Michael Powell
Biography from Blockbuster Guide to Movies and Videos CD-ROM
It won't print to file I'm afraid but I managed to sneak the following out
of the back door while the software had its back turned - Derek
Michael Powell
(1905-90), b. Canterbury, England
There is not a British director with as many worthwhile films to his credit
as Michael Powell. Yet in the age of Richardson and Schlesinger, in the
sixties and seventies, Powell had hardly any adequate critical appreciation.
The sadness was that he was written off as an eccentric decorator of fantasies.
Against persistent British attempts to dignify realism, Powell must have
seemed gaudy, distasteful, and effete. All three ingredients contribute
to his vision, but so do an imaginative evocation of the erotic and the
supernatural; a pioneering enthusiasm for visual autonomy always likely
to break out in passages of stunning delight; the adherence to what Raymond
Durgnat once called "High Tory" values; a wicked sense of humor and private
jokes; and most distinctive - like Colonel Blimp's dreams - an unsettling
mixture of emotional reticence and splurging fantasy. Thus, as late as 1969,
Age of Consent, a mild beachcombing anecdote, is lit up by baroque passages
of Helen Mirren, naked and underwater.
It is revealing that Peeping Tom was dismissed in Britain as wayward
nastiness. Worst of all, Powell may have been inhibited by the feeling that
his imagination was un-British. Powell stayed English despite the merry
excursion to Australia when he cried out for the geography of light and
shade that von Sternberg illuminated on the Paramount sound stages. Even
when Britain rediscovered horror in the late 1950s, as O. O. Green has
remarked, Powell was ignored. Green compared Powell and King Vidor, whose
Duel in the Sun Jennifer Jones was reduced to Country Life fretfulness by
Powell in Gone to Earth: "Vidor, intellectually, perhaps, less sophisticated,
or at least less cautious, than Powell, has retained just that Wagnerian
authenticity of emotional excess which gives his films that genuine
mysticism, a Nietzschean pantheism. But Powell lived in a class and a
country which suspects, undermines, is embarrassed by, emotion; his
diversity of qualities rarely find their holding context."
As if in early accord with that verdict, Powell left Dulwich College for
the studio Rex Ingram had set up in Nice. He assisted the ex-Dubliner, ex-
Hollywood director, on Mare Nostrum (26), The Magician (26), and The Garden
of Allah (27). Undoubtedly that experience encouraged his interest in the
expressionist treatment of the supernatural; Ingram's splendid isolation
may also have confirmed a young man's belief in "artistic" cinema. It was
several years before Powell's own films showed such strange fruit. He
slogged away for some time in England as cameraman, writer, and director;
only in the late 1930s do his films seem his own.
Thereafter, in vital partnership with the writer Emeric Pressburger, they
struggle with great, clashing virtues - with marvelous visual imagination
and uneasy, intellectual substance: I Know Where I'm Going is a genuinely
superstitious picture; 49th Parallel is a strange war odyssey, with escaping
Germans wandering across Canada - naive, very violent, at times unwittingly
comic, but possessed by a primitive feeling for endangered civilization;
an interesting sequel is One of Our Aircraft Is Missing - English fliers
getting out of Holland; A Matter of Life and Death is pretentious in its
way, yet very funny and absolutely secure in its dainty stepping from one
world to another. But the two Conrad Veidt movies - The Spy in Black and
Contraband - are exciting and atmospheric studies in Langian intrigue; The
Thief of Bagdad is delightful; The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp a
beautiful salute to Englishness. After the war, Powell expanded, attempting
to fuse the talents of painters, designers, and dancers. In fact, The Red
Shoes, Tales of Hoffmann, and Oh, Rosalinda!! underline the search for
respectability in his work. But The Red Shoes knows that creative dreams
easily surpass reality. It raised people to dance, but it is also a lovely
tribute to creative collaboration. And Anton Walbrook's Lermontov - so hot,
so cold - is a portrait of Powell himself. With a very personal mixture
of wisdom and naivete, Powell treated the artist or wizard as the last
potent pagan deity. Black Narcissus is that rare thing, an erotic English
film about the fantasies of nuns, startling whenever Kathleen Byron is
involved. The Small Back Room profits from the use of unexpected
expressionism on an ostensibly realistic subject and quivers with nervous
tension Equally, The Elusive Pimpernel has gorgeous moments despite a
routine swashbuckling story.
After about 1950, dejection seemed to set in, only to be dispelled by Peeping
Tom, Powell's most completely realized and intellectually somber film. Full
of dark jokes, including his own presence as the cruel father, it also shows
Powell's sense of the cinema's own contribution to frenzy. The central
character is a moving portrait of the imaginative young man who is unsociable
with real people but familiar with the stars of movies. He is a shy focus
puller who takes film of girls using a tripod that contains a swordstick.
The stuck victims goggle horribly at the picture they make in the reflector
above the camera; and so reaction stimulates the spectacle even further
The film was reasonably criticized as an exercise in de Sade's principles,
and it is the one work in which Powell discarded all inhibitions.
I was fortunate to know Michael Powell in the last decade of his life. He
was in America a good deal at that time: teaching for a term at Dartmouth;
as director emeritus with Coppola's American Zoetrope; as treasured Merlin
at the court of Scorsese; and in his marriage to the editor, Thelma
Schoonmaker.
I had the chance to watch many of his films with him, discussing them and
learning the passion of his vision. It is all the more agreeable now to
see Michael's influence spreading: the ardent antirealist has inspired so
many people; the man in love with color, gesture, and cinema helped to
educate viewers as well as filmmakers - not least in the two volumes of
his autobiography, A Life in Movies. The work looks better and better,
simpler yet more ambiguous. The great Powell and Pressburger films do not
go stale; they never relinquish their wicked fun or that jaunty air of
being poised on the brink. To put an arrow in our eye - to leave a nurturing
wound - that was Michael's eternal thrill. I do not invoke the figure of
Merlin lightly: Powell was English but Celtic, sublime yet devious, magical
in the resolute certainty that imagination rules.
Michael Powell's movies include the following 49th Parallel (1941 ), Age
of Consent (1969), Black Narcissus (1947), Bluebeard's Castle (1964), A
Canterbury Tale (1944), Contraband (1940), The Edge of the World (1937),
The Fighting Pimpernel (1950), Gone to Earth (1950), Honeymoon (1959) I
Know Where I'm Going (1945), III Met by Moonlight (1957), Lazybones (1934),
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), The Lion Has Wings (1939) The
Love Test (1934), Night Ambush (1957), The Night of the Party (1934), Oh
Rosalinda!! (1955) One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1941 ) Peeping Tom (1960),
Pursuit of the Graf Spee (1956), The Queen's Guards (1961), The Red Shoes
(1948), The Small Back Room (1949), The Spy in Black (1939), Stairway to
Heaven (1946), Tales of Hoffmann (1951), They're a Weird Mob (1966), and
The Thief of Bagdad (1940).
Copvright 1995. 1996 bv David Thomson. All rights reserved. Used by permission
of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
IIRC Powell was very appreciative of an earlier biog by
Thomson which was
in the same vein and, he felt, one of very few truly supportive and accurate
portrayals of his work by a UK critic. (Source: will "somewhere near the
end of Million Dollar Movie" do?!)
Regard
Derek
