A Life In Movies
(Michael Powell's autobiography - part I)
TLS October 31 1986
Red-blooded realist
Alexander Walker
Michael Powell
A Life in Movies
705pp. Heinemann. £15.95.
Not the least remarkable aspect of Michael Powell's memoirs is
how they present the whole man in what is really half a life.
In spite of the length of A Life in Movies, it ends (for
now anyway) with The Red Shoes in 1948 and Powell aged
only forty-three. But so much experience of men, movies and
women is crammed into its feat of total recall, rivalling the
late Compton Mackenzie's, that the eighty-one-year-old author
seems to have lived many lives. If not as a film-maker, he could
plausibly have presented himself as a globe-trotter, conservationist,
hotelier, novelist, even a womanizer.
He proclaims his Englishness with the vigour of a patrial being
quizzed by Immigration. ("I love England. I have mirrored England
to the English.") But what singles the book out is its Continental
tilt. And what makes it virtually unique among the memoirs of
English film-makers is the open (but rarely chauvinist) relish for
the beauty and company of women, on-screen and off, in bed and out
of it. It is a red-blooded example in a usually thin-blooded genre;
it will be read with pleasure by people who are not
cinéastes and who want a "life", not simply an account
of an art-form.
Powell's pleasures were cultivated without guilt - this also distances
him from his English peers. Probably they were acquired on that
cosmopolitan inter-war Riviera - his father (le capitain)
ran the Voile d'Or hotel - where he saw the European cinema of Clair,
Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Lubitsch and Seastrom flowering all round him.
Thanks to a chance encounter at a party given by his father for the
American unit at the nearby Victorine studios in 1926, "Mickey" wound up
with Rex Ingram shooting Mare Nostrum. He gives a most valuable
account, as well as a highly entertaining one, of that far-off silent era of
expatriate Hollywoodites - photographer John F. Seitz, art director
Henri Menessier, Alice Faye and Antonio Moreno. Likewise, Powell's
description of Korda and the profligate way the Denham empire was
ruled have historical importance. Korda sent him round the world
by flying boat - "It was pure Jules Verne" - to find Burmese locations.
Powell sent back cables from every "splash-down": "Could you imagine
whole Persian Gulf to choose from collided ... with westbound flying
boat. Awaiting replacement from Karachi." That movie was never made.
One that was, The Thief of Bagdad, got under way with the briefest
of remits: "I would like you, Mickey, to take Sabu and a film unit down to
Cornwall and start making it." That was all; it was Korda's method
of effectively cutting out the pedantic German director whom he had
already signed. Powell convincingly stakes Korda's sometimes hazy
claim to have aided the war effort by giving details of how the magnate
made good his peace-time promise to Churchill that he would have a
propaganda film (The Lion Has Wings) ready within a month of
the start of the war.
His book also repairs some of the blanks in the puzzle of who did what
in the Powell-Pressburger partnership, as in his account of his colleague
announcing: "Excuse me, I am Pressburger" (spoken with a Continental bow),
and then popping up like the dormouse out of the pot, holding a Denham
script meeting spellbound with a reworked scenario read from a
six-inch roll of paper.
Powell had his chance to go to the United States. He admired American
movies for their "lively energy". But Hollywood was another country:
they did things differently there. He opted for independence - and
kept it until his production company, The Archers, began losing money
and then the confidence of Rank who released The Red Shoes
without even a première.
Powell's writing is full of delights. On entering Korda's office:
"The furnishing of the room was civilized, by which I mean it was
full of books in five languages." There is not one line of theory in
the book (though there are a few misspellings that the publishers
should have caught). It is bound to upset academic critics who have
extravagantly lauded The Archers for setting their faces against realism
and for attempting "daring experiments in reducing the importance of
narrative", as Ian Christie put it in his recent Arrows of
Desire (reviewed in the TLS of May 16).
Here is first-hand testimony that they did nothing of the kind. The
Archers aimed in exactly the opposite direction from the one in
which the "New Critics" are pulling their own bow-strings.
Colonel Blimp, for example, springs directly out of a realist,
narrative tradition going back to One of Our Aircraft is
Missing, where a titled middle-aged rear gunner, played by
Godfrey Tearle, gave Hugh Burden's young idealist "skipper" a
dressing-down based on his experience of life. David Lean, who was
editing the film, had the scene dropped. "It's nothing to do with
the plot. It's the sort of idea you could make a whole film about",
he said. Powell adds laconically, "So we did."
[This is quite an amazing review, only partly about Powell's autobiography. A lot of it is the reviewer having a rant (subtle at the start, less so towards the end) about the younger critics who were threatening his position. He sets up targets of his own imagining and then twists things to his own advantage to score what looks like a hit with every one. Let's not forget, this was the critic who still referred to Peeping Tom as a "snuff movie" in the documentary A Very British Psycho (1997)]
