In 1948 Michael Powell and his partner Emerich Pressburger showed "The Red
Shoes" to the people who had paid for it: the brass of the J. Arthur Rank
Organization. The picture had cost £570,000, and it was
Powell-Pressburger's masterwork: the most rapturous meltdown of music,
dance, color, design, of movie, there on the screen. At the same time it
was
their defiant assertion that nothing mattered (or redeemed death and postwar
austerity) more than art.
The brass were gloomy. The film seemed excessive, a little embarrassing
even
in its frenzy for its own medium. There was no one in its story who was
sensible or businesslike. The whole thing felt as dangerous as Puck
celebrating wicked boyhood. "The film will not take in a penny in America,"
said one dour boss. He was wrong. The Red Shoes made a fortune eventually
in
America; and its magic still works on screen no matter that the show folded
recently on Broadway. But that reference to America was stinging in 1948.
There was no plainer proof for Brits of their country's decline than the
trashy empire of Hollywood. Homegrown movies were always measured against
that daft sunshine. It was Hollywood that spoke (wretched) English to the
world; and it was often American actors who played English heroes. To be
a
filmmaker in Britain has been to fight a fever of love and loathing for
Americans.
Thus the British lament - and it is as close as we will get to theme or
purpose in Ken Russell's lazy, bored and often funny book - that it is
uncommonly and unfairly hard for Brits to make movies; that there is no
money or stomach for such a crazy business in Britain; and that filmmakers
are not properly appreciated in the United Kingdom. So the poor devils have
to slink off to Hollywood, forsaking cricket, draught beer, the club of
good
losers and the rain-soaked irony that takes nothing seriously. It is
daunting for Brits in Hollywood that the Americans can be so determined
about themselves. Give a man $10 million, a mansion in the hills and a new
young wife, and he will grow solemn and bitter.
This is a cunning scenario, made of humbug, self-pity and flim- flam. The
"British movie" has never been more popular or influential. It is made all
over the world now just as Westerns once were produced in Italy, Japan and
South America. Look at the recent Oscar nominations: for best picture, The
Remains of the Day and In the Name of the Father are set in Britain and
fascinated by the po-faced hypocrisy of the class system; The Piano is a
story of British emigrants to New Zealand who have sailed with piano and
Bronte-esque yearnings about their own literary significance; and
Schindler's List relies upon British actors. (Ask yourself why it should
be
Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes and Ben Kingsley instead of, say, Gene Hackman,
Sean Penn and Dustin Hoffmann, and you begin to grasp the American
superstition about "eloquence," "depth" or "moral seriousness" in British
acting. Or do I mean acting British?)
These movies may have reached the screen only thanks to American funding;
and I am taking for granted that actors and directors born in Ireland count
as British. Of this year's twenty nominations for acting, seven went to
Brits. In the last few years Oscars have been won by Daniel Day-Lewis,
Jeremy Irons, Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, and for the next several
years - as Hollywood reckons grudgingly - those players are favorite
candidates for more. The British have always taken advantage of the shared
language. In the history of Oscar, the best actor and actress awards have
gone to Brits twenty-eight times. And this year there was even a Welsh film,
Hedd Wynn, up for the best foreign language picture.
Russell, who was nominated as best director for Women in Love in 1970, might
claim that many of those Oscars went to Brits who had settled for American
citizenship and salaries (people like Elizabeth Taylor and Ronald Colman).
But Russell had his years working out of Los Angeles, too, just like Alfred
Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang, Ernst
Lubitsch, David Lean, Fred Zinnemann, William Wyler, Tony Richardson, John
Schlesinger, Costa-Gavras, Roman Polanski, Milos Forman, Peter Weir and
Ridley Scott, all of whom were born in other countries. You can even make
a
case for British directors who have grasped America better than natives
ever
managed - think of Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy; John Boorman's Point Blank
and Deliverance; Ridley Scott's Blade Runner; not to mention Psycho, Vertigo
or Shadow of a Doubt.
Russell might complain that there was too little that was "purely" British:
made by Brits, with local money and exclusively British material. And yet
it
was possible in 1993 in America to see Sally Porter's tranquilly eccentric
and literary Orlando; Stephen Frears's "Irish" film The Snapper (a happy
return to form for Frears after the awkward Hollywood biggie Hero); and
Mike
Leigh's remorseless Naked. In more limited venues one could find the last
two films by the late, lamented Derek Jarman - Wittgenstein and Blue; and
even the beautiful and desperate works of a television director, Alan Clarke
(Road, Elephant, The Firm, Made in Britain), which might make American
televisions pop with disbelief. Best of all, maybe, was The Long Day Closes,
Terence Davies's rhapsody to a Liverpool childhood at the movies (and often
American movies).
To watch public television in this country is to regret the near absence
of
contemporary and domestic dramatic material; and the shortage will be
greater still now that PBS is losing "American Playhouse" to a movie
company. Yet PBS has rejoiced this last year in Ian Richardson's Iago-like
prime minister, F-U, and Helen Mirren's resolute lady cop from "Prime
Suspect." "Masterpiece Theater," to take the series at its own pious
estimate, has assumed that British television is not just unequaled, but
beyond the reach of American competition. (And will an American ever again
be fit to edit "Tina Brown's New Yorker"?) And so, over the years, we have
had the chance to see the work of artists in television, like Dennis Potter
(The Singing Detective, Pennies from Heaven) and Alan Bennett (Talking
Heads, A Question of Attribution), as well as shelf-loads of leather-bound
literary adaptations. That steady supply has surely built the audience for
Merchant-Ivory films, and it must have encouraged Martin Scorsese to come
in
off his mean streets to the decor and the hushed epigrams of Edith Wharton
and The Age of Innocence (with a Brit actor for his New Yorker).
Russell is 67, and he picks up work where he can, often for television.
(He
recently did an adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover, with Joely
Richardson, which has not yet made it to "Masterpiece Theater.") I don't
know why he wrote this book, unless it arose, as irresistible as a dare,
late in a bibulous lunch. You'll read it in half a day, and I can't believe
it occupied Russell more than a month. It's chatty and meandering, feeble
stuff next to the burning testaments from Powell and Jarman. The tone is
flippant or weary, as if Russell felt like a dowdy and former enfant
terrible now pushing 70.
But Russell's mood lifts whenever he's talking about his boyhood, music
on
film or Powell. There's a nice chapter on the teenage Russell biking around
Southampton to see how many cinemas remain after German bombing raids. As
for music, it was originally Russell's inspiration: in the late '50s and
'60s he made a series of increasingly melodramatic documentaries for the
bbc
on Debussy, Bartok, Elgar, Delius and Richard Strauss. They are still the
best things that he has done. And then there's Powell, that Merlin of
British film.
Russell loves Powell - from I Know Where I'm Going through The Red Shoes
to
Peeping Tom. Indeed, he rises to true insight when he says of that film,
nearly the last feature Powell made in Britain:
Did Powell have it in for Moira [Shearer - the star of The Red Shoes and
playing a murder victim in Peeping Tom], or was this succession of brutal
deaths nothing more than a sick joke? I suppose we could ask the victim
herself, though I doubt she'd tell - if indeed there was anything to tell.
But a mystery persists, nevertheless. Why did Powell make the film in the
first place? In doing so, he engineered his own suicide. As far as his
directing career in England was concerned, he was dead. Has any other
director in the history of the cinema been buried by one of his own movies?
Powell was 55 when Peeping Tom was slaughtered by English critics. They
said
it was odious and shameful, something the cat dragged in. In fact, it was
a
barbed black comedy in blood colors about the fascination and peril of
living for movies. Powell was by then a singular figure in Britain, and
Peeping Tom had a uniquely droll admission that movie was a kind of
pathology. Powell also loved old England and Celtic myth. In Colonel Blimp
he made a fond tribute to gentlemanliness. But he was a loner, famously
sharp-tempered and aloof in ways he declined to notice. In his coy voice,
Russell is alluding to that haughty and self-destructive independence in
Powell (as well as to his eye for red-headed actresses).
For the next twenty years Powell did too little. There were a couple of
films in Australia and some T.V., but years of De Gaulle- like retreat in
his cottage in Gloucestershire - all in the age of "swinging London," when
Russell and many others had their turn. Later in life Powell came to
America. He was artist-in-residence for a term at Dartmouth; he deepened
his
friendship with Martin Scorsese (and married Scorsese's editor); he was
director emeritus for Francis Coppola - Russell says that was like being
tea-boy, but people who knew Powell then recall stiffer drinks. And in 1980
he began his autobiography, the second volume of which, Million-Dollar
Movie, was barely complete at his death in 1990.
Million-Dollar Movie is not simply a sequel to A Life in Movies (1987),
but
a re-make. The second volume has not been published in America, in part,
I
daresay, because it goes back over old ground, and begins to hammer the
Powell credo that a film depends on one man, its maker or begetter. Repeated
too often, the claim sounds angry and egotistical; at his best, on film,
Powell was most magisterial when swift. The beauty of audacity masked his
arrogance.
But the first volume, already 700 pages, was a great success that revived
interest in Powell's films. The two volumes together make plain how unlikely
a career Powell had. He is the most beguiling of British directors; his
work
seems larger and warmer year by year, while Hitchcock looks more
mean-spirited. But Powell was blithely unworldly and allergic to most kinds
of "team spirit" in pictures. Being Powell was a triumph of the will, an
inability to be orderly or obedient. He loved art for art's sake, and saw
no
difference between a movie and an opera and an illuminated manuscript. He
was oddly out of his time: though a camera buff, he felt he kept imaginative
company with Chaucer, Milton and Blake.
How onerous it must have been for him to small-talk with the people who
financed movies (and who were so certain The Red Shoes didn't have legs).
It's a wonder that Powell and Pressburger stayed businesslike for so long,
for I doubt they knew or cared "what the public wanted." They took that
old
plea as humbug, and pursued their own fancies. Brooding on the common tastes
can be so depressing. That enough people adored their results then, and
now,
testifies to a recurring English insight about the movies (a heresy in
America, for critics as well as practitioners) that there's no proven point
in aiming at the public. Aim at your heart, or the mind's eye, and you have
as much chance of success as if you calculate the allure of The Last Action
Hero. Powell had always cultivated his garden - that's why he had enemies
in
a business that liked to think it was devoted to agriculture.
If anyone admired Powell more than Russell, it was another gardener, Derek
Jarman, a one-time art student and lifelong painter who got into movies
by
doing production design for Russell on The Devils and Savage Messiah. Jarman
was a homosexual who celebrated role models for that way of life in
Sebastiane and Caravaggio. He died of AIDS in mid-February, having skirted
death several times since 1986. Yet he was never more active than in his
last years. HIV was his prison and his liberty, and its threat led to The
Last of England, The Garden, Edward II, as well as Wittgenstein and Blue.
Jarman worked on tiny budgets in the spirit of a home-movie-maker, with
a
gang of friends.
He also kept a journal: Modern Nature covers the years 1989 and 1990, when
he was in and out of the hospital, observing his own gauntness and living
in
a cottage near the beach at Dungeness, in the shadow of a power station.
The
journal is very moving, with harrowing accounts of treatment mixed with
lists of flowers planted in his garden and of films held together against
lack of money and reports of friends dying. Not that Jarman had much time
for melancholy or premature mourning. He was exuberant; he insisted that
he
had a chance of beating HIV; and on several occasions he held off death
through work, stress and immense vocation, the very things doctors warned
against. He lost his sight, and Blue, his last film, is nothing but a blue
screen and a commentary that grows out of the journals. Here he is in April,
1989:
Wednesday 30
A chill coming on after lying naked on the shingle for the photos. Restless
night, shivering and hot by turns. Woke feeling very fragile.
A dull cloudy day, colorless. Read the Lorca biography.
Thursday 31
Still unwell. Washed all the bedding and t-shirts and pottered round the
garden. Dreamed all morning of escape. To where?
Will go back to London on Monday and try to work out a plan for the film.
James rang to say funding was on the way for The Garden. I feel it is too
late: the summer's gone.
However hard I try now I find it almost impossible to connect with others,
let alone myself. Was it ever any different? Was I gifted, or was it as
a
burden of proof that I took to film?
Those who knew Jarman saw his conviviality and his generosity. They would
have been surprised by such expressions of apartness. Powell was also a
grand companion in whom one felt a brusque, fearless isolation. Russell
in
his time has been praised and deplored as a law unto himself, a visionary
but self-indulgent, beyond reason. And Russell's early documentaries
worshiped solitary genius and the carefree bohemianism that took life as
the
threshold to art. Powell was prepared to stay idle a couple of decades to
stress his work; while Jarman discovered that only art could keep him alive.
None of this was reasonable, or medically plausible. Nor was it appealing
to
those who put up the money. So people like Powell nearly dared the bosses
to
be stupid enough to pay for them.
All three complain, more or less, about a dogged British resistance to
cinema. British culture, they say, prides itself on its literature, on its
theater, on its Leavisite scheme of stories that deliver moral lessons.
There is also the idea that the British are not naturally visual or
melodramatic, though that theory has to deal with Dickens, Turner, Hogarth
and Francis Bacon. It may be more to the point that much in British life
flinches from, or is embarrassed by, the enactment of fantasy, which is
so
vital to movies. There is a British modesty that sighs and says that movies
are really a bit of a lark, rather silly, something fit for Americans. But
that dampening down may only intensify the melodramatic urge. Powell could
be prickly in manner, terse in conversation; yet he was overwhelming and
emotional on the screen.
Maybe men like Russell, Powell and Jarman were determined to feel embattled.
Jarman came closest to fulfillment in what many regarded as impossible
circumstances. Russell rejoices in the reputation of a dangerous outsider.
And Powell - consciously, or by magic - took steps to make himself an outcast.
For all of them, the romantic urge to solitude was compulsive. It is there
in the flagrant imagery of their films and the swooning upheaval of their
narratives; and in their sense of themselves. Is it a British gift to film
history to suggest that the "normally" absurdly expensive collaboration
might also be a private passion pursued by half- crazed amateurs? At least
that frightens off Hollywood money - so then the few, the happy few, can
soldier on in brave penury, singing a lonely song. Who knows, a day may
come
when grim and overpriced American professionalism has been surpassed by
technology, while British eccentrics keep filming in their garden with
antique cameras, watching the flowers explode.
The New Republic 25th April 1994 v210:n17. p39(3)
