Submitted by
Nicky Smith
The Communal Balancing Act
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
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The Edge of the World
Directed and written by
Michael Powell
With
John Laurie, Belle Chrystall, Eric Berry, Finlay Currie, Niall MacGinnis,
Grant Sutherland, Campbell Robson, and Powell.
Rating
* * *
A must-see
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By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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In a recent review in the Times Literary
Supplement, American sociologist and historian Richard Sennett examined
the failure of socialism in the United States and argued that Americans
seem to have a different take than people in England and continental Europe
on collectivity itself. One reason he suggests for this difference—that
slavery confused and perhaps even undermined our overall sense of the dignity
of labor, ultimately altering our sense of collective labor—is both
provocative and debatable. But whether or not one buys into his theory,
it’s hard to deny that Americans practice and relate to groupthink
somewhat differently than Europeans. “The herd of independent minds”
was the late Harold Rosenberg’s memorable phrase describing us in all
our paradoxical singularity.
I happened to read Sennett’s words a few hours after seeing the
restoration of Michael Powell’s beautifully archaic and mystical 1937
epic about communal life on Foula—the Shetland island farthest from
the coast of Scotland—which is playing this week at the Music Box.
They help pinpoint why, in spite of his passionate romantic individualism,
Powell had a relationship to collective consciousness that has few if any
counterparts in American movies. Probably the greatest English filmmaker
after Hitchcock, Powell (1905-1990) was an unapologetic Tory throughout
his career, so I’m not trying to argue that his feeling for groups
had any traces of leftism. For that matter, even though this is a 30s movie,
socialism is barely an issue; apart from some government assistance when
the islanders have to evacuate because of harsh living conditions, it barely
comes up. Yet the communal feel of the picture is unmistakable, and unmistakably
British to boot—providing a sensibility that in some ways is as exotic
as the towering sea cliffs of Foula, the most spectacular I can recall seeing
anywhere.
The story hinges conventionally on a romantic couple who are separated
by tragedy and circumstance, then reunited after the birth of their illegitimate
baby, yet the film refuses to conclude with this couple—refuses to
use them as a summing-up of what the picture is really about, as almost
any American movie would. Eerily, these characters are dwarfed first and
last by their awesome physical surroundings, and by the nurturing community
they come from, which looms second largest in Powell’s sense of a natural
order.
I visited London in the early 70s when striking coal miners were causing
blackouts, and recall a half-serious BBC TV sign-off one night that cautioned
viewers not to let the blackouts lead to too much sex, given the country’s
concerns about overpopulation. The cozy groupthink implied by such a directive
can also be found in Powell’s An Airman’s Letter to His Mother
(1941), a deeply moving piece of war-effort propaganda playing with
The Edge of the World at the Music Box. Narrated by John Gielgud
and lasting only five minutes, it features many props from Powell’s
childhood and also his dogs as it introduces and restages the delivery of
a letter written by a Royal Air Force pilot to his mother before he was
killed in action, urging her to accept the possibility of his death. After
explaining that the mother gave permission for the film to be made, Gielgud
reads the letter offscreen while the camera inventories the object-laden
domestic interior where she—more likely an actress playing her—silently
reads it.
I’m grateful that this short is included with the feature rather
than Return to the Edge of the World, the documentary Powell made
in 1978 as a wraparound for a shorter version of the feature, chronicling
his reunion with surviving actors and crew on Foula more than 40 years later.
Though this half-hour color film has its charms, it takes the cozy tone
even further, sometimes coming across like a home movie that makes outsiders
feel excluded. Its most entertaining patch is perhaps a monologue delivered
by Powell to the camera while taking off a sweater: “Don’t tell
anyone—I’m a poet. A poet is not without honor save in his own
country, and I suppose that’s why most of my big chances were given
to me by Hungarians or Americans.” (He goes on to credit Joe Rock,
the American ex-vaudevillian who produced The Edge of the World,
and the New York film critics who named it the best foreign movie of 1937,
which led to him getting hired by Alexander Korda.)
Interestingly enough, Powell is in the original feature as well: he plays
the yachtsman who lands on Foula at the beginning, and his future wife,
Frankie Reidy, plays the yachtsman’s wife. They’re joined by Andrew
Gray (Niall MacGinnis), a former resident of the now-abandoned island, who
tells them the story in flashback to explain a gravestone at the top of
the cliff that’s marked “Peter Manson...gone over.”
After a beautifully developed sequence in which the characters gradually
gather for a church service, we learn that Manson’s son Robbie (Eric
Berry) plans to leave the island in spite of his father’s objections,
believing that others will follow because steam trawlers threaten Foula’s
survival as a fishing port. His slogan is “Every man for himself,”
which his father (John Laurie) finds deeply offensive. At a meeting of the
all-male island council, Andrew, who’s courting Robbie’s sister
Ruth (Belle Chrystall) and supports everyone sticking together, proposes
that he and Robbie follow an ancient local tradition and race to the top
of the island’s 1,220-foot cliffs to see whose opinion should prevail.
It’s a pretty implausible turn of events; like Peter’s hunt
for rare eggs that later leads to his death, it’s simply a clumsy piece
of plot machinery. That The Edge of the World functions so well in
spite of such ridiculous contrivances says a lot about Powell’s talent
and imagination and metaphysical sensibility. Its “plot” is mainly
a rationale for putting all the irrational flights of fantasy together in
a single package and making them compatible in terms of mood and atmosphere.
That the film was shot with the island’s residents—people of all
ages, sheep, and dogs—as well as actors complicates this premise without
essentially changing it. (Powell credits himself with the story rather than
the screenplay, but he’s the only writer in sight.)
Dave Kehr’s capsule review for this paper calls the film “quite
good” but “somewhat anomalous for Powell: a melodrama rendered
in the gray light of documentary naturalism rather than his famously stylized
Technicolor.” I’d go further and argue that it’s just as
surrealist, in inspiration and effect, as Powell’s later color studio
movies such as The Thief of Bagdad, Black Narcissus, The
Red Shoes, and Peeping Tom. One especially gorgeous shot—an
extended double exposure of Ruth and pounding waves—recalls a characteristic
shot from Josef von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture, a favorite
of the Surrealists, which superimposes a close-up of Mother Gin-Sling (Ona
Munson) on a gambling casino. It also recalls the “documentary”
shots of waves in Sternberg’s last work, The Saga of Anatahan,
which Sternberg later said he regretted because they were the only things
in the film that were real—a false claim, given the film’s heartbreaking
use of newsreel footage, yet still a revealing one.
My point is that Powell’s dreams of collectivity and individuality
are all that really count. Realized with professional and nonprofessional
actors alike, in real locations effectively turned into fantasy landscapes
through the force of Powell’s vision, The Edge of the World is
ultimately a more satisfying and less pernicious version of epic documentary
as mythology than the kind offered by Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia
, shot the same year and coincidentally playing at the Film Center this
weekend.
Copyright © 2000 Chicago Reader Inc.
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