Submitted by
Neal Lofthouse
Those studio enigmas, Powell and Pressburger
A stocktaking of their work in 'Gone to Earth and all that!'
Of all of Britain's film-makers, this team must be the most erratic.
From flights of fascinating fancy it gives us somersaults in the same
film. You never know what's coming next.
By Stephen Watts
Picturegoer November 4 1950.
There used to be a familiar publisher's slogan which claimed that it was
impossible not to be thrilled by Edgar Wallace. In a different sense, it
is for me impossible not to be thrilled by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
I mean the men themselves in this case; not their work.
I have known them and their work, as long as they have been together, which
is twelve years. I have never had a dull conversation with them. And on
leaving them I have never felt entirely happy. Stimulated but uneasy, would
be a fair description of my feelings.
Their films have sometimes had the same the same effect on me, but not always.
On some occasions "stimulation" would be too mild a word, on others "uneasy"
would be a gross understatement of my feelings.
It is easy enough to put a finger on what one likes about bald, blue-eyed,
soft-voiced Powell, and short, shrewd Pressburger, with his thoughtful remarks
in Hungarian-accented, but eloquent English.
They are, to their backbones and fingertips, men of cinema. They are enthusiasts
about and devotees of the medium in which they work. They are restless,
bold, imaginative experimenters, prodigous workers, and they have total
confidence in themselves.
Micky Powell will invite your opinion on his latest project, but you feel
his interest is conversational and academic: his mind is made up. He thrives
on argument, but never budges an inch.
Brilliance
If you were to say flatly that an idea was bad, it would bring merely a
glint into his pale eyes and you would know you had fortified his determination.
"I'll show you," his whole manner says. "You'll see who's right."
When a picture is a big sucess, such as The Red Shoes, he is not
merely, as some producers are, grateful. He simply implies that the public
has shown good sense in liking it.
It would be easy, too, to write a facile eulogy of this film-making team
by selecting the fine things it has done, for its extraordinary record is
dotted with memorable brillances.
Perhaps when everything else about its latest picture, Gone to Earth
, is forgotten, one will recall the final fox-hunting scenes as a model
of their kind. Going further back, one remembers the tension of the climax
of 49th Parallel, the fight as the train approached the U.S.- Canadian
frontier.
Similarly, one thinks of the Kentish landscape so magnificently realized
in A Canterbury Tale, the whirlpool scene in I Know Where I'm
Going, the strangely effective celestial atmosphere of A Matter of
Life and Death, the bomb scene at the end of The Small Back Room
, the rich, wonderful colouring of Black Narcissus, and of course,
the ballet sequence in The Red Shoes.
Dullness
And yet - and yet ... That uneasiness always comes creeping in when I cast
my mind back over the Powell-Pressburger pictures. Take their most famous
film, The Red Shoes. It is ungenerous, when a film has done so much
good for the prestige of British films abroad (to say nothing of dollar
earning), to go back and pick holes?
I do so only to trace my own uneasiness.
But what was The Red Shoes about - what did it say? Reviewing it
when it was first shown, I wrote: "The story is the feeblest part of the
picture - having nothing new to say it winds up in an insufficiently motivated,
hasty and melodramatic ending." I still think that is a fair comment.
It is a tribute, if slightly back-handed, to the writing-producing-directing
team of Powell and Pressburger that one should have so much enjoyed and
admired a film with so trite and unconvincing a story.
A girl is dedicated to ballet. She falls in love and marries. The Svengali-like
- or Diaghileff-like -
[Or Powell-like?]
impresario spurns her, the pull of the ballet is
too strong, she returns, loses her husband and commits suicide.
It is not just another version of the old love-verus-career story, one of
the most hackneyed screen plots? True, the career in this case happens
to be set in a beautiful and engrossing art, but the cliche is still there.
To me the conflict was unreal. "A dancer who depends on the doubtful comforts
of human love will never be a dancer", said Anton (Svengali) Walbrook in
the picture. To which I would say - tosh!
Yet that line was roughly the premise on which The Red Shoes was
built. Thank heaven for those wonderful ballet scenes. It is their effect
on me that makes me think of The Red Shoes as a fine picture.
Or take A Matter of life and Death, a film I defended strenuously
against those who dismissed it as a total failure. For me it was far from
that. It had the great virtue of being wholly cinematic, it had imaginative
novelty, great beauty and high technical accomplishment.
And yet ... you remember the trial scene when great figures of history made
speeches?
[No. Which 'great figures of history' made speeches? Unless he counts
Abraham Farlan as one]
I have rarely been made so restless in a cinema seat. The film
bogged down in ordinary bromidic words.
Once again the brutal conclusion is that the picture had nothing to say
- except what had been said a thousand times before.
I think, too, of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, of I Know
Where I'm Going, of A Canterbury Tale (a nasty little story,
handsomely disguised), of Black Narcissus - and always, if one takes
the trouble to go beyond the superficial and sporadic attractions (which
live best in the memory) it is the same analysis of tremendous erracticness
and a haunting, almost eerie sense of emptiness.
Good to Awful
This erraticness is the most extraordinary characteristic of Powell and
Pressburger. Like the celebrated child, when they're good they're very good,
but when they're bad they're awful.
Even their technical accomplishment seems to desert them and you have things
like the ending of I Know Where I'm Going - the bringing together
of boy and girl in an almost cynically slapdash and casual way.
The emptiness brings me back to the charge of "nothing to say". Goodness
knows, one doesn't want films packed with "message". But there should be
a central purpose, a backbone of conviction.
Have Powell and Pressburger any convictions? On the evidence, I would say
only the conviction that their mission is to make bigger, better and "different"
pictures. Of their sincere belief that the sky's the limit and nothing is
barred in exploiting the potentialities of the film medium, I have no doubt.
What then is the lack? This may offend them, but in my opinion it is a lack
of knowledge of and interest in human beings.
In these last twelve years of their partnership, when have they got to grips
with real, ordinary people?
I argued with them the desirability of making The Elusive Pimpernel.
They were convinced they could do something new and different with it -
and they may have suceeded. But the withdrawal from normal, contemporary
life is significant.
So, too, with their latest, The Tales of Hoffmann, which is a pure
essay in musical fantasy. Even in The Small Back Room, if you remember,
the love affair was a curious, unconvincing sideline - the bomb, with the
opportunities it provided for cinematic treatment was the ultimate hero.
Wanted: Discipline
I have deliberately said little of Gone to Earth. I have little to
say. I thought it an astonishingly bad film, but it gave another instance
of what I am arguing.
The three main characters were the merest puppets - the wild,
half-out-of-this-world girl and the two men who might as well have worn
labels marked "Sacred and Profane Love".
I find it incomprehensible that here Powell and Pressburger could have ever
stood back from their work and viewed it in normal terms of life as we know
it. No, the parts were treated as greater than the whole, the wood was ignored
while the trees were in close-up.
Now don't misunderstand me. Over all, British films have been better for
Powell and Pressburger. I would rather have them than many a timid, pedestrian,
unimaginative writer, producer or director about whose work I would not
bother to be so analytical.
I look forward to their future films - if only because one never knows what
they'll be up to next. But I think they have need of discipline, of closer
contact with life, of greater concern with the broad and total effects of
what they put on the screen while they are up to their clever tricks and
flights of fancy.
I said they stimulate me. Now I hope that this or some such frank probing
of their weakness may stimulate them to pictures one can wholeheartedly
admire and which do not any more inspire a curious and nagging uneasiness.
