Bluebeard’s Castle (1963)

In 1960 Peeping Tom ended Michael Powell’s career as a film director in Britain. After that he took work where he could get it. Bluebeard’s Castle is a low-budget German TV-movie and in anyone else’s career it would be an oddity. But Powell’s career was full of oddities.

The project was conceived by Norman Foster, who was the producer and star, and production designer Hein Heckroth. Heckroth had worked with Powell and decided he’d be the ideal choice to direct. So this was not a Michael Powell project from the outset.

It was intended for television broadcast but shot in colour so as to allow for a possible theatrical release as well. It was completed and then pretty much sank without trace until its rediscovery in the late 70s.

It’s a filmed version of Bartók’s very obscure 1911 opera.

It is obviously based on the fairy tale.

The libretto by Béla Balázs strips the fairy tale’s plot down to almost nothing. It becomes a psychological exploration.

In the film Bluebeard’s eighth wife Judith arrives at his castle to find that there are seven locked rooms. She insists on having the seven doors opened.

It’s all heavily symbolic. The doors don’t really lead to rooms in the castle, they lead to compartments of Bluebeard’s mind. Judith hopes that she will learn what makes her husband tick. What she finds is lots of darkness. But she finds no explanations. Neither Judith nor the audience has any idea why Bluebeard’s other wives met such unpleasant ends.

In the accompanying interview film critic Ian Christie suggests that it’s all rather Freudian and very very Jungian. It probably is. There are lots of elements that are symbolic of something although I have no idea what. The weaknesses of the film are undoubtedly inherent in Balázs’s libretto so Powell cannot be blamed.

The production design is all full-blown artistic modernism (and artistic modernism is one of my least favourite things in all the world). The visuals are extraordinary and wildly imaginative although also extremely ugly. Some of the visuals are effectively startling and memorable but some just seem overdone. But they are interesting and if you have more of a taste for modernism in art than I have you’ll enjoy them more than I did.

The ugliness was no doubt intentional - to represent the ugliness inside Bluebeard’s mind but since we have no idea of the reasons for his inner darkness the impact is not all it should be.

I’m also not particularly a Bartók fan which probably didn’t help.

This movie was a logical step for Powell. Powell and Pressburger had had a huge artistic and commercial success with their ballet movie The Red Shoes. They had followed it up with the even more ambitious The Tales of Hoffmann which combines ballet, opera and cinematic magic in a breathtaking way. It was not, alas, a commercial hit. Bluebeard’s Castle was done much more cheaply on a much smaller scale but it’s no surprise that Powell was delighted to get the directing gig and thoroughly enjoyed himself.

There are only two cast members. Ana Raquel Satre looks striking and is very good as the bewildered but adoring wife.

I don’t want to give the impression that I disliked this movie. I didn’t love it as much as I had hoped to but it is breathtakingly daring and visually extreme and in 1963 it was wild wild stuff. And it’s impossible not to admire Powell’s ambition. And its visual outrageousness is undiminished.

Bluebeard’s Castle is recommended as a unique slice of cinematic folie de grandeur.

The BFI Blu-Ray looks superb and there are some extras. This release includes the movie on DVD as well.

Tales of Hoffmann (1951)

Tales of Hoffmann is the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger film of Jacques Offenbach's 1881 opera The Tales of Hoffmann, which was based on three of the wonderful short stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann.

But this statement needs to be qualified and amplified a great deal. Powell and Pressburger did not simply film the opera. They adapted and altered it significantly. Opera is the most deliberately and consciously artificial of all art forms and the most uncompromisingly theatrical. Making a movie that is artificial and aggressively non-realist is no problem but opera is artificial and theatrical in a very non-cinematic way. And if you remove the artifice and the theatricality then you have removed the very heart and soul of opera. So how do you make an opera into a feature film?

Powell and Pressburger adopted a bold radical approach. Their first crucial insight is that yes this is opera but it’s a movie. There’s no need to cast actual opera singers. Why not cast actors and dancers, and have their singing voices dubbed by real opera singers? In fact the entire movie was shot as a silent film with every element of the soundtrack post-dubbed. This allowed Powell and Pressburger to use a lot of silent film techniques. They were much influenced by German Expressionism.

This also allowed Powell and Pressburger to pull off three casting strokes of genius. Moira Shearer had been a sensation in their 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes. She couldn’t sing. But she was a magnificent dancer, so her singing voice was dubbed. And they were able to cast the great Australian ballet dancer Sir Robert Helpmann. He couldn’t sing either but again no problem. Not only could Helpmann dance, he was a very competent actor and he had extraordinary screen presence. And he had that amazing face. Once the makeup people were let loose on him he could become sinister, monstrous, comical, grotesque - whatever Powell and Pressburger wanted him to be. And Ludmilla Tchérina has breathtaking screen charisma.

Being able to cast dancers rather than singers allowed Powell and Pressburger to carry out their master plan - to create an extravaganza of music, images, dance and movement. A total artistic experience that was more than opera and more than straightforward cinema. Powell called it a “composed” film.

Casting dancers rather than singers gives the film a sense of dynamic movement and energy which would have been impossible otherwise. And choosing dancers such as Shearer, Helpmann and Ludmilla Tchérina who could act as well was another excellent idea.

Powell and Pressburger were totally and deliberately out of step with the mainstream of British cinema. With movies like Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) they had already been pushing the boundaries. They were in fact operating more in the realm of European art cinema. They were making films with more in common with stuff like Jean Cocteau’s surrealist masterpiece Beauty and the Beast (1946) and were already venturing into territory that Max Ophüls would explore in his 1950s masterworks like La Ronde, Le Plaisir and especially Lola Montès. Martin Scorsese (a huge fan of this movie) has also correctly pointed out the influence of Walt Disney’s Fantasia.

There are three separate stories. Hoffmann is the only character appearing in all three. In the first story he falls in love with a beautiful girl but she is in fact a mechanical doll. In the second tale Hoffmann falls in love with the courtesan Giulietta but she helps an evil magician (played with gusto by Robert Helpmann) to steal his reflection (and presumably his soul). In the third story Hoffmann is in love with the lovely soprano Antonia who is suffering from consumption. She must give up singing to save her life.

There’s also a framing story and Powell and Pressburger added a whole new sequence that was not in the opera - the Dragonfly ballet (scored by Sir Thomas Beecham who also conducts the orchestra throughout).

So what went wrong? The episodic nature of the film is a problem - with the framing story and the added Dragonfly ballet there are in effect five disconnected stories which dissipates any real emotional resonance. The film collapses under its own weight and at 136 minutes it is a bit of an ordeal. Apparently when it was shown at Cannes Alexander Korda told Powell and Pressburger that if they dropped the third segment, the Antonia story, it was a certainty that they would win the Golden Palm. They were unwilling to do this, and the movie missed out on that coveted prize. But Korda was right. It’s the weakest of the stories and it makes the movie way too long. On the other hand the Antonia sequence has a technical tour-de-force ending.

The Dragonfly ballet has no connection to the rest of the film but it’s a crucial part of the Powell-Pressburger plan to integrate image, music and dance. And it’s a fine showcase for Moira Shearer who was after all the movie’s biggest box-office drawcard.

The first sequence with Shearer as the mechanical doll Olympia has so much charm and wit and then we get that very unexpected ending.

It’s the second sequence, set in Venice concerning the courtesan Giulietta, that is the highlight. Here we have a sexy bad girl and Ludmilla Tchérina brings an unbelievably degree of sensuality, eroticism and decadence to her role. This sequence is wildly flamboyant and surreal and dream-like. It’s magnificent cinema.

This is a movie for hardcore cinephiles, filmmakers and devotees of cinematic experimentalism. The Blu-Ray includes an audio commentary with Martin Scorsese. He talks (delightfully) about his obsession with this film but it was clearly an obsession with its awe-inspiring technical virtuosity. For a young would-be filmmaker it provided boundless inspiration. I’m not sure a general audience was ever going to be able to embrace this movie to quite the same degree. It really is an exercise in technique. It doesn’t really have any emotional centre or anything likely to engage the interest of an ordinary movie-goer. It’s a movie to admire and to be dazzled by might be be heavy going if you’re not a devotee of opera and ballet.

Highly recommended for its originality and strangeness and for the glorious use of Technicolor. It’s insanely ambitious and despite its flaws it is in so many ways a triumph of cinematic art.

Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960)

Peeping Tom is perhaps most famous as the movie that wrecked Michael Powell’s career as a director. British critics tore the movie to shreds and made Powell a pariah. 

It was released in the same years as Hitchcock's Psycho. There are similarities between the two movies but the differences are profound, and extremely interesting

Peeping Tom is actually the more interesting movie.

My full review can be found at Cult Movie Reviews.