Submitted separately by
Jane E. Langston and
Malcolm Pratt
Powell's Poetry
by Ella Taylor
Atlantic Monthly, Jul/Aug 2001
The story goes that Winston Churchill, after seeing Michael Powell's 1943
film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp - and taking it, doubtless
correctly, as a political attack on himself - fumed that this time, that
Powell fellow had gone too far. To which Powell, one of Britain's finest
filmmakers and a hero to the best among today's directors, from Mike Leigh
to Martin Scorsese, sweetly responded that he thought that was the whole
idea. As anyone who has seen Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes
(1948), or Peeping Tom (1960) knows, going too far was Powell's
credo. Though his visual style hardly seems over the top by today's
goose-`em-or-lose-`em standards, his images harbor a dazzling emotional
intensity without benefit of special effects.
Now the boutique art-house distributor Milestone Film & Video, which
already deserves a medal for restoring and recirculating such lost classics
as Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma
Roma, has released to video Powell's gorgeous 1937 first feature,
The Edge of the World (beautifully restored by the British Film
Institute), the story of two clans torn apart in a tiny Scottish Isles
crofting community. As always in Powell's movies, people go to exhilaratingly
absurd extremes for love, or at least for their lives' passion. In this
case, two insanely heroic - and, by all commonsense criteria, pointless
- attempts to scale an impossibly sheer cliff at the edge of perennially
stormy seas end in private tragedy; this is compounded by the consequences
for the villagers (played by themselves and a wonderful cast featuring
John Laurie, Finlay Currie, and Belle Chrystall), who are already taxed
beyond endurance by the harsh conditions under which they live.
As much as it is about the vital durability of love, The Edge of the
World is also the story of the death of an era. (It's hard to believe
that the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier wasn't inspired by this film's
austere black-and-white lyricism to make his own wildly romantic melodrama,
Breaking the Waves.) "Don't tell anyone - I'm a poet," an impishly
immodest Powell remarks to the camera in a charming 1978 documentary
post-script to the film, in which he goes back to the location, the island
of St. Kilda [Foula], with his crew. No need to
tell; it's all right there on the screen.
(Milestone: 800-603-1104; $29.95 plus shipping.)
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