World, of course, but the option is open. The opening text crawl makes it obvious that Powell and Pressburger aren't trying to recreate any particular concept of Heaven, of course.
The one thing about the film that fascinates me most, though, is the choice of what to film in color and what to film in black and white. At the time, black and white was actually considered more "real" and color more "fantastical" generally. Color, especially Technicolor, was expensive so it was generally treated as more unusual in cinema. Think of The Wizard of Oz with Oz being in color and Kansas being monochromatic. Warner Bros. Had this reputation as being timely and grittily realistic through films like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang while MGM had the opposite reputation of being unrealistic and musical through films like The Spirit of St. Louis. So, The Archers choosing to film reality in color and the Other World in black and white feels like a very conscious choice to be in opposition with the contemporary trends. This tells me that they want the real world to be more vibrant than The Other World, and it is.
The real world is full of these deep greens and reds (especially Kim Hunter's lipstick). There's a vitality to the manifestation of life that the black and white look at the Other World doesn't match on purpose. The Other World is gorgeous to look at with huge miniatures to create this wonderful sense of scale, clean design, and generally pleasing aesthetic, but it's not colorful like life is.
So, anyway, back to the story. Peter has to figure out who's going to defend him at his hearing, the Other World having chosen an anti-British figure from the American Revolution, Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey), to act as prosecution. Given the entire range of human history to choose from (there's this marvelous visual of huge statues of great men lining a moving staircase up to a white light), Peter cannot settle on anyone, the greatest thinkers being too erudite and removed from human experience, and even the more relatable of them being too removed from modern concerns. He's without counsel until an accident gives him an unexpected supporter in The Other World, the perfect candidate who knows his case and will fight vigorously for him.
An odd thing about this is how the film switches from dramatics and imagination to straight rhetoric for about fifteen straight minutes in the final stretch...and I love it. I recalled how 49th Parallel kept breaking into rhetoric and even polemic from time to time, mostly taking me out of the experience (though I like the film overall), and my contrasting reaction here fascinates me. The rhetoric becomes a dueling portrait of the qualities of British and American cultures and how they contribute to creating a man, so it's all tied to Peter's qualities as a character. And he's not even in the scene. It shouldn't work. It really shouldn't, but it does wonderfully.
And the film ends on this marvelous note of life affirmation, true love, and sacrifice that lets our characters have their cake and eat it too. Seriously, this shouldn't work, but the imagination and sheer skill of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger make it seem so easily.
This is a winning film all around, but special mention must be made of the acting talent involve. Niven anchors the film, and he's this cheerfully innocent and proper Englishman that comes off wonderfully as the central performance. Hunter is earnest and loving and believable as June. Livesey has become a small favorite over this run of Archer films, his unique register and earnest delivery always winning me over. And I have come to really love Massey as a performer, giving his small part such gusto and enthusiasm without losing control of any aspect of it that it's almost infectious. He also has some of the best lines in the film, which he does not waste.
This is a triumph of a film, the kind of humanist dramatic comedy of bright colors and intricate imagination that cinema had been reaching for since its earliest days with Melies. Truly operating in the earliest of cinema's traditions, The Archers made one of their best movies here.
I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)
Bog standard, but wonderful
Reportedly, Emeric Pressburger wrote this script in four days. The plan was to film A Matter of Life and Death, but The Archers couldn't get their hands on a Technicolor camera for months. So, they threw together a movie quickly, returning to the remote parts of Scotland (this time the western island region) to film a sweet romance that the pair imbued with wonderful specificity and beautiful imagery. It honestly makes up a lot for the fact that the actual story is kind of, you know, very formula. I am not surprised to learn that the British film industry used the script as a teaching tool for years afterwards. It hits the right beats without a whole lot of deviation. It just does it so well.
For the longest time, I thought this was about a female aviator. The Criterion cover, my only real exposure to the movie for a very long time, has Wendy Hiller in profile against a non-descript background, and she kind of looks like Amelia Earhart. Nope. Hiller plays Joan Webster, the daughter of a banker in Manchester who has become engaged to one of the wealthiest men in the country, Sir Robert Bellinger (Norman Shelley), the owner of a large chemical concern. They are to be married on the remote island of Kiloran off the Scottish coast, and her journey has been precisely planed by Sir Robert, detailed in an itinerary she gets when she gets onto the train.
The imagery of the film isn't exactly subtle. The film is called I Know Where I'm Going. The film starts with a little montage of her early years where she outlines how she wants silk stockings as a girl and prefers dinner once a month at the best restaurant in town over a biweekly trip to the movies, and on the start of her trip to Kiloran, she's given an itinerary. There's even a song that shares its title with the film. When she gets to the shore of the Isle of Mull, waiting for the final leg, a boat across the water to the island of Kiloran, the itinerary gets swept out of her hands by the wind to get lost in the sea. Her plans are being swept away by the natural forces of Scotland!
The boat doesn't come because the weather won't permit it, as dictated by the local harbor master Ruairidh (Finlay Currie), and she connects with Torquil MacNeil (Robert Livesey), the actual owner and laird of Kiloran who has rented his property out to Sir Bellinger for the income. Unable to go and stuck with MacNeil in a small community, I wonder if she's going to discover that there's more to life than fine things and money?
Really, what makes this journey towards an obvious destination worthwhile is the look at local life exemplified by the contrast between a pair of Bellinger's friends, the Robinsons, who have rented out another property on the Isle of Mull and the locals who celebrate a local couple's diamond anniversary with dancing, pipes, and singing. There's also Colonel Barnstaple (Captain C. W. R. Knight), a falconer and character who threatens to gore the other locals who are planning on killing his lost golden eagle which they blame for some sheep deaths (turns out it's a fox). In amidst all of this, Joan and MacNeil get to know each other, in particular around a couple of legends of the area.
And this is where the film gets this feeling of being adapted from a very solid novel (it wasn't, it was an original idea, it just has that feel). The first is the legend of a whirlpool in the area where a Nordic prince had to prove his love by remaining in it for three days. The second involves a castle on the Isle of Mull that has a curse upon it for any MacNeil who passes within. Both of these feel like just local color at first but also end up playing both dramatically and thematically with the story at its center. The whirlpool becomes a challenge to overcome, and MacNeil has to face his family's curse and history in confronting his own potential happiness. It works really well.
And that's where the skills of both Pressburger and Powell come through. This is a rote standard story of meet cute and fall in love, and it works very well. It works because the local color is so clearly brought out by both the script and the filming while it's also used to help define character journeys. It's kind of brute forcing a formulaic script into being so much more than it has any right to being.
For what amounts to a new quickie quota film, something thrown together on the relative cheap (it reportedly had no more than 2/3 the budget of A Matter of Life and Death) to fill a gap in the schedule, The Archers could have done so much worse. This is a nice little story elevated by the talents of everyone involved.
A Canterbury Tale (1944)
Transcendental Style in Film
Inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer but filtered through a sense of innocence that the original tales don't quite share (Pasolini was closer in terms of straight recreation in his adaptation), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale is a gentle tale of grace in the English countryside where war is a reality but still very far away. Centered around the investigation of a fairly harmless crime in a quiet community just over the hill from the famous endpoint of many pilgrimages, it's a sweet and warm look at connection during wartime.
On the final train through the small village of Chillingbourne on the way to Canterbury from London are two soldiers, the American Sergeant Bob Johnson (John Sweet) and the British Sergeant Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price). Johnson got off on accident, and Gibbs got off to report to his unit stationed just outside the village. Together, they walk with the newly arrived Alison (Sheila Sim), a land girl, who gets attacked by a mysterious figure in the night who puts glue in her hair before disappearing in the direction of the town hall. Investigating, they find a motley crew of locals, headed by Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman), the local magistrate who has been dealing with the Glue Man for some weeks while welcoming the new arrivals to his small village.
The first hour is dedicated to the slow investigation of the crime, possible suspects (it's really not hard to guess who it is, but the mystery itself is never the point), and the steady discovery of pastoral life. There are explicit contrasts through dialogue of life in the countryside with life in London, most particularly from Alison who came from a line of houses that all looked the same, sold garden furniture in a shop, and dreamed of the gardens where that furniture could end up. There's also Bob using the local boys, who have broken up into two armies and play war in their free time, to help investigate where the glue could have come from. All through this is interweaved this sense of the area's history as a stopping point on the Pilgrim's Road that circled around the hill that blocks the village's view of the cathedral, the symbol of holiness always just out of sight. This becomes most potently packaged around Alison whose fiancé, a pilot lost while on a mission, had been an archeologist who had studied the Pilgrim's Road a few years before, with her in tow.
The film is largely dedicated to these little conversations and movements of plot as time slowly moves forward with people watching the world go by, contemplations of time, loss, and movement while we get these nice portraits of characters like how Bob is smarting because his girl from back home in Oregon hasn't written to him in seven weeks. With that setup (Bob talking about how he no longer has a girl and Alison being alone because her fiancé died while doing his duty), you'd expect the two to enter into a romance, but the film isn't interested in such large moves. It's smaller, quieter, and more intimate than that.
And the film does eventually move to Canterbury for its final twenty minutes or so, Peter with a mission to report the Glue Man's identity to the constabulary, Bob to finish out his leave by meeting up with a friend, and Alison checking out the caravan that she and her fiancé had shared but has been stored at a garage ever since. They are joined by their suspect who pleads for mercy, for understanding, for a certain grace considering the intent, the motive, the lack of real damage, and the appeal to a higher power. And in Canterbury, the holiness of the place just kind of overwhelms everything, a connection with the divine transcending the human experience and redirecting attentions to more important matters.
It's a really gentle and sweet film. I'm not entirely sure if the implication that the Glue Man is actually some kind of angelic influence works (the pleading is too material and the intention too petty considering how the film ends, it feels), and the central crime is just too weirdly unimpressive to carry so much of the film. However, as I said, the crime isn't the point. It's just kind of weird on how much seems to hang on it. Outside of that, though, the character stories are sweet. The acting solidly good, though the one non-professional actor, Sweet, an actual US Army sergeant, is more arch than everyone else. It looks very good from beginning to end, and it actually works within the box that it creates for itself. I've recently just finished reading Paul Schrader's book on what he labeled Transcendental Style, and I do wonder if he ever saw it because I feel like it would fit, to some degree, his thesis (at least on the level that Dreyer fit it, intermittently).
It's really nice. A bit weird. But I think it hides something special that becomes evident once the action actually reaches Canterbury.
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
A complete gem
Still in the midst of WWII, Powell and Pressburger took a cut line from One of Our Aircraft is Missing at the suggestion of their editor, David Lean (yes, that one), and built a movie around it, choosing to physically model their main character and name the film after a popular contemporary comic strip character, Colonel Blimp. The end result is a touching, human, and wonderful look at the life of a man getting older, The Archers' own Ikiru in glorious Technicolor.
The film begins with a wraparound section near the end of the long, eventful life of the titular Colonel Blimp, actually named Cliver Wynn-Candy (Roger Livesey). As a general in the home guard during WWII, he's organized the largest wargame in the home guard's history, scheduled to start at midnight, but the impudent leader of the opposition, Spud (James McKechnie) attacks early, kidnapping the general in the bath, leading to the reminiscence of Candy's long life beginning with his return from the Second Boer War. This will take him from London to Germany, back home, through WWI, and through two romances and one lasting friendship. The friendship is with the German cavalry officer, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), and the first romance is with Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr).
The running theme that I've picked up through Powell's films, most evident in his collaborations with Pressburger, is this portrait of relationships (not always romantic) across borders, about how individuals deal with their friendships especially in times of war when on opposite sides. The film picks this up in the first hour with Candy first meeting Theo in a duel because Candy, in an effort to defend British honor against German narratives about English behavior in South Africa against the Boers, insulted the German army, a situation started because Edith, then a governess in Berlin, wrote to him about the situation. The two men mark each other in the duel and become fast friends in the resort where they recuperate (Candy gets a cut above his lip that he covers with a mustache, and Theor gets a cut alongside his forehead, which he does not try to hide at all).
They fought for the honor of their countries, and once the fight was done, they set aside those differences and got to know each other as men, as individuals, and they found so much to bring them together, including Edith. She falls for Theo, Candy lies to himself that he doesn't love her, and he congratulates them as he heads back to London, filling his days between wars with game hunting while he gets shipped from one post to the next in the service of his king.
One of the interesting things about the film is that it pretty much completely skips conflicts directly. We start right after Candy has gotten back from the Boer War. We only see the opening strikes of the duel between Candy and Theo. WWI is only seen on the last day. WWII is seen from the home front. What we do spend nearly three hours watching is the moments between, the moments of friendship and romance as Candy sees his soon to be wife on that final day of WWI for the first time, Barbara (also Deborah Kerr). He also deals with the divide that wars cause personal friendships when he finds Theo in a prisoner of war camp in England, but Theo resists the overtures of rekindling their friendship, the German holding onto this antipathy towards all of England in the face of defeat that extends even to his personal friend, General Candy.
What is probably the most heart-rending break happens off screen with Theo, in the earliest days of WWII, being interviewed by British immigration about his loyalties where he talks about his wife, Edith, died, and his two sons would not even come to her funeral because they had become good Nazis while their parents had resisted the movement, an event that led to his escape from his home country. Seriously, Walbrook's performance in this scene is absolutely wonderful. And, as old men, Theo and Candy reconnect, full of reminiscences and complaints that they're useless in the face of the new world of warfare facing them.
Winston Churchill hated the film from the scripting point and tried to kill the film more than once, and a lot of it seems to have to do with Theo's speech about how to defeat Nazism, one must fight less cleanly than before. The idea was that Nazism represented such a threat that Britain would have to fight dirty, a sentiment that Theo advances in the face of Candy's outdated views of good-gamemanship in fight. Honestly, the film has a VERY rosy view of how Britain fought its wars pre-WWII. Candy goes to fight the "lies" of the English using concentration camps against the Boers (they did), and he has a speech when WWI is over about how they never descended to using chemical warfare (they did). There's a certain blinders-on approach to British manners that never quite feels real, something I would imagine that Churchill, in the war effort, would appreciate. But, whatever. He didn't.
However, that less than accurate view of the British character doesn't negatively affect the film. This is more a portrait of an ideal in Candy, the good man who fought for his country, who gave up his own happiness for a friend, who was good to those who knew him, who grew old and slow after being young and impulsive (his trip to Germany was outright forbidden by the Foreign Office, but he did it anyway). It's this warm and human look at a good man, a man living his life as best he could, having happiness, regrets, friends, and losses, in a way that still feels real despite the white-washing of British military tactics.
The performances are wonderful throughout. I've already mentioned Walbrook, but the focus inevitably falls of Kerr for her trio of performances (the third being the elderly Candy's driver, Johnny), each one being completely distinct from the last. Edith is the most restrained but forceful. Barbara is the most withdrawn. Johnny is the most brash. They're completely independent performances, and they work very well, especially thematically since Johnny's resemblance to either Barbara or Edith is never brought up (their resemblance remarked on explicitly a couple of times), creating this idea of Candy yearning for the one woman he loved and surrounding himself with women who look like her (or some variation of the eternal feminine, I guess). Of course, it's all built on Livesey's performance as Candy, and he's got this bigness to him from his youth through his elderly years (his elderly makeup is essentially a skullcap and coloring in his mustache, and it works so much better than much more elaborate elderly makeup in other movies). He's earnest and full of life and, eventually, regrets and melancholy. It's a wonderful performance.
Really, this is The Archers hitting their stride. Mostly freed from other producers concerns for the second time, and taking one more healthy step away from propaganda, they have created this marvelous portrait of a good man representing an ideal of England. It's beautiful, touching, and heartwarming. It's a complete gem of British cinema.
One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942)
Solid drama
So begins The Archers, one of the most important directing partnerships in cinema history when Michael Powell shared directing, writing, and producing credit with Emeric Pressburger for the first time. They largely focused on different aspects of production, though one was never completely removed at any time except, maybe, the editing phase when Pressburger took over, but Powell insisted for the rest of his life that they were equal creatives on their films despite the tendency of some people to call Pressburger no more than Powell's screenwriter. Freed from the dictates of direct propaganda in 49th Parallel, they came up with a companion piece, another travelogue through a beautiful country with a timely story where the opposition between Nazism and western democracy are front and center except with a whole lot less sermonizing, which is very welcome.
"B" for Bertie, a bombing aircraft from England with six men in its bowels, flies over the Channel, over Holland, and straight for Stuttgart where it successfully hits its target, takes some flak, but is able to get away long enough for the engines to fail over Holland on the way back, necessitating the crew to bail out. Five immediately come together, led by the second pilot Tom (Eric Portman), he's joined by the pilot John (Hugh Burden), the navigator Frank (Hugh Williams), the front gunner Geoff (Bernard Miles), and the rear gunner Sir George (Godfrey Tearle) while the sixth man, the wireless operator Bob (Emrys Jones) is no where to be found once they collect themselves.
Uniformed in enemy garb, only one of them able to speak any Dutch, and in an occupied country, the five decide that the best thing to do is to stick together and head westward across the country to the western coast. How they'll do that, they don't know, but they're fortunately encountered by some local children who take them to their schoolteacher, Jet (Joyce Redman), who can speak English, verifies their identity, and tells them that she can get them to the coast almost 60 kilometers away, through enemy patrols and checkpoints, that very evening if they do what she says.
What follows is an episode travelogue through Holland filled with beautiful imagery, a calm and gentle mood, and frequent spikes of suspense as they navigate the dangerous terrain. Most of this works really quite well, feeling less episodic than it could. The scenes with the schoolteacher have a direct purpose of getting them on the right path. There are scenes that are designed to show how dangerous the journey is, in particular the scene in the church, and there's this wonderful undercurrent of resistance from the locals that gets repeated with the motif of the Dutch national anthem. However, there's one scene that really just sticks out and irritates me.
The five get handed off to a reasonably wealthy Dutchman and have lunch in his home. He lives across the street from a German garrison where his young son runs out after having given the German soldiers some records. There's also a neighbor who's been trying to get on the Germans' good side who used the boy to send the records, except the boy relabeled multiple copies of the same record, all playing the Dutch national anthem, and gave them to the Germans instead. When this neighbor figures out that there are English soldiers in the house, he is ready to turn them in, but the situation has quickly changed where he can't do it because he needs to hide from Germans because of the records. This is A LOT of plotting, and it all happens over the course of about five minutes in the middle of this film about escaping British aviators, all with brand new characters just introduced in that scene (some of whom never show up again). From a thematic perspective, it makes total sense, so I can't hate it. However, from a basic narrative construction point of view, it's such a giant sore thumb in the middle of the film. It's weird that it's so prominent, so busy, and so easily dismissed once it's done.
Anyway, the sense of danger increases as the film works towards its conclusion, ending at the port city as the men are guided by Jo (Googie Withers) about how to get out to sea, including a wonderful moment where they have to row under a swing bridge without being seen by the German guard.
It's very well made, quite suspenseful, and has this gentle heart that never goes away, but I do have a couple of other smaller complaints. The ending hinges on the men getting onto a survival buoy already populated by two German soldiers, but we don't see it actually happen, so there's this jarring moment where it's hard to understand the cut. Also, the film starts with text implying that this was based on real life, including a letter describing the execution of five Dutch civilians for helping the English escape, but there's no sense in the film itself that anyone was ever caught. It's a weird contrast in retrospect.
Still, these are small concerns, smaller than my issues with 49th Parallel which I thought worked in spite of itself. This is the better version of a similar story, less prone to polemic and more concerned with a straightforward application of thriller mechanics (we actually root for our main characters instead of against them). For a first film where The Archers were independent, they chose to remain topical but more firmly rooted in solid dramatics, and it works quite well. They probably have a bright future ahead of them.
49th Parallel (1941)
Interesting Propaganda
This is an interesting view into how the needs of propaganda and drama are in opposition to each other. The former requires rhetoric and polemic while the latter requires subtlety. Michael Powell and his new, regular writing partner Emeric Pressburger made the most of the dictates of the Ministry of Information to create a film that portrayed the Nazi way of life as violent and brutal while the Western, mostly British-inspired life to be peaceful but hiding great strength. Essentially broken up into a handful of extended vignettes, 49th Parallel works best within some of its moments, in particular its second vignette, but it is consistently held back by the need to say why Canadian life is better than German life instead of just showing it.
Germen U-boat 37 sends six men onto the shores of the Hudson Bay to take a small trading post as the first small effort by Germany to take the war into Canada. Led by Lieutenant Hirth (Eric Portman), the six watch as the submarine is attacked by an Allied plane, sinking it before it could dive out of harms way. Left alone in the Canadian wilds, they take the post while they figure out how they can get back home. What follows is a long journey southwards, westwards, and back eastwards as Hirth works through a couple of plans (involving, for an extended period, an effort to reach Vancouver to catch a Japanese vessel), providing the Germans plenty of opportunity to see the benefits of life under democracy rather than fascist national socialism.
So, we get the rugged individualism of trappers in the north, manifested by Johnnie (Laurence Olivier), a remote community of Amish-like Christians led by Peter (Anton Walbrook) and populated by innocents like Anna (Glynis Johns), the benefits of unfettered consumerism in Montreal, the intellectual hiding great courage and strength in Philip Armstrong Scott (Leslie Howard), and the working class soldier Andy (Raymond Massey). The best of these is the Amish-like community where Vogel (Niall MacGinnis) relearns the simple life of baking in contrast to the militant existence he's led in Germany since the rise of Nazism, complete with a vague explanation about how good men can let evil sweep over their nation. This is where the dramatics of the film outweighs the polemic, outside of a pair of speeches from Hirth and then Peter (Hirth's is a defense of Nazism and Peter's is a defense of escaping it rather than rhetoric in support of something else), and Vogel ends up being this wonderful little heart in the first half of the film.
The weakest part is probably the section with Scott, the writer in the wilds of Alberta researching a book about the local Indians who've been gone for many years. This is when the film relies most fully on rhetoric to make its point, Scott's attack on Nazism and defense of democracy feeling dramatically inert rather than invigorating. He does get a nice moment to prove to himself that he has courage in the face of danger, but it's small in comparison to the rhetoric that overwhelms the section.
For all my complaints, though, I do think the film is pretty good overall. Through Vogel's section, I was getting filled with a wonderful feeling about the film overall, but the episodic nature and rhetoric ended up catching up with the film as Powell provided these magnificent views of natural Canada, especially in Alberta, while we were on the guardrails of this predictable need to make sure the audience knew, for sure and without any doubt, that Nazism was bad. The vessel for that is rhetoric, though, not drama, and we get this conflict between the separate needs.
That being said, it is actually a pretty good experience. Its time capsule elements are interesting. Its travelogue aspects are quite enjoyable. The performances are really quite good, even from Portman in what amounts to the thankless role of unyielding Nazi, though my favorite really is MacGinnis as Vogel. It looks great, it moves nicely even while most of the movement is towards yet another speech, while it has a fun final scene where good triumphs over evil in a small way with some creative use of the word freight. It's held back by the needs of the Ministry of Information (my skin crawls writing that for real), but Powell and Pressburger did the most within the strictures given. Honestly, it's more than others who were making propaganda at the same time could manage (including Kurosawa).
Contraband (1940)
Apprentice of Suspense
The second collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger as his writer before becoming his co-director, Contraband is another English effort at replicating Hitchcockian suspense after the master of suspense left for America. It's got an everyman walking into a nest of spies and finding his way out, all while a little romance gets to play out at the same time. It's also extremely timely, its American title (Blackout) making it more obvious than its British title, and it ends up being a fair amount of fun. It's not great, its plot mechanics to get everyone in place never quite making the most sense or holding together as well as it should, but once it gets moving, it has an infectious energy that very much works in its favor.
Captain Anderson (Conrad Veidt) commands the Danish freighter the Helvig, passing by England on its way home from New York laden with cargo, Red Cross supplies, and a handful of passengers. Chief among those is the American Mrs. Sorenson (Valerie Hobson) who marks herself antagonistically against Anderson by refusing to wear the life vest that he orders all passengers to wear. Stopped by British naval authorities for inspection for contraband in the early days of WWII, they're anchored off the British coast for the night, Anderson given a pair of passes to go on shore for dinner. Those get stolen at the same time that Mrs. Sorenson and the other American passenger, Mr. Pigeon (Esmond Knight), go missing from the vessel. Anderson, responsible for everything and everyone on his vessel, goes out in search of them, sneaking past the patrols to quick get on their trail.
So, the setup is mostly fine. It wasn't the most engaging thing, but there was a nice bit of tension around the British officers coming on board and sorting through details. The characters are decently well drawn, with a special note going to Anderson's first officer Axel Skold (Hay Petrie) who has a brother in London, Erik (also played by Petrie) who runs a nice Danish restaurant. He's just kind of fun to watch.
Where things get interesting is when Anderson catches up with Mrs. Sorenson, stays on her tail, and keeps her within his grasp. The plot kind of gets forgotten for a few minutes as they wait through one train back to port for the next, slowly getting acquainted and falling in love a bit. There's also a sequence at Erik's restaurant that feels like it's going to be just a random side adventure where Anderson uses his relationship with Erik's brother to get a free meal while he and Mrs. Sorenson bond, but does end up coming back later, especially with a tie to a song in Anderson's pocket watch (a Danish anthem).
The thing is that Mrs. Sorenson is sort of a spy, going to London to drop off some information that could have been done with a dead drop. That she has to go into London and hand it off to someone feels like someone who doesn't really understand how spycraft works wrote it out (which Pressburger probably didn't, but it's a decent enough excuse for the action that follows). She ends up falling into a German trap led by Van Dyne (Raymond Lovell), and Anderson has to escape, find some help, and rescue Mrs. Sorenson. Why doesn't he just take her with him? Because the bad guys will know something's wrong? His objective is to escape, not take down the spy ring. Anyway, that ends up being his implied objective so that an extended fight with a bunch of Danes, joined in by some rowdy and slightly inebriated Brits, can get into a fistfight in a club with some German spies. I'm not complaining too much.
I do think that the film missed out on a real opportunity with its concept, though. The film is set mainly during a blackout in London. Why? Well, because a war is on and Germany is in the middle of its blitz campaign of England. What doesn't happen in this film? Any kind of blitz. It's just nighttime. This does give us this nice moment where Anderson is able to use his navigating skills using the stars to retrace his steps, but you could still do that with some very basic sound and lighting effects to add the extra bit of tension and suspense around a bombing raid of London that feels far away, gets closer at random intervals, and creates this need to keep lights off more than just it's the right thing to do at the time.
So, it's pretty good. Its final act works wonderfully well even if the plotting to get us there doesn't make the most amount of sense. It may miss an opportunity, but that's not really a critique of the film as it is but more of me wish casting for a film they never made. There's also this nice little sequence in the middle that enters into the realm of phantasmagoria when Anderson gets knocked out that seems to presage the nightmarish visions of something later in Powell and Pressburger's filmography like The Red Shoes.
It's fun, is what I'm saying. It's a product of its time, but it can extend beyond that. If someone were to take up the mantle of master of suspense in England from Hitchcock after he left for America, Powell was not a bad way to go. He wouldn't keep making movies like this for very long, but he was pretty good at it while he did it.
The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
Fun, childish nonsense
The film Michael Powell was in the middle of making (though, reportedly as the second director Korda had hired for the production) when WWII broke out, requiring Alexander Korda to move production from England to Hollywood. This left Powell behind to make the bit of propaganda, The Lion Has Wings, while Korda hired Tim Whelan to take over production (though, reportedly there are five directors who worked on the film, though only three are credited). This manic approach to scheduling ends up coming together to create a delightful bit of nonsensical fantasy, freely adapting Arabian Nights while feeling like it was cut down from a much larger cut. This is not great cinema, but it's fun cinema. I can't fault it for that.
A blind beggar and the former King of Bagdad, Ahmad (John Justin) tells of how he came to be blinded by the evil Jaffar (Conrad Veidt), his vizier, and the innocent thief Abu (Sabu) came to be turned into a dog. Eager to get to know his people, Ahmad had gone down to listen to them in disguise, but Jaffar had used the opportunity to seize power upon his absence, arresting Ahmad, labeling him as a madman, and throwing him in prison for execution. It was there he met Abu, in prison for stealing (though, good stealing since he gave the stolen fish to some starving men), and the two escape together. Now, my first sense that there were scenes missing happened here. Abu shows that he's pickpocketed the keys to the cell, and then there's a hard cut to the two of them outside the city, getting onto a small boat, and readying to head towards the city of Basra. Where's the escape? Was it filmed? Was it just skipped over because of the chaotic production? I have no idea. It doesn't break the film. It's not like we don't know how it happened. We have just enough information to fill in the gaps ourselves, but a tense 2-3 minute scene where they two have to sneak past guards feels like such a natural fit that its absence feels prominent.
Anyway, they make it to Basra where, coincidentally, Jaffar also goes. He has designs on the princess (June Duprez), to make her his wife. For power? For love? To expand his empire? I dunno, but he wants her. Good enough. Of course, Ahmad sees her (the whole ruling about how no man is allowed to even look at her falls apart the second it comes up) and falls in love. He sneaks in (how? I dunno) and the two instantly fall in love. However, Jaffar comes across Ahmad and Abu and does his magic to turn Ahmad blind and Abu into a dog.
For all my complaints about what feels like missing footage, the film is decently well plotted out. How does Ahmad come in contact with the princess again? Well, there's a small bit of coincidence (Jaffar encounters him on the road, blind and begging), but Jaffar actively brings him to her because he knows she'll only wake from a perpetual slumber if he arrives. So, Jaffar has to keep Ahmad alive after a certain point, but he also has to bring him to her. And then, plotting can also kind of fall apart. Upon the lifting of the curse on both men, Ahmad and Abu get separated, and Abu ends up on a random beach where he picks up a random bottle that randomly has a djinn (Rex Ingram) whose been trapped for two-thousand years inside. It kind of feels like a late idea in production that wasn't actually written into the script beforehand. Considering the level of craft, though, that went into the miniatures, the special effects, and the entire sequences, it feels like there had to have been some planning. However, one thing I know is that much of Sabu's footage originally shot in England was ditched because he grew so much in the months it took to move to America. Those months could have provided Korda with the time to create these large setpieces around Sabu from scratch. I dunno.
Essentially, Aladdin took the meat of this story, slimmed it down in some sections and generally just made it make more sense (and stole heavily from Dick Williams and The Thief and the Cobbler, but that's another story).
So, it's nonsensical, but it's fun. There's an embrace of special effects and spectacle, especially when Jaffar gives the Sultan of Basra (Miles Malleson) a flying, mechanical horse, that is designed to thrill the child in all of us. And that's where the joys lie, in these frequent flights of fancy, strung together by a plot that mostly fits together, hinging on low-rent Errol Flynn to hold up as much as he can. Well, at least Sabu is there.
So, it's fun. It's thin and nonsensical, but it's fun. It's colorful, has a light tone, and looks good (though those early blue screen effects are rough). Just the sort of thing the world needs as it descends into a war.
The Lion Has Wings (1939)
Drama + Propaganda
Michael Powell was in the middle of production of The Thief of Bagdad when war broke out between England and Germany upon Hitler's invasion of Poland. Falling back on an agreement with the government, producer Alexander Korda gave whatever resources he could to the British government to help the war effort and moved the production to Hollywood. That left Powell in England to make this, The Lion Has Wings, a propaganda piece of which he made, maybe, 15% of the final product. The rest is made up of footage shot by Brian Hurst, Adrian Brunel, and Korda himself mixed with a large dose of footage acquired from the British government and newsreels. The final product is a quick and dirty little bit of "pick me up" for the masses in the earliest days of the war. It would be interesting to match this up with John Boorman's Hope and Glory as well as William Wyler's Mrs. Miniver to get overlapping looks at the start of the global conflict from the British homefront perspective.
Anyway, the first half hour is essentially one long newsreel, describing the differences in culture between Britain (peace-loving, congenial, almost classless, and free-wheeling) and that of Germany (autocratic, stiff, warlike), leading up to Hitler's provocations across the European continent that led to the Polish invasion, and finally a look at British Spitfire and bomber production. Occasionally, we get glimpses of Wing Commander Richardson (Ralph Richardson) and his wife (Merle Oberon) as he goes off to help at central air command and prepare for the first of Germany's air raids against the British mainland.
The footage shot by each director is reportedly this: Hurst directed everything with Richardson, Powell directed everything in planes, and Brunel shot the crisis section (though, I'm not entirely sure what that is). There's footage from Triumph of the Will as well as a segment from the film Fire Over England showing Queen Elizabeth (Flora Robson) giving speeches in her armor in the face of the Spanish Armada, drawing a parallel between the British responses then and contemporaneously. It seems a bit hoary, but I think it kind of works.
And that's largely my response to it all: it's a bit hoary, but it kind of works. It's unabashedly propaganda to the point where the only way to make it moreso would be to have the narrator (E. V. H. Emmett) outright call it so. However, it's actually got something like a dramatic structure. The scenes are mostly decently well done. The stuff with Richardson ranges from obvious (everything with his wife) to borderline ridiculous (the entire section dealing with the three German bombing runs, including a command center that makes no sense). However, it's Powell's stuff in the planes that works the best. They're about professional men doing a professional job in a dangerous environment (it's almost Hawksian), but there's no time for bits of personal story from any of them. It's just down and dirty men on a mission stuff.
And, because this is propaganda, the British win everything. I mean, everything. The British bombing run Kiel Canal goes off flawlessly, sinking a bunch of battleships without losing a single plane. The counterattack from Germany gets brushed away with the well-trained British pilots easily taking out the bombers, leaving no one on the ground to be hurt. In fact, the final scene is between Richardson and Oberon where Oberon, in nurse's dress, talks about how she has so little to do in her official capacity, a reality that would starkly change with the beginning of the German Blitz. It reminds me of how Hawks' own Air Force had to end with a great victory even if the story didn't call for it.
So, it's propaganda, but it's decent propaganda. The look at wartime production is interesting. The "story" beats are fine and function decently enough. The overview of how Britain is preparing defenses including explanations for barrage balloons is interesting and informative (the people of the nation should know why large inflatable blimps are hanging by steel cables from their major cities, for sure). I've seen far worse propaganda, but it's also obvious that the needs of propaganda and the needs for drama are pretty much completely diametrically opposed. They clash. It's possible to lessen the clash, but the clash will be there, nonetheless.
The Spy in Black (1939)
Across borders
Mostly notable as the first time that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger worked together, this time with Pressburger only as writer, not as codirector, The Spy in Black exists in this interesting pocket of film history. Made in 1938, less than a year before war broke out between Britain and Germany, a British film came out centered around a German U-boat captain in WWI that made him a rounded, almost sympathetic character, even as he plots to sink dozens of British warships. It's a mostly successful film that's really got dueling narrative directions, but we'll get to that.
U-boat captain Hardt (Conrad Veidt) is ordered on a secret mission to the Orkney Islands where he will meet a female German spy for a mission he won't know until he meets her. Meanwhile, we watch as a young English schoolteacher, Anne (June Duprez), engaged to the traveling Reverend Harris (Cyril Raymond) leaves for the Orkney Islands before she's drugged and replaced by German spies. On the island arrives Ms. Tiel (Valerie Hobson), having taking on the identity of Anne, and eschewing all efforts to get her to stay in the small and populated town center in favor of living in the remote schoolhouse.
The early parts of the film demonstrate the conflict within the heart of the film itself. Hardt's scenes are about how the war stripped humanity of many of its joys, in particular around food. He shows up to a hotel in a German port city, expects at least butter, gets nothing but carrots, and has to go right back out to perform his new mission. On the other hand, Tiel's scenes are about the mechanics of spycraft, somewhere between careful attention to the minutiae of the reality and an overly attentive to detail series of scenes that don't quite add the kind of tension one expects. It's not that Tiel's scenes are bad, just that they don't quite have the kind of suspenseful tension around them that they probably should. Part of this might be information kept from the audience until late in the film.
Anyway, Hardt meets with Tiel who tells him the plan. There is a disgraced English commander, now Lieutenant Ashington (Sebastian Shaw), who is angry with the Admiralty for removing his command that he's willing to give the German navy intelligence on a convoy leaving the Orkneys in order to sink it in exchange for payment. This is where a certain love triangle develops that makes the film feel like it's going to go in a particular direction, something rather mundane but potentially workable: two men falling in love with the same woman. It's here were Ford's later They Were Expendable comes to mind, about the impermanence of war and the fleeting nature of relationships made under its shadow, potentially walking towards some kind of tragic end.
But the film has something else in mind, a complete overturning of everything leading into the final act that deepens everything. It takes the idea of the impermanence of relationships under war and expands on it to include feelings of betrayal, dereliction of duty, and failure. It's a presentation of how human connection is both possible and impossible across national borders in wartime. It's a touch of Joyeaux Noel and The Dawn Patrol where there will always be other bonds that connect people crisscross national concerns but also conflict with them at the same time. It's where the efforts at actually building Hardt and Tiel as characters through the earlier parts of the film pays off.
As Hardt stands alone on that trawler's perch, having been defeated so thoroughly that he can't even move from a sinking vessel, it has this touch of tragedy, even though he's a German character, a spy working to sink British vessels, in a British film. It's not that Powell and Pressburger hated England. It seems obvious enough at this point that Powell loved his country deeply. However, he and Pressburger also seem to be humanists at heart, perhaps even utopians, who wished for human connection even in trying times of world-upheaval, a fact that helps their films have a long shelf life long after the direct conflicts are over. However, the films don't seem to be utopian themselves. They recognize that the world is big and violent without promises that all violence will end if we could just learn to get along. Instead, it strikes this balance where the focus is on individuals looking for ways through messy times, their conflicts of interest, and their basic desires.
The shadow of war was looming over Europe at the time, so making this on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland feels like a statement that even though countries may go to war, the people can still find common ground, and when they can't it's a tragedy of the individuals.
That's some waxing poetic about a movie I think is pretty good, but the final twenty minutes made it for me. Up until then, it was fine, a perfectly acceptable, if a bit overly complicated, spy adventure. And then it gained this extra dimension, deepening Hardt in a wonderful new direction, and giving us a tragic ending that surprised me. Helped in no small part by a strong cast, especially Veidt, The Spy in Black is overall a solid spy adventure that ends so much better than it begins.
The Edge of the World (1937)
Powell's first masterpiece
Michael Powell's quota quickie period was over, and he cobbled together the money for a real feature film from American producer Joe Rock to make a movie based on an idea he had about dying communities on small islands off the Scottish coast. Writing the script himself, he took his crew out to the remote island of Foula, which he renamed Hirta for the film, and he took in the rugged beauty of the island north of the Scottish coast. What he captured was beautiful, but he also framed it all with this wonderful story of a population that was on the edge of understanding that it was dying, that its way of life was going away with the advance of modernity. Melancholic, proud, and beautiful, The Edge of the World is Powell striking out on his own and proving that his apprenticeship period on the quota quickies was time well spent.
Told as a flashback ten years after the main events of the film, the final couple of years of life on Hirta is recounted by Andrew (Niall MacGinnis), centered around his friendship with Robbie (Eric Berry), his romance with Robbie's twin sister Ruth (Belle Chrystall), and the antagonistic relationship that develops with their father, Peter (John Laurie). Robbie has just come back from some time on a fishing trawler off the island, pulling in more money in one season that he could years of working for their Laird sheering sheep and fishing on the island. He sees how the world has moved on from the peasant, aboriginal life that they lead and sees that Hirta cannot survive. They have to leave. Andrew disagrees, and they decide to have a competition to decide what to do. It's more of a playful demonstration of youthfulness than a serious effort to make a decision for the island, but the two friends free climb a cliff along the island's edge which leads to Robbie falling to his death.
This isn't a plot heavy film, so it doesn't lead to major plot changes. It's a character piece, the center really being Peter as he deals with the death of his son, his daughter continuing to want to leave him for Andrew, and the steady decline of life on the island that he cannot deny. He even remarks upon how the fishing trawlers from the mainland come further out to take what the islanders can fish, requiring them using even more coal to go even further out. It's a conflict of visions with Robbie's death awakening some and deadening others to the situation, driving people away and weakening the island even further.
Through all of this, Powell uses the absolute most of the beautiful scenery of the cold, remote island. If this didn't inspire David Lean on Ryan's Daughter, I'd be extremely surprised. He has these wonderful shots of people standing on the cliffs that dominate, demonstrating how large the island is to all of these people, how they transient considering the island's life that lasted long before they came (the opening text refers to when the Romans discovered it) and long after (the framing device of Andrew returning to an empty island). It's beautiful imagery, and it's almost constant, so much of the film happening outside. That makes me note the sound design as well. We're well past the point when sound was awkwardly built out of a single, unmixed track. Here, we get overlapping sounds like music, sound effects, and dialogue all at once, and it's all happening outside where it's obvious there's constant wind. The dialogue still comes through clearly, and it's really a strong technical achievement.
The ending of the film is the dramatic justification for abandoning the island with one character having exiled himself only finding need to come back when he receives word through unconventional means, racing back to save someone's life. It's a situation that would have been much easier to manage if the island had modern conveniences, but the modest economy of the place can't justify anything more than it already has.
So, the path is inevitable, and Powell makes no mystery of that, starting with the flash-forward where the island is already depopulated. There's this marvelous sense of melancholy from the moment Andrew's face crossfades into images of the town getting ready for Sunday services ten years prior. The rugged, hard life on the island has produced a wonderful people, but they cannot stay there. Watching the dramatics of a personal tragedy define this is just wonderful writing on Powell's part, splitting the community through the microcosm of one father grieving for his son and a potential son-in-law becoming the driving force to pull everyone away.
Finally, Powell is reaching what could be his full potential as a filmmaker. Given time and money he never had cranking out five short movies a year, he's able to personally craft a tale of wonderful depth and feeling. It's about as long as most of his quota quickies, but it is so much more. It's his first great film.
The Man Behind the Mask (1936)
All of a sudden, Flash Gordon influences.
Michael Powell's final quota quickie now only exists in an abbreviated, recut form made after WWII, cutting out twenty minutes of its final runtime to get it under an hour. I feel like those missing twenty minutes would have made this a fair bit better, but the end result is interesting nonetheless. I mean, it's not good. It's a weird combination of Hitchcock's British period and, of all things, Flash Gordon, but some of what makes it less than good is an abbreviated feel to, especially, its early sections where pieces don't quite seem to fit together. I doubt the missing twenty minutes would make this a masterpiece of silly wrong man nonsense, but it would probably just make it better.
Nick (Hugh Williams) is an amateur aviator (something that never becomes important ever, so a waste) who is in love with June Slade (Jane Baxter), daughter to Lord Slade (Peter Gawthorne) who opposes their match. On the night of Lord Slade's party to celebrate his acquisition of a mysterious and ancient golden shield, New Years' Eve, Nick gets shot by an intruder with a familiar tattoo on his wrist who steals Nick's costume for the masquerade. This man steals into Lord Slade's party in Nick's costume, steals the shield, makes off with June, and Nick ends up the prime suspect.
So, the early parts of this, pretty much the whole setup, feel unnaturally truncated and staccato, especially the history that ties Nick with June's brother Jimmy (Ronald Ward). They were two parts of three to a secret brotherhood, the third being Allan Hayden (Reginald Tate), presumed dead, information pretty much hidden from the audience until his reveal at being alive. Honestly, this feels more like the fourth or fifth entry in a serial than a standalone mystery thriller.
So, the focus of the plot ends up trying to track down where June went, who she was taken by, and who he was working for all while the police are after Nick. It's unclear why either he doesn't have an alibi or why Doctor Harold (Donald Calthrop) believes him so readily, fixing him up after he gets back from that central party that he was attending. However, Nick uses him to divert the police while he goes to the shop where a tie he pulled off of his assailant was purchased, leading to the discovery of Hayden. This is compounded by the fact that Hayden is betraying his employer, The Master (Maurice Schwartz), whose lieutenant, Harrah (Gerald Fielding) is in pursuit as well.
Where the film actually works is in pieces of the whole mystery thing, like the chase and individual sequences of some suspense, like when Jimmy has to rescue Nick from Hayden in the tie shop. There are also a good number of sources of light comedy to help even the tone out, especially from Dr. Harold's American assistant, Marian (Kitty Kelly). Also, the whole presentation of The Master, who feels like a copy of Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon, especially in his astronomy tower as he gazes up at the stars in between orders to have Nick killed and the shield returned. It feels so out of place in the rest of the film's setting of the English countryside, a small city street, and a country manor that it's just fascinating how the clean angles and exacting and mannered performances, especially from Schwartz, contrasts with everything else around it.
The movements of the plot get almost incomprehensible as people get kidnapped, Nick and June keep getting pursued even though they shouldn't (or maybe they should? The ownership of the shield gets unclear for a while). And it's all anchored by characters that we never got any real time to develop (the central reason I feel like the longer cut is probably better, should it ever be discovered), leaving the film's finale to focus on The Master because no one else is particularly interesting.
So, it's not a good film. It's far from his best, and it might be the worst surviving quota quickie Powell made, but it has some limited charms. The light comedy that gets sprinkled through is nice to have, and there are some decently built sequences. However, the whole just doesn't connect particularly well, the gaping holes of the cuts too obviously hampering what's left in the film. Eh, there are worse things out there, but I wouldn't exactly rush to discover this.
The Phantom Light (1935)
Soundscape
Michael Powell has completely grown past the early, awkward stages of the sound era and can now use sound to create interesting soundscapes in service to atmosphere. This is easily his most atmospheric film to date which is unfortunately tied to a script that just doesn't quite work. There are too many outside views of the remote community centered around the coastal lighthouse and not enough from the inside, making it a mystery to such a level that it's hard to grasp what the mystery is even about. Still, that atmosphere really does help things.
Sam Higgins (Gordon Harker) arrives at Tan-Y-Bwlch in Wales to take up his position as chief lighthouse keeper after the mysterious death of its previous occupant of the role, Jack Davis. Really, he just disappeared. At the train station, he meets Binnie (Alice Bright) from out of town who's waiting for a car into town. In town, he also meets a man who lets himself be known as a journalist, Jim (Ian Hunter), who tries to bribe his way onto the lighthouse island, a bribe that Sam easily swats away. He's a twenty-five year man, you see. At the lighthouse, he meets his main helper, Claff Owen (Herbert Lomas), a local with many eerie tales of the eponymous light that shines out some nights and leads ships to their death on the rocks.
So, my problem with this is ultimately that Sam isn't there to investigate anything but Binnie and Jim are, but under false pretenses. Sam is mostly just trying to get through his first night, and he's never flustered. He's too experienced for anything else. The one fact that should fluster him, the presence of a half-mad former helper, Tom (Reginald Tate), that Sam ends up tying up to control. Sam isn't interested in the mystery. Instead, Binnie and Tom end up on the island when Tom takes a boat and demands help in the night, a boat on which Binnie had stowed-away. They both have secret interests for investigating the circumstance of Jack Davis' disappearance, but they keep them from each other, from Sam, and from the audience until pretty much the film's ending.
So, we have our main character who's essentially just managing the mess, two supporting characters who are searching for truth but we don't understand any of it, and Claff in the middle talking about the phantom light while Tom tries to escape from his bonds. It's a weird muddle where I was unsure of what was even going on, the whole thing really only held up by that atmosphere. That atmosphere is helped by this constant whirl of wind, the crashing of waves, and the wonderfully naturalistic photography that Powell uses to help set the scene, especially as Sam is approaching the lighthouse. The set on which most of the film takes place is claustrophobic but brightly lit so that we can see everything (it could have used a bit more moodiness in the lighting inside).
And then everything gets revealed. It's a money scheme that's never quite clear but involves the wrecking of ships, a naval officers brother, and the death of Jack. Even how far the conspiracy goes ends up unclear, but the action itself around the resolution is clear enough to function.
If I were given this script, I'd rewrite at least one of those three outsider roles to be from the village, most likely Binnie. Her secret identity ends up not really mattering in the long run, and the lack of any real connection to the village makes everything about it extremely opaque for far too long. Instead, make Binnie Jack's brother or daughter, or something. She knows everyone, but she can't get onto the island for whatever reason. She ends up being able to provide Sam with background and even a reason for him to be invested (he falls for her, maybe). Then we can touch on, perhaps, a conspiracy in the town that she has some sense of but no real specific knowledge of, and someone like Claff or even Tom or Jim could help fill out the details.
So, the mystery is far too opaque for far too long, but the atmosphere really does help, especially since the focus is a bit more sensational in the experience rather than about the details of the mystery. It really would have helped the film overall to have greater clarity around its central narrative. So, it's a mix, not quite successful, but pretty consistently interesting.
Crown v. Stevens (1936)
Solid thriller
Looking at that title, one would be forgiven for thinking that this is a courtroom drama. However, much to my pleasant surprise, there isn't a single shot of a single courtroom in the whole thing. The title is something I would change (an observation I don't often make), but underneath it is another Hitchcockian adventure in the underbelly of interwar England where the wrong man gets caught in between a murder and his own safety.
Chris Jensen (Patric Knowles) works at an interior designer as an office boy. He's fallen in love with a girl, Mamie (Mabel Poulton) whom he gives a diamond ring he hasn't yet paid for, feeling like a promotion is just around the corner from his boss, Mr. Stevens (Frederick Piper). However, she takes the ring, runs off with another man, leaving Chris with the bill for the ring he doesn't even have anymore, a bill due to the nefarious Maurice (Morris Harvey). However, when Chris goes to negotiate the payments, something he can't being to pay back because Mr. Stevens denied him the promotion, he finds Maurice dead, shot by a mysterious woman who ends up being Mrs. Stevens (Beatrix Thomas). Borrowing money because her husband won't let her spend the way she wants.
So, there's a murder. Chris knows who it is, but he can't give her up because Mr. Stevens could fire him for embroiling himself as well as Mr. Stevens in scandal, besides Maurice will be missed by no one. He tries to forget what's going on, striking up a romance with the designer Molly (Glennis Lorimer), and keep his head down. Meanwhile, the police are on the case, looking for clues.
What's interesting about this is how we know exactly who the killer is from the beginning, and it's all about this dance around wanting Chris to turn her in, understanding his precarious situation, and watching as Mrs. Stevens steadily self-destructs. Freed from her illicit debts but not freed from her penny-pinching husband, she's egged on by her friend Ella (Googie Withers), putting her in direct conflict with her husband, all while Chris' conscience weighs more heavily on him and the police get closer through investigation of the gun used to kill Maurice.
The plotting is mostly very tight around the movements of the police closer to Mrs. Stevens. I say mostly tight because it relies on her taking the gun she used, throwing it off a bridge, and it immediately falling into a passing boat, the occupants of which take the gun to the police. Coincidence isn't something I'm totally against in drama. It's perfectly acceptable in setting things up, but this is kind of the middle ground where it's about making the drama more difficult (fine). However, it feels so convenient that it's kind of unbelievable. It's not the film's greatest moment, but it's over and done with quickly.
The final couple of reels, though, where Mrs. Stevens feels the most cornered with Mr. Stevens asking too many questions about the gun she can no longer account for and his continued pressure for her to stop spending money and living flagrantly out of order with his moral code (she parties with Ella), is where we get this specific level of detail around her efforts that ends up feeling most Hitchcockian. The devil is in the details, and we watch as Mrs. Stevens improvises a murder, starting with sleeping pills and needing to evolve as he insists on going to the police station, not quite hobbled by the pills she secretly fed him, and needing to involve a car, a closed garage door, and time.
So, we get our ticking clock as Chris and Molly (now in on the situation) stop by to investigate while the Stevens maid, Mamie (Mabel Poulton), who quit to preserve her character when Mrs. Stevens accused her of stealing the missing pistol and ran to the police. So, Mrs. Stevens' efforts feel like she flailing, but not completely without some method to it. She could almost have gotten away with it, sneaking by suspicions if only things had worked out a slightly different way.
And that last twenty minutes really makes the film. Everything before that had been perfectly fine. I had few complaints, mostly about the coincidence of the gun drop as well as the fact that Mamie never comes back into the film, making the opening feel like something of a waste. However, it's actually pretty solid stuff overall, and the ending is kind of great.
Her Last Affaire (1935)
Hitchcockian Entertainment
Michael Powell's quota quickie period is a mixed bag overall with a lot riding on quickly written scripts as he made about five films a year. All feature length, these were testaments to work ethic more than anything else, and what's interesting to watch across the first few years of Powell's career is how increasingly sophisticated the physical productions are getting with time. The Phantom Light had some very nice sound design choices, and here, in Her Last Affaire, Powell shows an increasing command of the visual aspect, especially in terms of set design. It also helps that the script is actually pretty decent, a mystery that gets wrapped up in a dangerous situation, hanging on by a solid, likeable lead we can root for.
Alan Herriot (Hugh Williams) is secretary to Sir Julian (Francis L. Sullivan). Son of a traitor who died in prison, Alan has fallen in love with Sir Julian's daughter Judy (Sophie Stewart) while Sir Julian's wife, Lady Avril (Viola Keats) is being told by her doctor to lessen the excitement in her life for the good of her heart. Alan gets sent to Paris to do some business for Sir Julian in the runup to Sir Julian's efforts to become a cabinet minister, but Alan ends up at a small inn in the countryside with Lady Avril, giving fake names to Robb (John Laurie) who owns the place while the maid, Effie (Googie Withers), gives Alan the kind of lustful attention he probably doesn't want but is ultimately harmless. He's there with ulterior motives besides the affair that Lady Avril thinks she's there for. He wants a confession from her about what happened to his father in written form, and he won't leave without it.
What makes this work better than The Phantom Light's plot is that the characters have motivation to actually being involved with what happens. Alan is a young man looking to make something of himself. He wants to advance his career and marry the daughter of a lord, but Sir Julian won't allow it because of the potential scandal. So, he's out there trying to clear his father's name, willing to do almost anything to get that information from a willingly unfaithful woman while also being faithful himself to the woman he loves, even if he has to put on a face and play unfaithfulness to a point.
Things go wrong when Lady Avril falls dead with a chemist's bottle in her hand, a bottle that the pair had picked up on their way there but had been made incorrectly leading to a radio report about it. Convinced that she drank from the bottle, which he can't pry from her hands, Alan panics, flees, takes a boat to France, and gets to his hotel in time for any phone calls due to come.
What follows is Alan navigating the investigation, pushed heavily by Robb and alternatively subdued and then elevated by Sir Julian. He thinks he may have had a real hand in the murder (by picking up the chemist's vial from the shop) in addition to having set himself in a situation where it really does look like he was trying to have an affair with his girl's mother and boss's wife. He also lost the letter that Avril wrote, picked up by Effie right after he left, so his only proof of his ulterior motive has been lost to him. It's a balance that he has to strike, and he can only manage so well, creating this wonderful sense of tension that flows through the whole thing.
The actual resolution is fairly staccato and abrupt, but most of the endings of these quota quickies have been staccato and abrupt. I would have liked a few more minutes, not much, maybe three or so, to get a better sense of where things are going to go. As it stands, I honestly don't know if it's a bittersweet ending or a happy one. I'd be surprised if Powell and team hadn't had a specific feeling in mind and just kind of missed how the ending they settled with left a lingering question that was key to understanding where things would go from there. It's a smallish complaint, but it was still kind of jarring as a place to stop the movie.
Still, the movie looks really good, especially in the inn. There's a set of stairs in the back of the sitting room on the first floor that gets some good use. It's full of strong angles and shadows that almost makes it feel more at home in German Expressionism than a Michael Powell film, showing that he was pushing set design in interesting directions even on tight budgets and short timelines.
So, it's a pretty effective little movie. It's got tension and a story that's almost Hitchcockian. It looks good, is acted well, and moves along with a nice clip before ending a little too quickly. Still, definitely one of the best of the quota quickies from Powell that survive.
The Night of the Party (1934)
Releasing the tension
Obviously inspired by Agatha Christie and her stories of Poirot, Michael Powell's The Night of the Party takes what should have been a tightly focused murder mystery and just lets out all of the tension by actually trying to follow real police procedures. What should have been a pressure cooker of tension as everyone is trapped in an enclosed location with a murderer ends up just feeling wane as police pursue one lead and then another over the course of days and weeks afterwards. It just ends up feeling like a waste of a solid setup and concept.
Lord Studholme (Malcolm Keen) is having a party for the visiting Princess Amelia (Muriel Aked). To this party he invites a cast of characters from his daughter Peggy (Jane Baxter) to her friend Joan (Viola Keats), daughter of the police inspector Sir John (Leslie Banks), the writer Chiddiatt (Ernest Thesiger) whose work Lord Studholme's papers have regularly trashed, and Studholme's secretary, Guy (Ian Hunter) who is having a secret love affair with plans to marry Peggy. There are a handful more, but that's the real focus, everyone who could possibly have a motive for killing Lord Studholme. Though, there's extra business about John in that Lord Studholme wants to start an affair with her, but she doesn't want it while he forced her previous lover, Howard Vernon (Cecil Ramage), to sell him the love letters she had sent him.
The movie takes its time to establish everyone, a good half-hour (out of a film that's only an hour long), and it's probably the film's greatest strength. People feel individualized and specific. People get real motives for what they could do to Lord Studholme.
The plot turns at the party when the princess, deciding that she's bored and won't be told no, dictates that they should all play a game called Murder where, drawing cards out of a hat, one person is declared the murderer, a second the investigator, the lights should go off for ten minutes, and they should play act the murder and then the investigation. Chiddiatt jumps at the suggestion, getting behind it especially when he discovers that the princess has a gun with blanks in it, and everyone gets involved, Sir John's arrival negating the need to randomly choose someone to investigate. Of course, Lord Studholme gets murdered, and we have our suspects.
If Christie would have written this, it'd have happened in a remote country house, not an inner city, posh apartment. No one would have been able to leave as Sir John, or Poirot, would have kept everyone there to dig into their pasts and dramatically draw out the truth of who killed him for nefarious means. Well, that's not how Powell and his writers, Roland Pertwee and John Hastings Turner, decide to play things. Sir John gets immediately sidelined when he calls his fellow police officers at Scotland Yard to take over. They let everyone go, and the investigation becomes a series of interviews about information we already know, eventually zeroing in on one of suspects because his knowledge of certain aspects makes him the most obvious suspect.
And then we get to the courtroom scenes. I rolled my eyes instantly because courtroom scenes tacked on to the end of movies rarely work that well. They vacillate between boring and unbelievable, and at least this has the good sense to go into fully unbelievable and, one might even call it, exploitative. It's kind of amusing.
So, the actual murder mystery feels bungled, but the character work leading up to it is interesting in and of itself. It feeds into an abbreviated courtroom bit, but it ends with a kind of ridiculous bang, a ridiculous bang that I was pretty okay with, even if it was a small moment that did little to elevate what had come before. This isn't exactly some great failure, the character work is too decently well done for that, but it is something of a wet squib when it actually gets to the murder mystery part. In terms of this quota quickie period, it's very much on the low end, but that it's still sort of okay is a testament to Powell's abilities behind the camera, I think.
The Love Test (1935)
A nice little comedy
Possibly the least ambitious of these quota quickies Michael Powell had made since The Fire Raisers, The Love Test has the great advantage of being a light romantic comedy. It has a small enough cast of characters so that our focus isn't diverted too much from our main characters (like what happened in Lazybones), and it has that big heart that Powell was showing so frequently. It's a frothy bit of nothing, but it's an endearing and frothy bit of nothing.
Touching on the obvious fascination Powell had with increasing technological advancements, the film centers around a commercial chemist lab that's focused on trying to come up with something to make celluloid non-flammable. For those who've seen Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (including its quick clip from Hitchcock's Sabotage), you know that nitrate film was highly flammable and a huge problem for the film world for decades. Fox lost almost its entire silent library in a film vault fire (including most of the early work of John Ford and almost all the work of Theda Bera). This has the good sense to not delve too deeply into what the solution to this flammable celluloid could be (it seems to be some kind of coating instead of just a brand new method of making the stuff), but at least it doesn't feel as ridiculous as swimming pools at petrol stations like in Something Always Happens.
Anyway, this chemist lab is headed by Mr. Smith (Gilbert Davis) who has decided to leave in the middle of this critical time to look after his health (manifested by hiccup fits). His second in command, Thompson (David Hutcheson), thinks that he'll be a natural fit for taking on the roll, but when the office secretary, Minnie (Googie Withers), overhears the company president (Morris Harvey), it's obvious that the post will be given to Mary Lee (Judy Gunn). Overcome with emotion at potentially being passed over for a mousy woman, Thompson comes up with a plan for Mary Lee to lose her advantage by getting her to fall in love with John (Louis Hayward), another chemist in the lab. John reluctantly goes along with it (presumably because he already likes Mary Lee).
The bulk of the film is this nascent romance between the two with Mary Lee starting as an ice queen who talks about how the ideal social arrangement is the beehive with one queen and many workers (she sees herself as a worker, not a queen) and John starting as an uninitiated boob in the world of romance. The two slowly open up to each other as Mary Lee begins to like the sense of affection. It's nice.
And then the most interesting contrast happens in the film. Mary Lee decides to buy herself a dress for a dinner with John, so her neighbor, Kathleen (Eve Turner), decides to help her by providing her with everything else. At the same time, Thompson and Minnie come over to John's house to help him become Mary Lee's Casanova by teaching him how to kiss girls. So, Mary Lee strains to become pretty, and John makes out with another girl. In today's parlance, that would be considered problematic. I found it amusing, if unintentionally so.
There are complications that push Thompson to accelerate his plans which involve driving a wedge between John and Mary Lee. It's not a deep conflict, mostly relying on a couple of lies that someone immediately believes without question. However, it does provide this nice backdrop to a comic ending where John is locked up, Thompson has stolen his work, and Mary Lee has to figure out the situation on her own.
It's not deep or challenging, but it's a nice ending where good triumphs over irritatingly underhanded through the use of honesty and earnestness.
On these short features that Powell was banging out several times a year, it's obvious that his command of the physical production had solidified, his ability to coax performances out of actors was strong, and the strength and weaknesses rose and fell with the quality of the script. Here, with a modestly ambitious, tightly focused script, he's able to craft an amusing romantic comedy that still entertains 90 years later. It's nice.