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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 11/30/2024

Michael Powell (and Emeric Pressburger)

The best form of this is going to be the recent documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger narrated and executive produced by Martin Scorsese. He has been a fan of the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, often under the production company banner The Archers, since he was an asthmatic child unable to go out and play and spending all day in front of his television where he discovered movies like The Tales of Hoffmann on a local station in New York. He and his fellow students at NYU in the 60s like Brian De Palma kept searching for uncut prints of movies like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Peeping Tom, but it was after the success of Mean Streets that he actually found Powell alive and forgotten in Kent which began a friendship between the two men that lasted the rest of their lives. Powell even married Scorsese's editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.

Well, I guess I don't have to write anything, just go watch that!

Well, I'm gonna write more anyway because I watched every Powell and Pressburger film as well as every film Powell himself made alone (though I could never find a copy of the one film that Pressburger made alone), and I have come away with thoughts. I will share such thoughts!

The important thing to consider regrading Powell and Pressburger is that they were such a tight collaborative pair that shared writing, directing, and producing credits on fourteen feature films. They also worked together on ten more in different capacities, the most important being five of them where Pressburger is credited as sole writer and Powell is credited as sole director. Powell directed 31 other films without any involvement from Pressburger (mostly from the early quota quickie period) while Pressburger only directed one film without Powell (Twice Upon a Time, which I would have watched but could never find a copy of).

When considering Powell's career and even the collaboration between Pressburger, it could be said that most of Powell's work would be considered fairly standard fare for any capable and talented director in the British film system of the day (the early 30s through the early 60s, roughly). However, it's not that bulk that people like Scorsese latch onto, it's the special period, mostly through the 40s, that capture the imagination. It's not the capable and entertaining Hitchcock-like Contraband but the ethereal The Red Shoes.

Formalism

It's the films from 1939 to 1951, almost without exception, that people latch onto, everything outside of that getting scant mention if any at all (Scorsese mentions one quota quickie, The Phantom Light, in Made in England, out of more than 20 that Powell made). From The Spy in Black to The Tales of Hoffmann, these are films that seem to work by their own rules. It was within this period, as Powell and Pressburger were gaining a rather strange power within the British filmmaking world, that Powell zeroed in on what he called "composed film", the synthesis of light, color, sound, motion, and music into something distinctly cinematic.

In art, there's a generalized model of how stories are presented. On one extreme there is realism. In the middle is classicism. On the other extreme is formalism. Realism is the attempt to recreate reality, obviously. Classicism is applying dramatic rules to realistic things, creating this bridge between reality and the fakery of formalism. Formalism is the complete embrace of fakery at the expense, usually, of things like plot and character and, especially, realism. Formalism is something that mass audiences usually tend to reject with regularity in the Western world. Think of even outrageous things like fantasy and science fiction where audiences (and even some artists) want to approach things that cannot be like they could be (think the textured physical reality of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings or the muted color schemes of most Marvel movies) with people demanding realism from watching hordes of monsters and aliens destroying things and being fought off by a single guy or small group.

For extreme formalism, though, think of Francis Ford Coppola's experimental One from the Heart which bombed horribly at the box office or...The Red Shoes.

There was a series of films I watched in this period of the Archers' output, mostly A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes where, had I watched them contemporaneously, I would have been convinced that they would tank the careers of the eponymous creative team. They so completely embrace artifice in the telling of their stories that they feel like films that mass audiences would simply reject.

And both were massive (massive) hits at the time. Heck, Alexander Korda, the producer of The Red Shoes, was so convinced of the film's inability to connect with audience that he dumped the film in a series of small London theaters with hardly any promotion, convinced it was going to die a quick death, and yet the postwar English audiences discovered it on their own, propelling it to massive success.

So, what is it about these films that's so strange and yet so popular?

Composed Film

I mentioned Powell's conception of what he called "composed film" in the last section, so let's take a look at it. Below is a clip from The Red Shoes. It is the central ballet, happening at about the middle point of the film and lasts about fifteen minutes. It shows Moira Sheerer as Vicky dancing to the ballet written by her boyfriend and produced by the domineering Lermontov. It's extremely subjective, quickly losing any sight of realism for this created reality where a dancer on a stage can immediately jump into new ballet slippers that instantly lace up, where she can fall through the stage and just keep dancing, where the mischievous and evil Shoe Maker can turn into both her boyfriend and Lermontov as she regards him. And it's all done to the music with Vicky dancing in time, the action on screen hitting the beats of the composed score, creating this uniquely cinematic segment.



For a more modern progenitor of this, think of how Edgar Wright composes his action scenes to music, especially in Baby Driver or, also, the ending to Last Night in Soho.

That's the only section in the film that follows those rules on that kind of grand scale, though. However, it actually started in Black Narcissus and it's 10-minute long suspense sequence of madness near the ending while he would push it as far as he could in The Tales of Hoffman, an adaptation of an Offenbach opera from 1881 where the combination of sight and sound in the operatic model gave Powell the freedom to push his techniques as far as possible. Below is another clip, this one from my favorite of the three main tales in the film when the titular Hoffmann fell in love with a female automaton.



You can see the combination of camera moves, movement of characters in the frame, the dancing, and the editing all in time to the music, creating this ethereal reality that...you either buy into or don't. I largely did, and while I don't quite hit the same levels of appreciation as someone like Scorsese who holds Powell and Pressburger up as some of the greatest cinematic artists who ever worked in the medium, I do appreciate them for the unique and talented artists that they were.

Decline


The Red Shoes were a surprise success, but the pair ended up discovering commercial failure pretty regularly afterwards. Their little slice of British psychological realism, The Small Back Room bombed (it's pretty good). The production and first cut of The Elusive Pimpernel angered their financiers, Samuel Goldwyn and Korda, so much that the pair were forced to reshoot large sections of it. Their effort to work with David O. Selznick, Gone to Earth, with his new wife Jennifer Jones, made just about no one happy (Selznick would re-edit and reshoot some stuff for a separate American version he titled The Wild Heart). They increasingly found trouble financing films, the only notable success being a bog-standard WWII film, The Battle on the River Plate, that feels nothing like their work.

The pair amicably ended their partnership after Ill Met by Moonlight, another WWII movie, this one set on Crete and telling the true story of the capture of a German general, though they remained friends with Pressburger writing a couple more of Powell's film (They're a Weird Mob, under a pseudonym, and The Boy Who Turned Yellow), but Powell's career was sputtering out, mostly because of Peeping Tom.

Peeping Tom angered British critics in a way that rarely happens. They found it disturbing and unappealing in how Powell told the story of a killer from the killer's perspective, in retrospect also creating what is arguably the first slasher film. Powell was somehow able to pull together funds for one more British feature film (the largely forgettable The Queen's Guards), but he entered exile for a few years (first to Germany then to Australia) before his ability to find any funds for films simply stopped in the early 70s. It was only a couple of years later that Scorsese, fresh off the success of Mean Streets discovered that this unseen hero of his, Michael Powell, was still alive and sought him out.

The two became friends for the final sixteen years of Powell's life with Scorsese doing that other thing that he's important to: film preservation and advocacy. Powell became one of the cornerstones of his efforts with the Film Foundation, leading restorations of several of his films including Scorsese's favorite, The Red Shoes.

Discovery

So, should you discover him? I think so, but I kind of hate to say that the limits are the best known things. Mostly, I'm thinking of the quota quickie period which are thirteen surviving films, all made very quickly, that lack of time leaving them all feeling somewhat incomplete. There are some small joys to be had here and there (His Lordship to see him attempting Lubitsch and a couple, like Crown v. Stevens where he imitates Hitchcock reasonably well), but it's really everything that gets mention that needs paying attention to, starting with Powell's solo work The Edge of the World, his first post-quota quickie film, extending through his propaganda work like 49th Parallel and reaching the highest points of his career like A Matter of Life and Death (my personal favorite) and The Red Shoes.

There is a wealth to discover, but just be forewarned that these are largely unusual. I find them unusual in wonderful, enchanting ways, but you're not getting a whole lot of realism from them.
Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Moana 2

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

A Matter of Life and Death (Rating 4/4) Full Review "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." [Personal Collection]

Black Narcissus (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "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." [Personal Collection]

The Red Shoes (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "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." [Personal Collection]

The Small Back Room (Rating 3/4) Full Review "On balance, it's a good film, but its 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 Criterion Channel]

Gone to Earth (Rating 2/4) Full Review "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." [Library]

The Elusive Pimpernel (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "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." [Library]

The Tales of Hoffmann (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "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." [Plex]

Ill Met by Moonlight (Rating 3/4) Full Review "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." [Library]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 12/21, and it will discuss a case study in adaptations.