The end of the war found The Archers among the front ranks of a new
wave of British filmmakers whose work had found a major audience in
the United States. For their next film, the team chose to adapt Rumer
Godden's novel Black
Narcissus, a story of nuns struggling against elemental
hardships and repressed passions to found a convent at the foot of the
Himalayas. Despite the fact that this was a British film focused on
Anglican nuns, the movie was scrutinized by the Catholic Legion of
Decency in the United States, and was heavily cut on its original
American release. The controversy didn't prevent cinematographer Jack
Cardiff from winning an Oscar® for his stunning Technicolor
photography. The film, however, wasn't widely available in America in
its full-length version until the end of the 1970's.
The Red Shoes
originated as a screenplay that Pressburger had
written as a vehicle for Merle Oberon, during his days at London
Films. The Archers purchased Pressburger's script from Korda and
extensively revised it. The result became the most celebrated British
film of its time, as well as the biggest financial success that Powell
and Pressburger ever had. Ironically,
The Red Shoes
and its long and expensive post-production work
created major problems between The Archers and the increasingly
parsimonious Rank Organisation. This resulted in a split between the
two for the first time since 1942, when Rank had turned down
One of Our Aircraft is Missing.
For their next picture, an adaptation of Nigel Balchin's 1946 novel
The Small Back Room,
Powell and Pressburger moved to Alexander
Korda's re-established London Films, which was only too glad to have
back their two pre-war alumni.
The Small Back Room
marked a return not only to black and white,
but also to the World War II setting that had yielded some of their
finest pictures.
The Small Back Room
concerns an engineer battling alcoholism,
depression, and his resentment toward the politics in his office. The
drama intertwines with his mission to uncover and defuse a series of
deadly German booby traps. Oddly enough, it was the only one of the
team's films that received unqualified praise from the British
critics.
"The English critics always hated our pictures,"
Michael Powell remarked in 1984, "but they loved
The Small Back Room."
Despite this reception, it was a
complete and immediate box office failure in England. Powell said,
"We'd done it too long after the war, and no one wanted to see
it." The film wasn't released in America until three years later,
in the wake of
The Red Shoes'
immense success, under the title Hour of Glory.
The Archers' move to London Films involved them in two difficult transatlantic
partnerships. The first of these was an adaptation of Mary Webb's novel
Gone to Earth,
about a young, superstitious but loving Welsh girl (Jennifer
Jones)
and her doomed romantic entanglements with two men from her village. Jones'
contract was held by her husband, David O. Selznick--co-producer of the
picture with Korda
-- who had his own ideas about what the movie should contain. The
resulting film was one of the best that Jones ever made, but Selznick was
extremely unhappy with the results and attempted to sue The Archers. A judge
later ruled that there were no grounds to sue the filmmakers, but that Selznick
could modify the film in any way that he chose for its American release,
where he controlled its distribution. This he did, under the title
The Wild Heart ,
with extensive cuts and new footage shot by Rouben Mamoulian.
The complications surrounding
Gone to Earth
were echoed on The Archers' next production,
The Elusive Pimpernel,
a Technicolor remake of The Scarlet Pimpernel,
which had been one of London Films' biggest successes
of the 1930s. It stars David Niven, who plays Sir Percy Blakeney aka
The Scarlet Pimpernel, battling to save innocent French aristocrats
from the Reign of Terror. Samuel Goldwyn had Niven under contract and
co-produced the film with Korda. Originally planned as a musical -- one
can still see where the production numbers were to have been -- the film
instead was shot as a costume drama. The resulting picture was
beautiful and clever, but lacked the depth of Powell and Pressburger's
usual work. The finished film also led to a lawsuit -- subsequently
dropped -- by Goldwyn against the filmmakers and Korda.
As Powell later remarked in an interview, The Archers' contract with
London Films was turning out very poorly for all concerned, mostly
because of the awkward American co-production deals. Korda was also
using The Archers and their previous track record to secure financing
for remakes of properties that he already owned, rather than allowing
them to make the films they wanted. The team realized the need to come
up with a film based on an idea of their own, before, in Powell's
words, "Korda had us doing a musical remake of Sherlock
Holmes." The result was
The Tales of Hoffmann.
Sir Thomas Beecham, who had conducted the ballet music for
The Red Shoes,
suggested a filmed version of Offenbach's opera to Powell and Pressburger.
The Tales of Hoffmann
was a Technicolor ballet/opera extravaganza,
based on Offenbach's fantasy about the poet E.T.A. Hoffmann and his
star-crossed romances with three women. The movie fulfilled all of its
promise, carrying the cinematic advances made in
The Red Shoes
several steps further. It was the only film The
Archers made for Korda that turned a profit, albeit a small one. The
American distributor, however, balked at releasing a 127-minute opera
film and chopped 14 minutes out of it for the United States
opening. The missing footage was not restored until 40 years later.
After completing their contract with London Films, Powell and
Pressburger took a three-year hiatus from their partnership. Both
pursued projects separately, Powell writing and producing for the
stage in London, while Pressburger directed a movie adaptation of his
friend Erich Kastner's book Twice Upon A Time, later remade by
Disney as The Parent Trap. One proposed Archers film, Taj
Mahal, went through several screenplay drafts but never
materialized. Both the British Empire and the British film industry
were in full retrenchment; an epic about the construction of the Taj
Mahal was beyond anyone's capacity to produce. A planned film of
The Tempest, to star Moira Shearer, also failed to find
financing, as did Powell's notion of a series of art films to involve
Dylan Thomas and Igor Stravinsky. In 1955, The Archers resumed work
together on
Oh ... Rosalinda!!,
an adaptation of the Johann Strauss
operetta Die Fledermaus, set in four-power occupied Vienna. The
plot concerns a debonair master of ceremonies who exacts revenge on
four officers who once played a practical joke on him. It was to be
the only film they would ever make in CinemaScope®.;
Oh ... Rosalinda!!
was followed by a rather more conventional if equally challenging vehicle,
The Battle of the River Plate
.
Pressburger suggested a film about
the sinking of the German battleship Graf Spee, one of the few British
naval successes in the early days of World War II. The Admiralty was
extremely cooperative, and many witnesses to the epic sea battle were
available. With seed money from 20th Century-Fox and assistance from
the Admiralty (and the American navy, which loaned one of its
cruisers), the story was duly restaged and proved extremely
appealing.
The Battle of The River Plate
,
retitled Pursuit of the Graf Spee,
[So that Americans wouldn't think it was the River Platte and therefore
a Western - Steve]
became only the third Archers film of the 1950s to get an
American release reasonably close to its British release date, and
from a major distributor.
The final film in the formal Powell/Pressburger partnership,
Ill Met by Moonlight
(U.S. title: Night Ambush), was based
on W. Stanley Moss's account of British commando action on the isle of
Crete during World War II. It tells the story of the kidnapping of a
German general. At first glance, it seems like an off-kilter, anemic
work, harking back awkwardly to the glory days of World War
II. Produced amid the turmoil of the Suez Crisis and other signs of
England's decline on the world scene, it seems a strangely odd
filmmaking project. But a fresh viewing reveals it as perhaps the most
consistently engaging, suspenseful, and witty of all England's postwar
action films.
The Archers' partnership ended after
Ill Met by Moonlight,
and Michael Powell continued as a
producer/director on his own, culminating with his 1960 thriller
Peeping Tom.
Emeric Pressburger produced one film, based on his
long-cherished script The Miracle of St. Anthony's Lane, which
was released as Miracle In Soho in 1957. He later resumed the
literary career that poverty and the rise of the Nazis had interrupted
during the early 1930's. His novel, Killing A Mouse on Sunday,
was subsequently filmed under the title Behold A Pale Horse by
director Fred Zinnemann. During 1972, Powell and Pressburger were
briefly reunited for the Children's Film Foundation release of
The
Boy Who Turned Yellow, a whimsical fantasy written by
Pressburger and directed by Powell, about a boy who has an adventure
with a man who is the walking manifestation of electricity.
During the mid-1970s, Powell and Presburger also produced one joint
literary effort, a novel based on
The Red Shoes,
which was published by Avon Books. The tributes
devoted to their work together began soon after, first in England with
showings of the restored edition of
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
.
This was followed by
full-blown career-length retrospectives, at London's National Film
Theatre and in America at the Museum of Modern Art. The 1980s saw
restoration work carried out in England on all of the major
Powell/Pressburger films, and 40th anniversary tributes to
The Red Shoes
in America. Powell and Pressburger's influence can
be seen in dozens of films, and they are freely acknowledged as
sources of inspiration by directors as diverse as Brian DePalma, Derek
Jarman, Vincente Minelli, George Romero, and Martin
Scorsese. Monuments to the most daring artistic impulses of two vastly
talented men, the films of Powell and Pressburger are a remarkable and
rich legacy from two of the greatest filmmakers in the history of
British cinema.
Bibliography
Ian Christie:
Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
(Faber & Faber)
Kevin Macdonald:
Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter
(Faber & Faber)
Michael Powell:
A Life in Movies (out of print)
[Since been reprinted. Often available secondhand]
Michael Powell:
Million Dollar Movie (Random House)
