Michael Powell: a great director of very odd films

Michael Powell

The filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were two of the greatest creative geniuses in the history of cinema. Powell, a self-styled “Man of Kent”, was the director, while Pressburger, a Hungarian émigré, acted as scriptwriter.

From that exotic melding of cultures emerged a series of movies which were, without exception, classics - or, at the very least, near-classics. The list includes Black Narcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, The Red Shoes, The Thief of Baghdad, 49th Parallell, One of Our Aircraft is Missing, The Small Back Room and The Tales of Hoffman. 

Amongst British film-makers, only Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean can boast a similarly impressive canon, with Carol Reed in fourth place.

Today, I want to recommend two films released by Powell and Pressburger’s production company, The Archers, towards the end of the war: A Canterbury Tale  (1944) and I Know Where I’m Going (1945). 

A Canterbury Tale is one of the strangest films ever made. I don’t mean it’s deliberately obscure or pretentious in the style of early 1960s  Art House movies: you just know you’re watching something almost entirely original, practically devoid of conventional cinematic attitudes, aims or techniques. It follows the fortunes of three modern-day pilgrims in search of… what? Redemption? Release? Comfort? Something.

Despite Powell not being an intellectual, his films are full of ideas, thoughts and  themes. Fortunately,  they are massively cinematic, and not in the least bit dull or wordy: the stories, characters and the sheer exuberance of his directorial style, allied to a febrile atmosphere of heightened reality that occasionally tips over into magic realism, make them utterly compelling. 

No film-maker has used landscape as brilliantly, not merely as a relevant backdrop, or as the stuff of visual flourishes, but to drench his stories and characters with meaning. In A Canterbury Tale, the summer landscape of Kent, which Powell obviously adored, is breathtakingly beautiful - strangely, so are the bomb-damaged ruins of Canterbury, pummeled in the so-calledBaedeker raids of 1942. Due to wartime shortages, the film was shot in black and white by the émigré German expressionist cinematographer, Erwin Hillier. When I first saw the film as a teenager, I had never been to Kent, but I remember experiencing a nostalgic longing for its landscapes, even on a ropey old 405 line TV set.

The story is simple enough: three “pilgrims” – a land girl, a British army sergeant and an American equivalent - arrive by train one night at a Kentish village. As they walk up from the station, someone attacks the girl – played winningly by Sheila Sim – by pouring glue on her hair. It’s one of a series of identical assaults on English girls consorting with American soldiers. Turns out a highly respectable local magistrate – played by Eric Portman - is responsible. Seems he doesn’t want American soldiers to be distracted fromhis lectures on local history, or for local girls to be unfaithful to their boyfriends on active service. The three pilgrims confront the magistrate with their suspicions, which he confirms, but, to his surprise, they decide not to report him. (Believe it or not, the film was partly designed to make American and British serving men feel more kinship.)

As I said, very odd.

Some of the acting is unconvincing: the real soldier playing the American sergeant is useless, and so scrawny and bereft of energy, you half expect him to expire from tuberculosis at any moment. But the other principals, including a very young Denis Price, are strong.

The film’s final scenes, set in Canterbury Cathedral, gave Powell and Hillier an opportunity to display their cinematic wizardry. The cathedral was closed at the time, but brilliant set design and magical camera work mean you’d never suspect it. Whatever its shortcomings, it’s a must-watch: a mystical sense of the living past infuses the whole magical, slightly dotty confection. 

Despite - or maybe because of - all that, It was Powell and Pressburger’s only commercial and critical failure as a team. Audiences at the time just didn’t get it – and one can’t really blame them.

Landscape was also at the heart of  next Archers release, I Know Where I’m Going, set in the outer Hebrides. This just pips William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939) as my favourite romantic film. Joan Webster, the headstrong daughter of a bank manager, travels to the Highlands to join her fiancée, the self-important head of Consolidated Chemicals Industries, who has taken a lease on the Isle of Kiloran. Joan has decided to marry for money and security, not love. 

Bad weather strands her on the mainland in the company of a young naval officer home on leave, who turns out to be the impoverished Laird of Kiloran. They don’t half fancy each other! Joan does everything she can to get away from the man she is falling in love with in order to keep ontrack for a well-heeled future – at one stage risking her own life and that a young local fisherman – but true love triumphs (you’ll be astonished to hear).

As with A Canterbury Tale, wartime caused some odd casting. Captain C. W. R. Knight as The Colonel probably wasn’t nominated for an Oscar. The two leads, Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey, are at least ten years older than they should be -  but they are nevertheless perfect. Ms. Hiller’s cut-glass accent, knowing eyes, wonderfully expressive mouth and gift for sly comedy make her wildly sexy here, while Livesey, with a voice like an Arbroath smokie soaked in whisky and sprinkled with cigar ash, brings an appealing mixture of manly solidity and reserve as well as energy and occasional flashes of passionate intensity to the role. 

This scene, where Joan and the Laird watch a local ceilidh is an object lesson in how to create onscreen sexual chemistry without anyone getting their kit off or exchanging bodily fluids – they used to be good at that before the world discovered sex (between the end of the Chatterley ban and The Beatles’ first LP). The ladder exchange is up there with the “Walls of Jericho”scene from It Happened One Night and the removing the stockings whilehandcuff scene from The 39 Steps. Livesey’s sudden fierce hawk-like turn of the head and on quoting the words from a traditional ballad -  “You’re the maid for me!” – and the sudden blaze of predator fierceness in his eyes is matched by Wendy Hiller’s lowering of her eyes in shame and shock as she realizes how much she wants him. 

The force of their unspoken mutual passion and the conflicting emotions raging inside Joan are reflected in Nature – the squally weather, the Golden Eagle the Colonel is trying to train, the beautiful shaggy Irish Wolfhounds belonging to Kiloran’s beautiful shaggy friend (and we presume, former lover) Catriona Potts, played by the extraordinary Pamela Brown, the Coreyvreckan whirlpool which almost claims the lives of our hero and heroine, the savage storm which threatens to sink the boat in which Joan is attempting to reach her safe, dull, businessman fiancé. 

As in A Canterbury Tale, the past suffuses the present. Powell evidently loved the old world that was dying – the Yeatsian world of custom and tradition, an existence rooted in the soil of one’s homeland, a more natural, authentic, meaningful life emerging from a localized collective unconscious: he hated the safe, boring, money-grubbing, materialistic mass age in which he found himself, and the numerous mystical touches in his films (Sheila Sim hearing the sound of medieval merriment in a deserted, sun-drenched Kentish field, the curse carved into the walls of Moy Castle, which seals Kiloran’s fate) suggest a rejection of a purely mechanistic view of the world. 

There’s something distinctly pagan about both films.

I was astonished to learn, upon reading Powell’s fascinating autobiography,A Life in Movies, that Roger Livesey had been unable to leave London during the making of the film, due to theatre commitments. Despite so much of the movie being set outdoors, all of Livesey’s scenes were shot in the studio. Powell and Erwin Hillier’s technical genius is once more demonstrated by the very fact that this strikes one as impossible. 

In the unlikely event I was told that I could only watch the films of one director for the rest of my life, I would choose Michael Powell. And A Canterbury Tale and I Know Were I’m Going would be the ones I would return to most often.