For a decade and a half, the partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger illuminated the cinema with an array of extraordinary films.
But the massive reputation the team garnered during and immediately after
World War II -
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,
A Canterbury Tale,
I Know Where I'm Going!,
A Matter of Life and Death,
Black Narcissus,
and The Red Shoes in just five years!
went into steep decline in the Fifties.
There were no Archers films at all between
The Tales of Hoffmann ('51) and Oh... Rosalinda!! ('55),
and both of those were disastrous failures, critically
and financially.
Perhaps to cover themselves in the ultraconservative British
film industry, Powell and Pressburger finished their partnership with two
conventional war adventure movies - rattling good yarns that, alas, were
widely perceived as rattling just a bit too much.
The Battle of the River Plate ('56) was a box-office success and had a royal
premiere, but it now looks like the corniest of the Archers movies. An
account of Britain's first major naval victory of WWII, it does have the
great virtue of showing actual ships maneuvering about in an actual ocean
instead of models in a tank - Powell's main pleasure in directing the movie,
one imagines. But this is exasperatingly offset by far too many shots of
actors on studio bridgehead sets being doused with water as they strike
poses in front of a cyclorama. The local color Powell provides is a bit
sticky, too, given that Uruguay, where the German battleship Graf Spee was
forced to seek shelter before being tricked into self-destructing, was and
still is a nation notorious for its concealment of Nazis. Peter Finch, as
the captain of the Graf Spee, manages an impressive performance, but none
of the other actors in a lively cast Anthony Quayle, John Gregson, Patrick
Macnee, Anthony Newley, Christopher Lee, John Schlesinger in a bit as a
German sailor [a British prisoner] - has much chance to create a real person.
The Germans are all decent fellows, really, whilst the characterization
of the Brits is entirely on the level of good-show-chaps caricature.
Powell seemed rather attached to this movie in later years, but had no love
at all for the very last Archers film, Ill Met By Moonlight ('57). "I felt
imprisoned by the facts," he was wont to complain; and there were problems
with the script Pressburger provided. Ian Christie's book about Powell,
Arrows of Desire, goes so far as to refuse to list the film as a
collaboration at all, his filmography (reproduced, incomplete and inaccurate
as it is, in Powell's memoirs) giving Powell's name alone as writer,
producer, and director.
[He's wrong, it is in there.]
Dissension between Powell and Pressburger coincided
with antagonism from the Rank Organisation, which refused them money for
color. Once the film was finished, so were the Archers.
After Ill Met By Moonlight, then, the deluge. It would be foolish to suggest
that the film - miserably renamed Night Ambush for U.S. release and cut
by 11 minutes - is anywhere near the level of the team's masterworks. Even
so, it's more interesting than legend suggests. The (true) story, set in
occupied Crete in 1943, concerns the kidnapping of a German general (Marius
Goring) by Cretan partisans led by a British officer, Patrick Leigh-Fermor
(Dirk Bogarde). Film buffs will recall that the real Leigh-Fermor was one
of the scriptwriters of John Huston's The Roots of Heaven (also the author
of some bestselling travel books). Then again, the film seems to ask, who
exactly is the "real" Patrick Leigh-Fermor - or the real anyone? Taking
its title from a play concerned with dreams and disguises, magic and power,
Ill Met By Moonlight is all about questions of identity.
Under the credits, we see Dirk Bogarde in uniform; then, unexpectedly, we
see him in the flamboyant outfit of a Cretan hill-bandit. A title informs
us that Major Leigh-Fermor was also known by the Greek code-name "Philidem."
In other words, there are two of him (at least), and on one level the adventure
the film is about to unfold reflects a conflict in his personality. It's
a conflict shared, unknowingly, by his Nazi opposite number, the fierce,
arrogant General Kreipe (an unlikely "proud Titania," but it's true that
he "with a monster is in love" - the monster of Nazism). Kreipe's human
side is so rigorously repressed by the demands of war and "glory" that he
is genuinely unaware of it; ironically, this humanness, which constitutes
the true manhood of this Teuton warrior, is revealed by a boy
(equivalent to Shakespeare's Indian Prince?)
- who, in turn, is the most grownup person in the movie.
If "Philidem" appears under the credits, caped and open-shirted, a romantic
dream-figure out of an operetta or a storybook, he is first seen in the
film proper as a coarser, more down-to-earth version of the same thing -
an ordinary Cretan peasant in a shabby suit, waiting for a bus.
When he makes contact with the Resistance, his personality fragments further.
To some, he is the mystical Philidem, Pimpernel of the Hellenes and righter
of wrongs.
To others he is "Major Paddy," the happy-go-lucky Englishman of popular
movie myth conducting war as if it were a branch of amateur theatricals,
a gentleman adventurer relying on breeding to get him through and making
fun of the whole business.
To Bill Moss (David Oxley), the newly arrived junior
officer sent to assist him, he is the cool, fast-thinking professional
soldier. And to himself? In his quietly passionate defense of Cretan life
and culture, he seems someone else again: a scholar and aesthete outraged
by the barbarism and folly of war, and by the moronic arrogance shown by
his captive toward the Cretan people.
Whatever his persona, Leigh-Fermor is a chameleon who never seems to change
very radically in himself. Perhaps because he has this quality of seeming
all things to all men - and being those things - he remains unfazed by the
monolithic might of the German military machine. Fluent in Greek, he can
also speak German like a German and is easily able to assume another
disguise, that of a faceless Nazi officer. Although he and Moss make fun
of themselves - "If only I had a monocle!" muses Moss when Leigh-Fermor
tells him he "looks like an Englishman dressed like a German, leaning against
the Ritz bar" - they are able to effect the kidnapping with an ease that
seems appropriately Puckish.
General Kreipe is ignominiously thrust onto the floor
of his own limousine, gagged, and sat upon by a couple of the peasants he
so despises. Kreipe's rage is compounded by his firm conviction that he
has been snatched by "amateurs" - a belief Leigh-Fermor and Moss slyly make
no objection to, knowing how it will gnaw at his already shaky Master Race
self-confidence.
Soon, partisans and captive are up in the hills, where they stay for most
of the movie (though the biggest of the film's mountaineering set-pieces,
a nocturnal descent through fog, was filmed on elaborately stylized studio
sets). Once there, Kreipe determines to leave a trail for following German
troops to pick up on - his cap, buttons from his uniform, even a couple
of medals from his impressive display of such baubles never realizing that
each emblem of his authority is no sooner dropped than it is retrieved by
the vigilant Moss.
Among Major Paddy's partisans is a young war orphan, Nico, who has, while
shinning up and down the mountains, much occasion to complain of his need
of a pair of boots. Nico knows that the cost of a new pair will always be
far beyond him; Kreipe, who has been friendly enough toward him in a rather
patronizing way, seizes on this need by showing the boy his own impressive
footwear and offering a gold coin with which to buy an identical pair. A
German gold coin, he stresses, not one of the sovereigns Leigh-Fermor keeps
a supply of; it is, in fact, a coin the General is known to keep as a
good-luck charm. Nico is impressed by the General's largesse. But, of
course, the Nazi requires a quid pro quo. All Nico has to do, when he goes
down the mountain, is tell the searching German patrols where the General
is, using the coin as a bona fides. But Kreipe has misjudged the boy
(indeed, he can be said to have misjudged the whole of the human race):
it never occurs to him that the boy will not do what he says. What Nico
actually does is simply point the patrols in the wrong direction, leading
them into an ambush; the magic gold coin is lucky for the Greeks, not the
Germans. This makes the escape from Crete of the Britishers and their
ill-met prisoner the easiest part of their long journey.
Once aboard a British ship, and naked of the symbols of military power,
the General seems a new person - not such a bright man, not such a strong
man, but also not such a bad man, either. He is visibly moved by the return
of his possessions, especially the gold coin: despite his genuine pleasure
in Nico's company, Kreipe had assumed that the boy, like every non-German,
is someone who can be bought and sold, and that "friendship" had been merely
his gift, and not a privilege from which he might derive spiritual benefit
rather than tactical advantage. The very simplicity of Nico's ruse in
deflecting rescue was the, final humiliation, the last stage in General
Kreipe's lengthy symbolic disrobing - which is precisely why his possessions
can now be given back to him. If he started this modern midsummer night's
dream as imperious as Oberon, he ends it as foolish as the donkey-headed
Nick Bottom. But then, Bottom the simple weaver is always better-liked by
everyone than the unearthly and tyrannical monarch of Shakespeare's
enchanted forest.
And from his elaborate humiliation, the stiff-necked German learns a good
deal about himself and about humanity. His curt acknowledgment at film's
end that he has been kidnapped not by amateurs but by professionals is also
his acknowledgment of his own fallibility and that of the creed he has so
proudly espoused. And so he regains a measure of dignity, along with those
tokens of an identity he no longer needs. Nico himself get his new pair
of boots after all (they belong to Leigh-Fermor, who is barefoot in his
final exchange with his prisoner), but, by a sad irony, is about to change
identity as well: he will wait out the rest of the war far away from Crete
in the distant England of which he has heard much but knows nothing. But
at least he has a friend - a real friend, now - in General Kreipe, who has
learned that the respect of an uneducated boy is worth more than a medal
from the Fuhrer. "Gentles, do not reprehend / If you pardon, we shall mend."
And Patrick Leigh-Fermor, aka Major Paddy, aka Philidem - and, if you
stretch your imagination just a smidge, aka Robin Goodfellow? - what of
him?
In the film's closing moments, he is far from being self-assured
intellectual or dashing amateur adventurer or legendary outlaw of the hills.
He's just a tired man who wants to go home and rest up. "How do you feel?"
asks Moss. "Flat" is the reply. "You look flat!" says Moss. "I know how
I'd like to look ..." murmurs Leigh-Fermor wistfully.
Moss knows what he's going to say, and joins in the litany:
"Like an Englishman dressed like an Englishman - and leaning against the
Ritz bar!"
It's easy to imagine them ordering drinks at that renowned watering-hole
with all the suavity required by this little fantasy.
Still, the film's last images of Crete receding
in the distance, until all we can see is the sea, suggests that maybe Major
Paddy's heart is really back in those hills in the "fair and fertile" land
that has become as much a Powellian landscape of the mind for us as the
studio-built Himalayan convent of Black Narcissus or the monochrome Heaven
of A Matter of Life and Death. And, as we depart both Crete and this film,
we may reflect that being "dressed like an Englishman and leaning against
the Ritz bar" would, for Patrick Leigh-Fermort constitute yet another
disguise. After all, he was Irish.
Film Comment 13th March 1995 v 31:n2. p37(4)
