Today the films made by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are
celebrated not only for their wit, conceptual audacity and visual flamboyance
but also for their willingness to take risks and go against the prevailing
tastes and attitudes of their times. This is especially true of the classic
films they made during their critical and commercial heyday, from 1941 to 1948,
a period book-ended by two Oscar-winning films, 49th Parallel and The Red Shoes,
also their two most popular films at the 1940s box office.
During these years they jointly wrote, produced and directed eight
extraordinarily ingenious and utterly distinctive films that rate among the most
ambitious and important works of British cinema. Complex issues - relating to
their appeal to high art (often taken as a form of elitism); frequent charges of
incoherence and inconsistency, in both their politics and their use of dream or
fantasy narratives; persistent accusations of 'bad taste' - all mean that a
critical consensus even about their best-known work is still far from being
reached, although ironically the exploration of how to harmonise group dynamics
was a major theme of their classic period.
Powell and Pressburger's delight in wrong-footing viewer expectations,
narrative reversals and use of paradox was already evident in their debut
collaborations, The Spy in Black (1939) and Contraband (1940), both starring
German idol Conrad Veidt and released just as war was breaking out in Europe.
Their next project was 49th Parallel, an original and highly idiosyncratic
propaganda piece backed by the Ministry of Information. Leslie Howard plays a
British professor seen living in a Native American tepee, while Laurence Olivier
is cast as a French-Canadian fisherman who is initially uninterested in joining
the war effort. These eccentricities are counterbalanced by a fine irony in the
sequence in the German Hutterite settlement, in which the dogmatism of the
leader of the stranded Nazi submariners leads to their exposure and expulsion.
The team's follow-up '...One of Our Aircraft Is Missing' (1942) was their first
film as 'The Archers' and also the first to bear their celebrated joint credit
'Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger'. This
time it's the British that are stranded overseas, while the Nazis are ever
present but never seen directly, only heard or seen in shadow.
Distinguishing Germans from Nazis would continue as a prime concern in their
subsequent war films, never more brilliantly than in The Life and Death of
Colonel Blimp (1943), which became controversial before even a foot of film had
been exposed. Almost three hours in length, this romantic epic was seen by some
as downright subversive, not least because its most well-rounded and sympathetic
character is the German officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff.
The disputes over this film are well known, but its singular virtues and the
cause of some of the disquiet and consternation it aroused may be usefully
gauged by comparing it with Goodbye, Mr Chips (d. Sam Wood, 1939), one of the
most popular films of the time. Both films tell their stories in flashback, with
a narrative spread across nearly half a century, and follow their title
characters from early manhood to moustachioed old age, their chronological
progress marked by the recurrence of different characters played by the same
actor. Both Chips and Blimp have a best friend who fights with the Germans in
the First World War; both lose their red-haired wives early and never remarry.
As the decades pass, Chips and Blimp become figures of fun to younger characters
for dedicating themselves to a single profession and for their old-fashioned
worldviews. The structure, story, characters and incidents of both films are
frequently identical, but their treatment couldn't be more different. While
Chips reinforces tradition and ideas of national identity, Blimp challenges
them, while the syntax of its film storytelling is often thrilling in its
daring.
Similarly, A Matter of Life and Death (1946) contained strong fantasy
elements, as did many other war films of the time. But whereas usually these
were cosy and reassuring visions, here forces within the hereafter, daringly
represented by the Americans, want the hero to die and not live happily ever
after.
Their following two films were less expansive and made more economically in
black and white, seemingly much closer to the kinds of films being made by the
duo's fellows in the Rank-funded Independent Producers partnership. A Canterbury Tale
(1944), with its strong comic overtones and central land girl character, is
reminiscent of Launder and Gilliatt (Individual Pictures) films like Millions Like Us (1943), while I
Know Where I'm Going! (1945), with its focus on the emotional turmoil of a woman
torn between a relationship of love and passion and a marriage of wealth and status, recalls
David Lean's Cineguild production Brief Encounter (1945). The Archers' films, however, are
distinguished by their sardonic disposition, with characters that are defiantly
less romantic and approachable because they (initially) seem too self-confident
and secure, a certitude born of the inevitable polarisations of wartime.
Powell and Pressburger's films are also notable for providing prominent roles
for women, especially the two final films from their classic period, Black
Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes. Both offer highly eroticised and distinctly
exotic looks at the pressure on women to conform within specific social groups
(nunnery and corps de ballet respectively) and climax with extended wordless
sequences dominated by the music of Brian Easdale and the magnificent colour
cinematography of Jack Cardiff. The desire to escape from bourgeois conventions,
a constant theme of The Archers, is here expressed thematically and structurally
with great boldness and imagination. These doom-laden and fatalistic works are
resolutely autumnal - gone is the exuberance and frivolity of such characters as
the 'glueman' or Conductor 71, replaced by neurotic fables of sexual repression
and displacement in which the passions of Sister Clodagh and Lermontov are
sublimated and subsumed into their professions; both will end in death and
failure with women driven mad, and ultimately to their deaths, by their duelling emotions.
After disagreements with Rank over The Red Shoes, Powell and Pressburger
rejoined Alexander Korda, but his financial footing was much less secure and
they frequently had to bend their visions to suit his international
co-producers. Only a few of their later films would match the works they made in
their classic period.
Sergio Angelini
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