1980: Exile
Michael Powell began writing his autobiography A Life in Movies during a period of professional exile from England — in 1980, while teaching film students at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. “I love England,” he wrote:
I have mirrored England to the English in my films. They have not understood the image in the mirror. I am writing these lines in a foreign country…because for the last ten years I have been made to feel an outcast by my own people.
Unable to actually make any movies, Powell’s own story turned out to be his last great artistic production. Sitting in New Hampshire, Hollywood, even Russia, almost anywhere but England, he composed a love letter to his Edwardian youth. In exile, he was haunted by home. But this was not just a place, because the England of 1914 or 1940 was not the England of 1980. It was also the past: a past that could only be excavated or reimagined.
Powell’s longing for home, which manifested itself in a passionate deluge of detail that consumed hundreds of pages, was made more acute by a painful conflict of feeling that had two sources: Powell’s rejection of English parochialism and England’s rejection of Powell. Sometimes the English fell in love with his work, but just as often they were suspicious, indifferent or hostile to it. This could partly be explained by the foreignness of its declared sympathies and interests: Powell ended up as an English exile in America but he had always been something of an internal émigré, an outsider who was surrounded, whether intentionally or not, by other émigrés and outsiders. He was a European Englishman, a Francophile and a devotee of German cinema, and, as such, saw himself as the spiritual heir to a select tradition with a long pedigree.
When Roger Scruton, whose own understanding of the idea of England had much in common with Powell’s, tried to describe ‘English culture’ he was forced to acknowledge that it had been “shaped from outside.” By the 1930s, the English cultural elite no longer needed to go abroad to find inspiration or, indeed, threats: Central Europe had arrived in London and started to transform English culture from within. Powell, in close collaboration with the Hungarian scriptwriter Emeric Pressburger, was at the heart of this transformation. Kevin Macdonald, in his biography of Pressburger, described Powell as “at once terribly English and not English at all,” “a man whose ambitions were foreign but whose means were domestic.” There was, almost from the beginning, a suspicion that he had been corrupted by foreign influence. Initially this had been attributed to his Hungarian and German collaborators — the Korda mafia, Denham’s Danube-on-Thames — but, over time, it would become too strong and persistent a tendency in his own work to be fully explained away. He would have to be held to account by his “own people.”
The great cataclysmic event of Powell’s life was the final, brutal rejection of all of this by the English cultural establishment: the outcome of a protracted conflict that reached its climax with the Plaza Cinema premier of Peeping Tom in 1960. “When the show was over we waited in the lobby for our friends,” he recalled in Million Dollar Movie, “but we had no friends. They passed us with averted gaze. It was obvious they just wanted to get off the hook, go home and forget about it — and us.” Peeping Tom had provided English critics with the perfect opportunity to have their final reckoning with a director whose films had, by their very existence, exposed their own parochial sensibilities and cramped ambitions. The irony was that Powell had not been trying to provoke them. The problems that he was tackling were the problems of desire, the imagination and human psychology, but it seemed that these were not English concerns and had no place on English screens. The fact that Peeping Tom had been made by the same director as The Battle of the River Plate — a patriotic naval epic lauded by Winston Churchill and honoured with a Royal Command Performance — only intensified the critical backlash. Powell was an apostle of the image in a society that was resistant to the seduction of the visual, the iconographic, and the artificial. He was safe at home as long as he was playing by the rules, but he did his best work, his real work, when he refused to acknowledge that these rules even existed.
Powell’s two volumes of autobiography — A Life in Movies was followed by Million Dollar Movie in 1992 — were Acts of Martyrs, Chronicles of Exile. Even when he attacked or despaired of the English themselves, he never chose to disavow home. “I am English to the core, as English as a Cox’s Orange Pippin, as English as a Worcester Pearman,” he wrote, in defiance of his condition of exile. His memoirs made a point of describing “the passionate love of the Englishman for his island” and it was no accident that from the beginning — from, that is, The Edge of the World, a film made on the northern fringe of the British isles — Powell was preoccupied with the idea of home. It was also noticeable that what this actually showed was that ‘home’ was a mysterious and magnetic place with a lure that was deep, unfathomable, irrational, and tinged with bitterness and violence — and this was before he had been destroyed by the English for his nerve, for his artistry and for making Peeping Tom.
1939: Germany
“The Germans were the first, and certainly among the best, of the early film-makers who brought fantasy to the screen,” Powell wrote in Million Dollar Movie:
I had understood and appreciated this from my first days in the cinema, with great directors like Rex Ingram and Alfred Hitchcock. These great men didn’t wait for inspiration. They believed in control, in design, from the start to finish of the film.
This was Powell’s own ideal. If the Germans had helped him to understand and eventually realise this on screen, then it was also something that he felt instinctively from the very beginning. “At the time I was too young and inexperienced to formulate these ideas, but I felt them and I had the German film-makers to guide me and reassure me.” German films did not only influence his style, but also his method and conception of film as a total art form. The “composed film” that Powell accomplished with the climax of Black Narcissus, the ballet of The Red Shoes and all three acts of Tales of Hoffman had its roots in the “pure cinema” of the Weimar Republic.
The Germans gave Powell an understanding of the power and place of artifice, atmosphere, and imagination in film; most important of all, they taught him to prize the image over everything else. “Everything depends on the image,” declared Paul Wegener, director of The Student of Prague, in a 1916 public lecture:
The real creator of the film must be the camera. Getting the spectator to change his point of view, using special effects to double the actor on the divided screen, superimposing other images — all this, technique, form, gives the content its real meaning.
“In my films, images are everything,” Powell would repeat throughout his life, echoing Wegener and signaling his allegiance to the German tradition. From The Thief of Baghdad to Peeping Tom, Powell’s own films would often return to the act of watching, the primacy of vision, “the morbid urge to gaze.” The image reigned as aesthetic ideal, technical challenge and recurring visual metaphor.
The first two Powell and Pressburger collaborations paid direct homage to this shared inspiration. The Spy in Black and Contraband were both patriotic British war movies steeped in the hallucinatory Gothic atmosphere of Murnau and the shadows and paranoia of Lang’s early noir. This was the first sign of a perverse streak that quickly put English critics on their guard and would eventually cause trouble with the Churchill war ministry. In The Spy in Black, Pressburger had come close to making a German U-Boat Commander the hero of the film; at the very least, in the hands of the German silent movie star Conrad Veidt, he became its most complex and charismatic character. Captain Hardt, skulking in the dark corners and corridors of an isolated, fog-shrouded Orkney schoolhouse recalled Count Orlok lingering in the black shadows of his Transylvanian castle. The great films of the Weimar era created a cinema of outsiders. In Powell and Pressburger’s two thirties spy thrillers, the “outsiders” were enemy aliens adopting false identities in order to penetrate and subvert the physical and psychological defenses of the British state. In a sense this very infiltration became a part of the film itself — they were hybrid products, fusing the twilight, gloom, mist, chiaroscuro, ambiguity and eroticism of the German film with the British espionage thriller.
Korda, owner of Denham Studios and London films — the man Powell considered to be the “saviour” of the British film industry — had already aroused suspicion and resentment in English critics with his circle of Hungarian and German “aliens.” Graham Greene, writing in the Spectator in 1936, claimed that
the Quota Act has played into foreign hands, and as far as I know, there is nothing to prevent an English film unit being completely staffed by technicians of foreign blood. We have saved the English film industry from American competition only to surrender it to far more alien control.
For Powell, this was not even nonsense, it was irrelevant: to make the best films you needed the best people, wherever they came from. If they happened to be down the road in Denham, all the better. For a long time, he would face accusations of being led astray by the European pretensions/perversions of Pressburger until, finally, Peeping Tom put an end to all of that:
So, it was Powell all the time, eh? We suspected Emeric Pressburger with his Continental background, but now we know it was Powell, the sadist, who poured glue on girls’ hair, or splashed buckets of blood all over Moira Shearer lying on the railroad tracks, when she should have been allowed to die neatly and tidily, like a British ballerina.
They had both learned too much from the Germans and therefore about the other Germany that they still believed existed somewhere beyond the reach of the Nazi state.
Pressburger was more sympathetic to the ordinary German caught up in what Powell would describe as the “whirlwind of war” in 1939 than he would be later on, recalling that “I always believed, and I have to say that there are also good Germans, one or two, though the great majority of them proved to be pretty awful, pretty horrible.” In The Spy in Black, Germany was a malignant presence, an invisible threat, as mysterious and abstract as the Weimar vampires and monsters; it was less a place or even an idea, than a sinister atmosphere, an eerie mood. It was left to The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp to explicitly reckon with the problem of German nationalism. Pressburger’s subtle portrait of Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff as a patriotic German officer (brittle pre-1914 pride giving way to bitter postwar despair and finally horror at the national descent into racial violence) showed Wilhelmine nationalism to be both pregnant with and separate from the later pathologies of Nazism. Theo would end up as an émigré in wartime London, faced with the same kind of internment officers as Pressburger had been, the most eloquent and passionate anti-Nazi voice in all of their films.
If The Life and Death and Colonel Blimp tried to redeem the German individual, then 49th Parallel was a direct assault on the Nazi Weltanschauung. “This was one of the very first important films about the ideology of the Nazis,” Emeric recalled, defending his now unfashionable film in the 1970s. “We were fighting for our lives and everything else.” Powell, by 1941, did not need convincing: he could also see what was at stake. “I suddenly understood what Churchill had seen years ago,” he wrote in A Life in Movies: “this was going to be a global war, a war of survival, a shift in world politics that would affect communications all over the world.” For Pressburger, this was not simply the threat of occupation, but extermination. Emeric had not left Europe by choice, but by necessity. There was no ambiguity of purpose or confusion of role here, but there was a crucial distinction that it was important to make: the real enemy was Nazism not the German character.
1940: London
1940 was the final myth. “You knew,” wrote the American journalist Virginia Cowles, watching the Battle of Britain unfold over the fields of Kent, “that the fate of civilisation was being decided fifteen thousand feet above your head in a world of sun, wind and sky.” Or, as Ian Nairn would write, much later, of the Blitz: “London burnt in 1940 for the sake of tolerance, and the price was well worth it.”
Powell and Pressburgers’s second film, Contraband, did not not live up to this national drama, but there was no way that it could. Shot the previous October — while The Spy in Black was still in cinemas, before the Nazis had invaded France — it was made at a different time, in a different world. If Pressburger had some understanding of what the Nazis were capable of, then Powell was still living with millions of other people in the strange twilight comfort of the phony war. Powell looked back on Contraband as nothing more significant than “an amusing thriller” that allowed Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson to develop the flirtatious rapport they had established in The Spy in Black and to give Korda the opportunity to prove to Churchill that the British film could be used as a weapon of war. By the end of 1941, Powell and Pressburger had essentially achieved this for Korda; in fact, their propaganda had become so effective and sophisticated that it would eventually present Churchill and Bracken with a serious problem.
The Spy in Black had not actually been a propaganda film in the same way that Contraband and 49th Parallel would be. It was a movie about a First World War U-Boat Commander that was made as a vehicle for a great German actor before the Second World War had even started with no official funding or oversight from the British government. Helen Kennedy, in her book about The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, noted that Powell and Pressburger could be “frighteningly good at predicting the future” and The Spy in Black was a case in point; it was a film blessed with immaculate timing. Two months after it had been released, a German U-boat entered the waters of Scapa Flow and torpedoed the HMS Royal Oak. “All the Powell-Pressburger wartime films were original stories, written for the screen, keeping pace with events and trying to put into action what people were thinking and saying at the time,” Powell wrote in A Life in Movies. Contraband, their first directly-funded propaganda film together, was originally conceived by the MOI as a showcase for the Royal Navy’s Contraband Control, but, for Powell, “the glimpses of London preparing for war” were as important as the story itself (“pure corn”). To some extent he was “predicting the future” again — showing Londoners living under the Blackout Regulations, buying gas masks on street corners and avoiding ARP wardens, months before the Blitz would make London an iconic image of the war. It was about “what was happening” but also about what was coming.
The great irony of the Blackout Regulations is that while they made people safer from German bombs, they also made them less safe from each other. The London of Contraband was a city cloaked in darkness and shadows, a nocturnal underworld in which vice and corruption flourished alongside spies and double agents. As Captain Hardt quickly worked out in The Spy in Black, there was a fine, almost invisible, line between crime and espionage; the tools of spy craft (bribery, kidnapping, fraud, murder) made it, in effect, a state-sanctioned criminal enterprise. Powell’s depiction of London in 1940 anticipated Carol Reed’s Vienna in 1948 as the ultimate European noir city. In Contraband, the bright bars, bustling restaurants and cinema screens of the West End disguised back rooms, basements, underground liars and subterranean dens; draped in Langian shadows, they provided the ideal conditions for deception and disguise.
“Nothing will ever quite fit to the waves of continental influence,” wrote Ian Nairn, “and the true Londoner will never quite fit in any pattern at all, even an English one.” “In German films,” wrote Lotte Eisner, “the street represents the call of Destiny…it is the lure and enticement of all poor devils who, tired of their dull homes and monotonous lives, are out for adventure and escape.” London in 1940, in conditions of war and blackout, with the exiled governments and royal families of Europe congregating in its hotels and embassies, was one of Europe’s great cosmopolitan hubs. It was also, in Contraband at least, a subversive metropolis, as dangerous, exotic, and transgressive as Paris, Lisbon or Casablanca. For Powell and Pressburger’s secret agents the city was not just an ideal environment, but an existential condition; in The Spy in Black, in a small Orkney hamlet, they were far more exposed and vulnerable.
Both of these early British war films were essentially Weimar films, not just in terms of their style and influence, but also their ambivalence towards outsiders. They were also, like the films of Josef von Sternberg, drawn to and attracted by the transgressive, linking the world of espionage to sexual freedom. In The Spy in Black, Captain Hardt initially dismisses Jill Blacklock’s professional alter ego Fräulein Tiel as a murderer and a prostitute but it’s not long before he’s tracing the line of her nylon tights up to the hem of her skirt and making a pass at her (she has to resort to locking him in his room). In Contraband, Captain Anderson’s pursuit of Mrs. Sorenson ends with them being tied up together in a dark basement at the heart of London’s red light district while being spied on by Nazi voyeurs. Powell always considered Black Narcissus to be his erotic masterpiece but Contraband was the sexiest film he ever made — an erotic thriller funded by the MOI to help sell a war for democracy.
Powell paid close attention to the couture of his female leads: the clothes, apart from looking good, usually told a story. Famously, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp showed, through the wardrobe of Powell’s muse Deborah Kerr, “the most sensational transformation of women’s bodies since the Garden of Eden”:
The beginning of the century saw the hourglass figure, the heavy material of the dresses and skirts, the enormous hats and all paraphernalia to make a woman feel decorative and useless. The 1914 war freed a woman’s body from corsets, which went into the dustbin. It was a time of ugly serviceable clothes, drab colours, cloche hats, skimpy skirts, and low heels. Finally, there was the Second World War with women in uniform beside their men.
This was a sartorial and social transformation that reflected all of the other changes taking place in the film, including, ultimately, the shift in values that would make General Wynne Candy and his idea of England obsolete. Powell’s fashion taxonomy skipped the Sorenson era altogether — the high glamour thirties of sculpted cocktail dresses, gleaming pearl necklaces, and dark, padded furs. There was nothing casual or accidental about Valerie Hobson’s frock in this most time-stamped and topical of films, nor was it merely fashion. This was Elsa Schiaparelli’s ‘hard chic’ taken to its logical conclusion: the cocktail dress as a suit of armour. It was the militant glamour of a woman drawn to confrontation and liberated by risk, secrecy, disguise. The German spymaster Van Dyne, Sorenson’s temporary captor in his underground bunker, could very quickly identify her as the most dangerous agent of all — the one who enjoys the game.
Powell was, for a time, an adoptive Londonder, with a home in Kensington. “It was only by making Peeping Tom,” he would write later, “that I was able to immortalise the London world in which I lived, at No. 8 Melbury Road, and the red-brick, stone-capped house opposite it where Mark developed his pictures.” Other than Denham, Soho was the centre of his professional life. In A Life in Movies, Wardour Street was Film Row, the home of British Pathe, Warners, Rank and Hammer, and shorthand for the British film industry as a whole. (Upper Rathbone Place and Charlotte street would make atmospheric and ultimately sinister cameos in Peeping Tom.) Both Powell and Pressburger, in the early years of their collaboration, lived cosmopolitan city lives, surrounded by artists, writers, financers, producers, actors and models from across the country and continent. But it was also true that, in some important sense that was deep and intuitive for them, London was not England. They both ultimately longed for an English ideal that was located in the countryside, but only really existed in their imaginations: a dream that would become a form of resistance to an industrial urban present and future.
1942: Resistance
The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time.
George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’
When Chamberlain dismissed the Nazi assault on Czechoslovakia as “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing,” he was making a cynical appeal to a reliable British parochialism that would soon lead Europe into the abyss. This catastrophic outcome did a lot to teach the British something about the danger of ignoring the rest of Europe and the moral shame that resulted from their willingness to do so. The network of alliances and resistance movements that fought alongside the British during the war cured many of their residual isolationism and xenophobia, at least temporarily. One of Our Aircraft is Missing was a film that tried to reinforce this new spirit of internationalism by showing the Dutch resistance risking everything to help a downed RAF crew escape Nazi capture and return home.
The key speech was given to Googie Withers, one of Powell’s old quota quickie starlets who rediscovered and channeled her own Dutch ancestry in the role of double agent Jo de Vries to produce something unforgettable. “You see,” hisses de Vries, addressing the RAF crew she is about to smuggle out of Holland as German soldiers scurry to the sound of an air raid siren:
That’s what you’re doing for us. Can you hear them running for shelter? Can you understand what that means to all the occupied countries? To enslaved people, having it drummed into their ears that the Germans are masters of the Earth, seeing these masters running for shelter, seeing them crouching under tables, and hearing that steady hum night after night, that noise which is oil for the fire burning in their hearts?
As Kevin MacDonald, writing about Aircraft in his biography of Emeric, put it, “there is something about the intense ‘Britishness’ of the piece that indicates it was not written by a native”; in a similar vein, the de Vries speech, like the German Hutterite leader Peter’s response to the Nazi fanatic Lieutenant Hirth in 49th Parallel, is nothing like rote British propaganda and bears the mark of an outsider. This is Pressburger releasing the suppressed fury of an occupied continent, speaking on behalf of subjugated populations, refugees and exiles, to which he himself belonged. It is worth recalling that his mother died in Auschwitz along with hundreds of thousands of other Hungarian Jews. It was by chance, or luck, that he found safety in England and an unparalleled visual platform through which to communicate his ideas courtesy of his closest English ally, Powell.
Nazism was an ideology of power and expansion that defined everybody in relation to its own racial hierarchy. This was one of the reasons why the propaganda that Powell and Pressburger produced placed the question of English and British identity at its heart. For both of them, this was not a question of nation or blood or tribe. Given the nature of the threat, they could not define English nationalism in terms of biology or ethnicity as this would simply make it the inverse of Nazism. Instead, they presented England as an idea of home in a way that reflected the way the Dutch felt about their own home in One of Our Aircraft is Missing. This was based partly on Pressburger’s observations and gratitude as a refugee and partly on Powell’s knowledge and love of his home islands. Britain itself was an alliance of nations and this reflected the alliances being forged across Europe against a common enemy that aimed to either dominate or eliminate all other national and ethnic identities.
By 1942, London was the capital of the continental resistance movements. Within this matrix of political and royal exiles were the Dutch. The Londens kabinet first met in May 1940, with Queen Wilhelmina arriving on the 13th May to take charge. She lived in Claridge’s, alongside King George II of Greece, King Haakon of Norway and King Peter II of Yugoslavia. The centre of operations for the Dutch resistance outside the Netherlands was the Macclesfield pub in Soho (later renamed De Hems in its honour). Holland was surrounded by Nazi-occupied territories and the Dutch were forbidden access to their own coast; those who tried to escape by sailing for England were called the Engelandvaarder (most died in the attempt or disappeared in the North Sea). Because they had no guns, the Dutch underground followed a policy of passive resistance, part of which involved helping British air crews shot down over Holland. As Powell put it, Aircraft was “an opportunity to show how people in the Low Countries and France were risking their necks every night to help such crews get back to their own country.”
In 1939, Powell and Pressburger allowed Conrad Veidt to play a Danish captain with a German accent, figuring that an undiscerning British audience would hardly notice the difference. In 1942, they did much better for the Netherlands: Aircraft is a genuinely moving and dignified tribute to the Dutch resistance. As Rear Gunner Sir George Corbett, a First World War veteran loosely modelled on Arnold Wilson, tells de Vries: “We can’t offer you anything except our love, our gratitude and our admiration for a brave woman and a fearless country.” The resistance that Powell and Pressburger paid tribute to in their film was a national rather than a revolutionary movement. Their heroes included a Catholic school teacher, a provincial burgomaster and a wealthy Amsterdam business woman, while Communists and Revolutionary Socialists were conspicuous by their absence. Sheltering at Else Meertens’ farmhouse, the B for Bertie crew recognise her as an ally when they spot orange blossom above the lintel and discover a portrait of Queen Wilhelmina hidden in a cabinet. When talking to the Germans, Jo de Vries maintains the fiction that her husband had been killed by British air raids; in fact, he is alive and working for Radio Orange, the resistance network broadcasting out of London. The identity that the Dutch are seeking to preserve in Aircraft is cultural and religious; if it is organised politically then this is a voluntary alliance of individuals inspired by the historic legacy of Dutch resistance to foreign occupiers. In the shadow of Operation Barbarossa, Powell and Pressburger still understood the war against Nazism to be a war against the political extermination of the private individual and certainly didn’t see the Dutch resistance as a tool of Soviet foreign policy.
Like 49th Parallel, Aircraft had a specific propaganda purpose and its appeal was partly limited to the moment it served. By the time the film was released, the British had lived through the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. The aeroplane was at the heart of the war myth, in the form of Spitfires, Hurricanes, Messerschmitts and Junkers; Lancasters and Wellingtons were less well known. The British did know that their own bombers were punishing German cities without really understanding how this was done or the level of risk involved. Powell put a lot of time and effort and money into recreating B for Bertie’s bombing raid on Stuttgart because, as he recalled, “these things had never been seen on screen” before. He took a romantic view of the pilots and air crews of the RAF and, writing in a Churchillian register, described them as “knights of the air who had revived the ideal of personal combat.” In the end, the focus of the film was not really on any of this but on a resistance movement that united school teachers, football players, merchants, children and, even, actors. It was a story about collaboration and solidarity across borders, cultures: its internationalism was a principle that always remained at the heart of Powell and Pressburger’s work.
1943: Total War
There is a vein of poetry and fantasy in the English which sometimes in a man is never known beyond his family circle.
Michael Powell, Million Dollar Movie
But what about the new kind of men from Eastern Europe, the streamlined men who think in slogans and talk in bullets? They’re on our track. Not long before they catch up with us. No Marquess of Queensbury rules for those boys.
George Orwell, Coming Up for Air
The trouble caused by The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp gave it a kind of subversive cachet, but, in retrospect, it seems odd and even ironic that Churchill reacted so strongly to Powell and Pressburger’s film when what it was urging was no different to what he actually did when he sacked Claude Auchinleck from Middle East Command and replaced him with more competent and confrontational fighters like Harold Alexander and Field Marshall Montgomery.
Powell and Pressburger ended up in a conflict with Churchill that they did not really understand and which they did not want. Neither of them objected to the Prime Minister personally or politically. For Pressburger and his fellow European émigrés — all victims in some way of Chamberlain and appeasement — Churchill was a hero. Powell, like so many others, had come around to this position by March 1939 at the latest and considered Churchill to be something rare: a statesman with a “vein” of poetry. “I shall never forget,” Powell recalled, “that the survival of the British film industry was due to the little private talk between Winston Churchill and Alexander Korda, in that convivial hour after dinner when the cigar smoke mounts and clings to the curtains and the golden brandy splashes into big-bellied glasses.” Powell and Pressburger films, from 1939 on, were being made at the indulgence of the War Office along the lines of 1940 MOI priorities. In one respect, Blimp met the rules: it was a “how Britain fights” film. But instead of delivering a promotional advert for the British armed forces, Powell and Pressburger chose to point out how badly they were being led. Even if the focus of the critique was not Churchill himself, then it implicated his class and generation. The present disaster had been delivered by the officers and cadets of the Boer war who had become the generals and political leaders of the First World War and the elder statesman of the “low, dishonest” thirties. It was the bequest of the gifted amateurs of Eton and Oxford, the aristocrats and arrivistes, a declining but indomitable stock of English gentlemen who — in any context other than Total War — Powell and Pressburger admired. But, in Blimp, they were finally confronted with and chose to confront a class of leaders intellectually and temperamentally unprepared to fight the new totalitarian powers.
From this perspective, it is easier to see why Churchill took offence and why the MOI would not want this message being broadcast around the world. As Powell said, with some understatement, “to make a hard-hitting film which lampooned the military mind and said we must pull our socks up if we were going to win the war, at a time when we were losing it hand-over-fist, was a bold enterprise.” In 1943, at least, Churchill did not appreciate the advice. The fact that the British military establishment was being held to account while a German officer was given a sympathetic platform by a Hungarian writer was enough to condemn the film as dangerous anti-propaganda in the eyes of those who were actually trying to prosecute the war. When Churchill couldn’t stop the film being made he tried to stop it from being shown in British cinemas. This also failed. He never actually forced the issue by resorting to outright censorship. He ultimately deferred to Bracken who counselled that taking an “illogical degree of control over films” would lead to the “the imposition of a compulsory censorship of opinion upon all means of expression” and would provoke “infinite protest” that it would be wise to avoid. “It’s a free country, and you can express your opinion,” Powell reflected, long after the dust had settled, “he did and we did.” Anton Walbrook spoke for both director and writer when he told an irate Churchill, “no people in the world other than the English would have had the courage, in the midst of the war, to tell the people such unvarnished truth.”
Powell and Pressburger both believed in Blimp and refused to compromise its message. As Kevin MacDonald put it, “it took more than a little arrogance and a fierce belief in the value of their project, to turn the arch-conservatives into subversive radicals.” This was down to the circumstances of time and place rather than personal temperament or disposition. The message was subversive to the official military status quo that existed in 1943 and the film was (in some ways) unconventional in structure and presentation, but it was not a politically radical film in any way. If it had become evident that a man like Candy, embodying certain traditional English values and virtues, was, in the climate of 1943, both obsolete and dangerous, then this was not a development that Powell and Pressburger chose to celebrate. Their film was as much of a eulogy as it was a satire. Defending it in a memo sent to the MOI, Powell and Pressburger asked: “What are the chief qualities of Clive Candy?”
They are the qualities of the average Englishman: an anxiety to believe the best of people: fairness in fighting, based upon games: fairness after the fight is over: a natural naivete engendered by class, insularity and the permeability of the English language…We think these are splendid virtues: so splendid that, in order to preserve them, it is worthwhile shelving them until we have won the war.
Blimp was an elegy to a traditional English culture that was already fading fast. Clive’s world, with its genteel codes of conduct and its romantic and almost childlike view of life, turned out to be a fundamental misunderstanding of reality. Its virtues ended up doing more harm than good.
In 1943, Churchill clearly did not have the time or patience to appreciate these subtleties and therefore understand that Powell and Pressburger had given him a great work of war-fighting propaganda. At the heart of this British wartime propaganda film was an unbreakable friendship between a German officer and an English general in which the German had a much better grasp of reality. The Englishness of Blimp was inseparable from its German. Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff was perhaps the principal reason why it was the most lethal British propaganda film of the war. The idea that it would take a former German officer to articulate with chilling clarity the evil of Nazism actually made perfect sense, but it was yet another thing that infuriated Churchill and Bracken. Describing the loss of his children to the Nazi party, Theo was able to expose one of the most insidious aspects of the ideology: the subordination of individual relationships to the state. When children can be counted on to denounce their own parents to the party then its power is secure. For the English, so protective of their privacy and their home lives, this was a sacred violation. Pressburger understood the central importance of this one detail and knew that it would do as much as anything else — even mass murder — to make the propaganda case in his adopted country.
The England of Blimp was an idea that did not need to be explained or described; hints, allusions, and small details were enough. This was a nation glimpsed in manners and rituals, costumes and customs; not a state, a creed, or a nation, but a place, a home. This was very distinct from the collective submission to race or Reich demanded by the Nazi ideal and it was the exiles who really understood the difference. “The truth about me,” Theo tells an internment officer, “is that I’m a tired old man who came to this country because he was homesick.” In the end, the violent, alien creed of the Nazis had filled him with a longing for Edith’s home, “the English countryside, the gardens, the green lawns, the weedy rivers and the trees she loved so much.” Powell described Blimp as “one of the most romantic and remarkable love stories we ever made” and this was true, not simply because of the romance between Theo and Edith or the indestructible bond between Theo and Candy, but because it uncovered the romance that lay hidden inside England and the English.
1944: Kent
…here I am in Kent and Christendom
Among the muses where I read and rhyme
Wyatt, ‘Mine own John Poynz’
In the summer of 1918, Powell went on a trip with his mother and brother, cycling from Kent to Dorset, along the Pilgrim’s Way. It was the end of the Great War and Powell’s father had abandoned the family for France, en route to his final destination at La Voile d’Or in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. “My mother, seeing her world crumble around her,” Powell recalled in A Life in Movies, “was determined to have one last holiday with her sons.” Loading Thermos flasks, a Kodak camera and supplies of food onto their bikes and reciting Chaucer and Kipling to each other (at least, according to Powell), they struck out for Canterbury. Along the way, they stopped at the New Forest and Salisbury Plain and “were not disappointed” by what they found:
New Forest was wonderful: the great oaks, the deer, wild ponies, the miles of unfenced grassy glades and seas of green bracken, already yellowing; the sheer size of it all, the varieties of butterflies dancing in the sunshine, the sensation of being in a part of old England that had not changed or felt a plough since Domesday Book was compiled, the Forest where Red William died of an arrow, shot by an unknown hand, where outlaws could hide and be undetected, where children — for like all good families we had read The Children of the New Forest — could have incredible adventures among Roundheads and Cavaliers and emerge unscathed. It was beyond our dreams.
This late August trek reached its grand spiritual finale with the entrance into the shining city of Powell’s school days. “It wasn’t really loyalty to the “old school” that I felt,” he wrote, “it was loyalty to place”:
to the narrow streets of Canterbury, to the High Street and cattle markets that are no more, to the Christchurch Gate opposite Kit Marlowe’s statue in Butter Market, to Cave’s cafe, to the Cathedral standing amid the hushed green lawns of the precincts, to the vast silence of the nave, where a chair dragged across the echoing flagstones made one think of Becket’s body dragged by armoured men, pierced and slashed with swords, to die before the altar in the side chapel.
A Canterbury Tale, released in 1944 off the back of Blimp’s ambiguous success, has been described as Pressburger’s most personal work, a point confirmed by Powell, who also claimed that he felt an unexpected sense of detachment from the film. Erwin Hillier’s chiaroscuro imagery and translucent nature photography and the music of Allan Gray chiming with the peeling bells of Canterbury Cathedral do a lot of the work here, but it is hard to believe that the film would have looked or felt the same without Powell’s own roots and memories feeding into the final production. When he recalled the landscapes and impressions of his childhood in A Life in Movies he kept coming back to A Canterbury Tale, to his own surprise (“extraordinary how this film keeps cropping up!”).
Powell’s own semi-mythical retelling of his Edwardian childhood, Marcher ancestry and upbringing in the Garden of England (“the orchids and chestnut woods of East Kent, where I was born”) evoke the same ideals that the film presents; at times, his descriptions could just as well be Thomas Colpeper discoursing on clouds and archeology or listening to the footsteps and laughter of Chaucer’s pilgrims as he lies down alone in a corn field. In fact, in A Life in Movies he says as much:
All of this I have tried to get into the last twenty-five minutes of A Canterbury Tale, guided by Emeric’s noble dramatic instinct, inspired to dozens of small touches, glimpses of textures, effects of sunlight and shadow, and above all by love and grateful memory for having been born a Man of Kent.
It is fitting and maybe too obvious that A Canterbury Tale opens with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales prologue, lines that put English vernacular on the literary map. This was not a parochial achievement. Chaucer linked Kent to the continental circuit of royal courts and religious pilgrimage; or, as that other South Country poet Thomas Wyatt put it, “Kent and Christendom.” Wyatt, royal diplomat and disciple of Petrarch, found something slightly different here, of course: an escape from the worldly license and political scheming of the European royal courts. Banished back to Kent by Henry VIII, he discovered freedom and respite in the landscape of his youth:
This maketh me at home to hunt and to hawk
And in foul weather at my book to sit;
In frost and snow then with my bow to stalk.
No man doth mark whereso I ride or go;
In lusty leas in liberty I walk.
In comparison to London, Kent, for Wyatt, was not simply home: it represented a moral rebirth. The Kent countryside was a spiritual sanctuary with Canterbury enforcing ecclesiastical unity across the land, a form of spiritual nation-building that A Canterbury Tale in some ways attempted to emulate. Powell and Pressburger had chosen to make a “what Britain is fighting for” film that paid explicit homage to the English poetic tradition of Chaucer, Shakespeare and the Georgian ‘Nature poets’ who shaped the English imagination of Powell’s childhood. Kent, with its fields and meadows, farmsteads and parish churches, Tudor cottages and oast houses, cart horses and hay bales, evoked, in A Canterbury Tale, a pastoral and spiritual vision shared by Wyatt and Brooke centuries apart. This is what soldiers were supposed to think about before being blown to pieces in France. It was a nostalgic reverie even in 1944. What was important was not the reality of it, but the attempt to portray and therefore define certain elusive spiritual values. “The crucial point is not that English art and literature took refuge in the pastoral and the idyllic,” Scruton writes, “but that it was an art and literature of place. Its inner goal was to internalise the topography of England, to re-mystify it and to deliver it up as home.”
A Canterbury Tale opens with a bucolic view of the pilgrim’s trail being shattered by a tank crashing across the screen, closely followed by the image of a kestrel transforming into a Spitfire. By 1944, Kent had acquired a new national resonance as golden fields and fighter planes were united in the public imagination by the Battle of Britain. As the air war unfolded in August and September most people had no conception of the true nature or scale of the drama that was unfolding. Only afterwards would it be consecrated by Churchill’s oration and Air Ministry propaganda, leaving George Orwell to wonder at “the way in which ‘epic’ events never seem so important at the time.” Powell and Pressburger began shooting before Operation Overlord had commenced and they were still filming while its outcome was in the balance — in many ways it was the central fact of the film. Kent was a temporary home and a spiritual haven for allied forces: beyond this lay the killing fields of Nazi Europe. Death constantly cast a shadow across the idyll that Powell put on screen, but the shimmering landscapes of A Canterbury Tale — as rich in detail as Powell’s own recollections of childhood in A Life in Movies — suggested something beyond the carnage of Normandy: they also promised redemption, deliverance, and rest.
This would be England’s last leading role.
1946: America
All of the things that American film directors received, Powell wanted too, but he wanted them in England. Hollywood had a world-conquering commercial and artistic ambition that Powell experienced first hand working for Rex Ingram on the French Riviera. He considered the Hollywood silent film pioneers to be equal to Buñuel, Lang and Murnau, the European masters of his art. The power of MGM, Warner’s, Paramount and Universal later grew to a scale that was both tempting and tyrannical; Hitchcock, Chaplin, Lang and Wilder all succumbed, but Powell, Pressburger and Korda, for different reasons, did not. The things he admired about America were the same things that many Americans admired about themselves: “their Constitution, their generosity, and their success in creating a real democracy, owned by the people themselves.” Powell’s praise for the rebel republic, like his conspicuous Francophilia (so extreme that he actually spoke French), devotion to Weimar cinema, and his gang of Hungarian and German collaborators, was, if anything, a source of tension at home. “I suppose that it is this strong predilection for and admiration for everything American in the lively arts that makes the English critics and literary ladies and gents, suspicious of me,” he reflected, later on, in professional exile in New England, the only place other than France and Australia that had shown him any respect or consideration during the wilderness years. “And yet,” he added, “I never wanted to go to America and make pictures for them. I wanted to make English ones.”
The original idea for A Matter of Life and Death had come from the MOI and was communicated by Jack Beddington during a lunch arranged with Powell and Pressburger in 1944. This is how Powell recounts the government pitch:
Before America came into the war, our relations with them were excellent. After Pearl Harbour, we were one people. Their war was our war and vice versa. But now that we are winning the war, all that has changed. The top people are already planning strategy in terms of spheres of influence, spheres of business. There’s a danger that the ordinary man and woman in the Services will forget what they had learnt about each other. The old jealousies, misunderstandings and distrusts will return.
What was required was a propaganda film to promote Anglo-American fraternity. “He wants an epic film about two great nations, full of colour and larger than life, with parts for good actors and full of jokes about America and England,” Powell recalled Pressburger responding: “for this fantasy is best.” Pressburger had an idea, but it was a Technicolor idea and, in 1945, all colour film stock had been requisitioned by the MOI for military use (this was the main reason why A Canterbury Tale and I Know Where I’m Going! had been filmed in black and white). This delay was, in itself, significant: A Matter of Life and Death began shooting on the day that Japan surrendered, so the value of the film no longer existed from the perspective of war-fighting or MOI propaganda. But, in other ways, the underlying purpose had become more relevant and acute over time.
What Beddington and Powell and Pressburger did not really consider when they had their first conversation about it was that the issue had already been decided. The British economy had been ruined by the war effort, the Empire was on the verge of disintegration, and the future of the nation could only be guaranteed by the financial support of the United States. The idea of an Anglo-American partnership of equals was an illusion that was more important to the British than the Americans. At the same time that A Matter of Life and Death was doing good business in British cinemas, the realisation was slowly beginning to make itself felt in the national psyche that the country had come out of the war with a significant and irreversible global downgrade.
A Matter of Life and Death was a film that resisted the parochial resentment that otherwise infected the collapsing mental world of the English intelligentsia. Pressburger had written the dialogue of Two Great Nations that Beddington had envisioned, but he had done it before the reality of British global collapse really sank in. The film that came out in 1946 strayed far from the MOI brief. Powell and Pressburger had created an extravagant existential fantasy, a supernatural love story, a philosophical meditation, what Powell called ‘A Big Show.’ The celestial trial to decide the fate of Peter Carter and June concluded the film by confronting the “jealousies, misunderstandings and distrusts” of Beddington’s brief. It would, of course, have no formal “legal” resolution because there was no satisfactory resolution from the vantage point of an Englishman in 1946. For all its lack of rancour and prejudice, and despite the still present illusion of English exceptionalism in the minds of both Powell and Pressburger, A Matter of Life and Death betrayed an insecurity and fatalism about British power at the very moment that it was vanishing. The climactic scenes — Dunkirk, the Blitz, the Battle of Britain, D-Day — had all been canonised. The national myth had reached its endpoint.
This could be felt if not “known” almost immediately and, for the part of Powell that was an optimist, a libertine and an aesthete, it was not a welcome development. What was even less welcome, but in his mind typical, was the way that the English embraced their straightened circumstances. “I wanted to escape from postwar England,” he wrote of this period,
where the inhabitants were already settling down with obvious enjoyment to a programme of austerity. There is nothing the British enjoy so much as being deprived of something.
There was an element of A Matter of Life and Death that was a conscious effort to escape this particular England — the insular island that had always plagued Powell and tried to put him in his place, that distrusted foreigners, was suspicious of art, mocked imagination and punished ambition. Where Blimp had been an “intimate epic,” wrote Powell, “with AMOLAD, we had returned to the Big Show, to the kind of film for which motion pictures were invented.” This was American scale and ambition combined with European extravagance and culture, and was, therefore, in some fundamental way, inimical to British expectations and the narrow world of Wardour Street. For Powell, there was no retreat from here, and, in fact, A Matter of Life and Death marked the beginning of his estrangement from the British cultural establishment. “The end of the war,” he would write, looking back with some regret at a lost moment, “gave a great opportunity to break down the conventional barriers and surge forward.” With the Archers, this is precisely what he did. The three year sequence of A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes was the peak of the Powell-Pressburger collaboration and pushed British cinema in a direction it would never have gone otherwise and, evidently, did not really want to go.
Mixed receptions from film studios, critics and audiences would, over time, harden into a hostility and indifference that lasted for decades. There was a growing and fundamental disconnect between the Archers and the times — their fingers were on the pulse, just about, but they were starting to lose the key critical battles. “We were showing them what we thought was an English speaking film, and they were seeing what looked to them like a European film dubbed into English.” The clash of sensibilities, of styles and cultures, was not obvious at first, and would be disguised by Oscars for Black Narcissus and the cult of Vicky Page. But their loyalty to the art and ambition of the continent would always be there, coursing through the bloodstream of the films, waiting to be exposed, isolated and killed off.
1947: Empire
Black Narcissus was released at the very moment that the British exit from India was collapsing into sectarian conflict and bloodshed; the film was being shown in American cinemas as the massacres of partition unfolded. This was entirely coincidental. Powell and Pressburger did not make the film in order to mark the great event. Black Narcissus was not a piece of imperial propaganda or postcolonial critique, although it contained aspects of both. Powell’s motivation for making the film was somewhat different. “It was wanderlust. It was restlessness,” he wrote in A Life in Movies, “I yearned for exotic people against stupendous backgrounds.” Still committed to the Big Show and still oppressed by England’s slump into shabbiness and poverty, Powell was looking outwards again, seeking adventure, escape, colour, romance, sex. He found some of this in Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel Black Narcissus, although he had to work hard to convince Pressburger to adapt the film script and ended up making the entire picture in England anyway.
Powell’s attitude to Empire was fairly typical of his class and his generation; at least, as typical as it could be for such an idiosyncratic and temperamental aesthete. He belonged to the generation that grew up in the shadow of the Blimps, Clive Candy’s zenith, with all the maps painted red and the heroes and explorers of the empire being fed to young boys by Kipling and Boy’s Own and Chums. This was a world that was physically distant, with a reality that was hazy, half-fictional, obscured in myth, while also being present in everyday life. “My uncles were scattered about all over our casual Empire,” Powell recalled, “Geoffrey in India, Roger in New Zealand, Alan in South Africa, Edward, who at the time was happily traveling for Lee & Perrins and had succeeded in selling Worcestershire sauce to the Chinese, there, here and everywhere.” In 1937, freshly signed on with Korda, “in those far-off days before the Englishman’s world was destroyed for the second time” and “the British Lion’s paw was extended, protectively or offensively, over the East, Far East and Middle East,” Powell lived out his own imperial fantasy, traveling by land, sea and air to Burma to scope out a project that would never be made (The Spy in Black was instead).
Of all the things that The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is — an “intimate epic,” a propaganda film, a satire, a eulogy, a character study, a love story, a treatise on friendship — it is also an affirmation of the national myth, a myth that had, at its heart, the second British Empire. Clive Candy’s story stretches across time and space. Time, despite Powell’s personal “contempt for conventional chronology” (“Time…a mere tyranny,” is the ultimate message of A Matter of Life and Death), is what we see and feel in the film, watching the succession of wars and women and the physical transformation of Candy himself. But those vast spaces of British influence and rule remain off camera even as they dominate the mental atmosphere of every character in the film, including the Germans. Candy is, simply, a product of his time, with a chronology that matches Churchill’s, possibly another reason why he found the film so offensive.
The British Empire in Blimp is the Englishman’s inheritance, an imperial playground, a psychological domain, a cosmic fact. A Matter of Life and Death put the Empire on trial, but this was an abstract thing, rationalised by the gifts that the English had given the world. Black Narcissus was different: it put the imperial principle on trial. This trial was not a legal abstraction, but a physical test, a test that was taken, not at the periphery, but at the heart of Britain’s greatest imperial possession. The film would present the logic of British authority as increasingly hard to sustain. It would do this at the very moment the British were leaving the subcontinent and effectively abandoning the very idea of empire. This was not a revolutionary film, it was not ideological or prescriptive; as Blimp had registered the once immovable fact of empire, Black Narcissus was registering the inescapable fact of its disintegration. There was no triumph in this, but resignation, the melancholy spectacle of human failure and spiritual defeat. As the nuns of the Anglican Order of the Servants of Mary leave Mopu and the monsoon rains break above them, the tone is valedictory and bittersweet. The enterprise, whatever “good intentions” it had, was always doomed to fail, and the locals, subjects of General Toda Rai and his British handler Mr. Dean, despise the nuns for thinking that good intentions would ever be enough. Dean is cynical, jaded, drunk, but also, it turns out, wise in his own world: he always said it was a stupid place to put a nunnery.
Powell was a devotee of Kipling which has some bearing on what happens in Black Narcissus. “I’d love to have something by Kipling engraved on my stone,” he wrote, “but I am afraid it would look like showing off.” “The average person associates Kipling with jingoistic sentiments and cruel military cantonments,” he also wrote, maybe thinking about some of his own propaganda work during the war, “but he was a more complex person than that.” Kipling’s appeal in ‘A Song of the English’ —
Keep ye the Law — be swift in all obedience —
Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford.
Make ye sure to each his own
That he reap where he hath sown;
By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!
— could be etched over the entrance of the Irish Sister Clodagh’s nunnery in Mopu. Mr. Dean is the only visible representative of British power in Mopu and he is as sick of himself as he is of the people he oversees, describing them as “primitive people, like children. Unreasonable children.” Later, an exasperated Sister Clodagh concurs, laying bare the imperial teeth behind her spiritual mission: “We all need discipline. You said yourself they’re all like children. Without discipline we should all behave like children.” (“Oh,” replies Dean, “don’t you like children, Sister?”)
Despite Powell’s Kipling devotion and Pressburger’s Anglophilia, they weren’t making propaganda here. This was not the world of Korda’s imperial epics: Black Narcissus was not Sanders of the River. If it was a product of its time, then it was a very specific moment when the psychological foundations of the British imperial order were disintegrating. Aesthetically and intellectually poised between The Thief of Baghdad and The Small Back Room, Black Narcissus contained elements of Orientalist fantasy and post-colonial reckoning, erotic fairy tale and psychological horror movie. The Pinewood production was itself the product of a dissolving empire. Extras had been recruited from Indian communities in London’s docklands, while Powell took location shots in Leonardslee Gardens in West Sussex among Sir Edmund Loder’s imported Himalayan cedars and azaleas. This was just one of Godden’s objections to Powell’s interpretation of her tale but, in a way, it stood for all the others: where she saw a realistic story about a barely fictional place, he saw a psychological fantasy. Powell didn’t need to go to India to make the film because he had not been looking for realism in the first place. In this way, Black Narcissus was one of his most German productions, haunted by the ghost of Murnau.
In Black Narcissus, the breakdown of Clodagh’s mission is triggered by an explosion of sexual energy, an experience directly rooted in the memory of the British colonialists of the eighteenth century with their concubines, mistresses and native wives. Powell and Pressburger drop enough hints that Dean is not outside this tradition. Clodagh’s school is located in a reclaimed seraglio, the Old General’s royal harem, decorated with erotic frescoes, and the atmosphere of physical decadence and sexual indulgence haunts the Sisters until the moment they leave. When Kanchi, a young peasant girl, expertly seduces the local Prince’s young general with exotic dances and coquettish eyes, the Sisters mission almost immediately falls apart. It is not long before Sister Ruth, driven wild by Dean’s tiny shorts and hairy legs, is discarding her habit, applying thick make-up and throwing herself at his feet. Clodagh’s exasperation and ultimate defeat recalls Reginald Heber, the Bishop of Calcutta, who, confounded in a different way, was left wondering if all he had actually accomplished was to turn Indian boys into “accomplished hypocrites.”
1948: Europe
The way Powell viewed it, the roots of The Red Shoes could be traced straight back to Victorine Studios in Nice in the 1920s. “I can never get over my luck in starting with a great man like Ingram and his Hollywood band,” he recalled:
That target that I aimed at made a pain in the neck to a lot of people, but led a lot of actors, actresses, designers, composers, and cameramen to heights of achievement that they wouldn’t have otherwise attempted. I had worked as an apprentice with the best in Europe and America, but I still wanted more.
With The Archers, Powell, along with Pressburger, had provided them with “the opportunities they had been trained for, that they had been waiting for” — at least, for as long as they were able to do the job that he wanted. In the name of Art, he could be as tyrannical and manipulative as Boris Lermontov. Alfred Junge had just completed the task that Powell set him of recreating the Himalayas at Pinewood and won an Oscar for it, but when Junge objected to some of the demands being made for The Red Shoes he was unceremoniously sacked. He would be replaced by his own assistant Hein Heckroth, a German painter who had designed Tales of Hoffman for Kurt Jooss in Frankfurt and was steeped in the visual innovations of Surrealism, Expressionism and Cubism. Junge, Powell reflected, was “a realist” and, running up to The Red Shoes, this was a death sentence.
This, in a way, simply reflected what happened in the film itself — what, in fact, the film was about. Powell aspired to produce Art with a capital A, and, as a disciple, the standards that he set were punishing. Lermontov demanded total commitment from everybody who worked for him and for his star ballerina Vicky Page this demand was so total that it precluded any other emotional ties or private life. The only outcome of this conflict was surrender or death. The vision was practically totalitarian. Only Julian Craster, an English composer, would dare break the spell and try to drag Page back to some form of real life. Powell’s own artistic principles had been formed in the pioneering twenties and there could be no conscious retreat from this without cost to the work or to the soul. The pitiless refusal to accept limits or to compromise in the pursuit of the perfect image or the big idea became an article of faith that was ruthlessly honoured far beyond the point of personal loyalty or mere sentiment. Anybody could be sacrificed for it: Alfred Junge, Hein Heckroth, Emeric Pressburger, even his wife Franky Reidy. “Art is merciless observation, sympathy, imagination and a sense of detachment that is almost cruelty,” he had written, in the afterglow of a life dedicated to this pursuit of creative ambition at the expense of almost everything else. Cruelty was the price of Art. Somebody had to pay for it. Lermontov would have agreed.
Heckroth symbolised something else for Powell: “my contact with European art, when England, my England, threatened to smother me, or starve me out.” Heckroth was in a European aesthetic tradition that Powell had chosen, or that had chosen him on the interwar Riviera. The German link was, as ever, key: it was from Murnau and Wiene that Rex and Powell had learned to surrender to the lure of “anti-naturalism” and embrace the “imaginatively unreal.” Powell saw the central theme of The Red Shoes as the “conflict between romance and realism” and its practical objective was “to leave naturalism behind” by building on what the Archers had achieved in A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus.
Film was what I had always thought it was — wonderful fantasies superimposed upon life. For me from then on, there was no more realism in films, only surrealism.
He could just as well have framed this as a conflict between England and Europe. The hostile reception that Arthur Rank and his manager John Davis gave The Red Shoes seemed to sum up the English attitude, although it was a view shared by their American distributors who were also “scared shitless” by what they saw. Even when the film was an unexpected international smash hit, the English remained indifferent:
only in England is The Red Shoes just another movie to its distributors, an art movie that won’t lie down, a bit of a nuisance because poor cinemas with enthusiastic patrons are always asking to rent it and they can’t pay very much money.
As London lost its role as the capital of a world empire, Powell noted, it collapsed into “provincial snobbism,” a fate that was already visible on the horizon in 1948.
The war had united Powell and Pressburger and provided them with a cause and a focus. The end of the war offered liberation, an opportunity glimpsed in I Know Where I’m Going! and consummated in A Matter of Life and Death. “War was our spur,” wrote Powell, “and when that sharp incentive was removed we ceased our mad gallop and started to look around us.” Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes were the results. They didn’t just see themselves as the saviours of the British film industry but of an entire continent. “We had won the war. We had lost the Empire. Now we must tighten our belts and save Europe.” “We thought that the best way to save Europe was to make extravagant, romantic British films.” It is typical that contained within their cosmopolitan enthusiasms lay a confident and to some extent complacent sense of British exceptionalism.
1957: Decline
The Powell-Pressburger partnership that began just before the outbreak of the Second World War (The Spy in Black, 1939) formally ended the year after the Suez Crisis (Ill Met By Moonlight, 1957). In a country that was now left with image and fantasy in place of purpose and identity, Powell and Pressburger’s brand of cinema should have been in its element. In fact, as the postwar decade moved on two things happened: their more extravagant fantasies flopped and they returned to the kind of “realism” they had once rejected.
Pessimism about British prospects could be detected in their films even before 1957. A Matter of Life and Death tacitly accepted the American eclipse of British power as early as 1946. Black Narcissus was, among other things, a beautifully timed coda to imperial collapse on the subcontinent. The Red Shoes was escapism and this implied that there was something worth escaping from. In 1949, right off the back of The Red Shoes, The Small Back Room gave some hint of what that might be. Shot in bruised and brooding monochrome — itself a startling visual statement after the Technicolor extravaganzas that preceded it — this insular, bleak story was set during the war but actually reeked of postwar malaise. The London that it depicted was the “dingy and parochial” national capital that Powell had described elsewhere: a city of cramped lodgings, packed tube trains, smoky jazz clubs, bare offices in desperate need of redecorating and Whitehall meeting rooms disturbed by the noise of building work. This was not the heroic or pastoral England glimpsed in Colonel Blimp or A Canterbury Tale but a new England gestating during wartime (see Contraband) and finally emerging almost fully formed in the 1950s. The Small Back Room hinted at a new urban culture of nightlife, consumption and sexual permissiveness. The film was a commercial failure, Powell claimed, because nobody wanted to be reminded of the war just after it had ended. Their original Denham/MOI propaganda films had been active agents in the national mythmaking of the war years. They had contributed to the creation of these new myths and helped to write the final heroic chapter of British history. But, in 1949, Britain wanted to move on. The Small Back Room was not only too cynical and pessimistic, it was too soon.
When Powell and Pressburger did return to the war in 1956, this gloomy foreboding had been replaced by something different. By the early 1950s, everything had changed again: suddenly the shine had worn off the New Jerusalem and the British future did not look so resilient. Illusions died hard. The combination of American dominance and Soviet threat led to a remilitarisation of the economy and, to a degree, of popular culture. What was left was an opportunity to retell the old stories, to affirm what had gone before. This was an indulgence: a recycling of the old myths as a way to boost morale and deflect the bleak reality of relative decline. In one way, The Battle of the River Plate (1956) and Ill Met By Moonlight (1957) would serve the same function as the Bond films that followed in the 1960s: to obscure national decline. In another way, they stood alongside the wave of 1950s war films that struck a fine balance between reverence and revisionism (The Dam Busters, Dunkirk, Ice Cold in Alex, The Colditz Story) but which often did this with more imagination and assurance than Powell and Pressburger could now manage. The sad fact is that the total artistic triumph of Tales of Hoffman and the commercial failure of the gorgeous and underrated Oh…Rosalinda! had exhausted them. Their last two films were not a culmination or a reckoning but a distraction from this bleak reality.
Powell was given access to HMNZS Achilles and HMS Cumberland by the Royal Navy for The Battle of the River Plate but could think of nothing more interesting to do than shoot them in the manner of a stylised documentary. Accordingly, Hein Heckroth, Powell and Pressburger’s great hero of the “surrealism, not realism” phase, was unceremoniously axed from the production just as Alfred Junge had been from The Red Shoes in 1948. Powell, who had been infatuated with the Royal Navy since he was a child, had a good time and, as he did whenever he was having a good time, wrote a book about it. Pressburger had less to do. The final product was a kind of grand neoclassical monument that, in its closing (admittedly magnificent) shot of the three warships lined up in silhouette against an enormous setting sun, revealed itself to be what it really was: an elegy for British power.
Ill Met By Moonlight, on the other hand, was like a precursor to the Bond franchise. Based on a book by W. Stanley Moss, it restaged the abduction of German Commander Heinrich Kreipe by Moss and Patrick Leigh Fermor on Crete in 1944 and, in so doing, told a tale of covert military ingenuity and public school panache that recalled the imperial adventure stories of Powell’s youth: the kind of material partly satirised and partly celebrated in films like Blimp and Black Narcissus. There was one thing that linked both Moonlight and River Plate to their earlier war films: the idea of international collaboration. The covert operations of Moss and Fermor could only succeed with the aid and hospitality of the Cretans. As Fermor reminds Kreipe, who considers them savages and protests at being left in their charge, “we are all in the hands of Cretans here.” The victory at River Plate was, of course, itself the result of collaboration between the Royal Navy and the Royal New Zealand Navy.
One of these films was a commercial triumph and the other a personal catastrophe, but both served as distractions from the reality of decline. The Powell and Pressburger partnership disintegrated at the very moment a younger generation was preparing to sweep away their brand of fantasy and surrealism with its own more militant and pitiless return to politics and realism. The Royal Film Performance of River Plate took place months after the Royal Court Theatre premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, the first shot in an aesthetic revolution that would consign the works of Powell and Pressburger to temporary oblivion. The establishment recognition conferred upon them in 1956 was received just as it was beginning to lose credibility and authority. Simultaneously, they discovered that their much coveted independence had left them exposed in the brutal world of Rank, Goldwyn and Selznick. They no longer had industry support (Korda died in 1956) and were defenceless in the face of a new postwar commercial regime. They were romantics in a way that would be rejected by the more radical political realism of the British New Wave and eclipsed by a new countercultural romanticism that would make self-consciously “highbrow” productions like The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffman look dated, elitist, even a bit ridiculous.
The narrative of British decline — the anti-myth — had led to this point. Powell was no Declinist and resisted the cultural and political despair to which his generation and class succumbed. He did not choose to leave England to make his films while he still thought there was something worth fighting for. But, by the time he came to Battle of the River Plate and Ill Met By Moonlight, he was struggling to adapt to a country that could not contain the full force of his imagination and ambition. The one exposure to this Powell led to an explosion and, ultimately, artistic exile. The disintegration of his career in England did not happen in complete isolation. Tales of Hoffman benefited from a final flurry of support from the British elite which successfully pushed it to New York and Cannes, but the last attempt by a British government to protect British films had provoked a commercial war with Hollywood that ended in abject defeat.
On this subject, Powell was willing to adopt a despondent tone of his own. Talking to Gavin Miller for an Arena documentary in 1980, he would describe the replacement of J. Arthur Rank by a “new generation of Rankers” as the reason why the British film industry had died. “Nobody’s got any guts, nobody’s a gambler, nobody can see why they should turn over in their sleep and back films,” he complained. There was, as ever, plenty of revisionism here, but also some truth. It may well have been the case that nobody in England would put their money behind Powell after Peeping Tom, but it was also the case that nobody in England in the 1960s or 1970s would have put their money behind another Tales of Hoffman either.
1960: Decay
The ferocious reaction to Peeping Tom was a career cataclysm that overshadowed the very existence of his other film of the period The Queen’s Guards, already in production when Peeping Tom was released. The two films appeared to be as far apart from each other as The Red Shoes had been from The Small Back Room. Despite the extreme contrast in tone, they shared a subterranean despair: an unspoken presumption that any sense of national cohesion or pride had dissolved and been replaced by a void. The American film historian William K. Everson was practically alone in noting any link at all between them: “it’s sad that two of his most personal films should be so out of step with the then current audience fashions,” he wrote, looking back a couple of decades later: “Peeping Tom anticipated them by too great a margin, while The Queen’s Guards offered respect for the past and sorrow at its passing when others were preaching anger and revolt.” These were, in different ways, the two bleakest films that Powell ever made. If The Battle of the River Plate and Ill Met By Moonlight were products of an imperial nation retracting and in decline, then Peeping Tom and The Queen’s Guards could only have been made in an atmosphere of moral and institutional decay. Both too early and too late to connect to the promise of the new decade, Powell had presented the England of 1960 as stagnant, exhausted, corrupt, decadent, and ridiculous.
For Powell, the opportunity The Queen’s Guards offered was as straightforward and promising as The Battle of the River Plate. “As a boy, the Royal Navy had been my first love, and I’d always wanted to make a film about the navy,” he wrote, contemplating the possibilities presented by The Pursuit of the Graf Spee. When the idea for The Queen’s Guards landed on his desk, “I brought it. I suppose that it was inevitable…like Rudyard Kipling, I am a sucker for stories about the services.” During production, Powell shadowed the Guards as they took part in a NATO exercise in Libya and the conditions and background of this expedition gave the game away: the very existence of NATO was a potent symbol of a new post-imperial reality. Like the British film industry, British military power could no longer hope to be truly independent. Survival required interdependence. In the background of all of this, and in the immediate future, there was the final, scrappy, squalid end of empire: Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Aden, the chaos of Palestine. This was the new situation in which The Queen’s Guards was made — it was, in fact, a twilight film.
The exhaustion and incoherence of The Queen’s Guards may well have been the result of a bad script and the psychological knock that Peeping Tom inflicted on Powell, but it is hard to see how he could have made the kind of patriotic military film he clearly wanted to in 1960. The 1940s had gone: there was no reality to draw on. The original script placed the action during the Mau Mau rebellion but this was replaced by a fictional Arab state in the throes of a violent coup d’etat when it was discovered that the Queen’s Guards had never been to Kenya. Despite this, The Queen’s Guards presented itself as an almost apolitical film, the contemporary intrigues of the early Cold War and the politics of decolonisation simply providing material for a tale of personal redemption. Powell was not really interested in the grubby details of politics beyond the kind of society gossip that captivated the Tory elite. As a good Kipling disciple, he accepted the British role in any postcolonial situation as part of the nation’s historic duties. His lingering documentary shots of the Trooping of the Guard would set the tone of a film that put ritual and ceremony at the heart of Britain’s post-imperial identity. This was an attempt to re-mystify the monarchy and therefore the land — a different way of reaching the same end as A Canterbury Tale in 1944. But there was almost nothing behind it. The ceremony was no longer an expression of pure power; it was a stylised facade, a ritual that existed for itself, an empty tradition brutally severed from its own history.
Like the British 1950s, The Queen’s Guards was overshadowed by the legacy of the Second World War. It still seemed inescapable. In its own way, the film attempted to escape this legacy, not by disowning it, but by coming to terms with it emotionally and psychologically. This was the only way to let it go: to exercise the ghosts. In this case, the ghost was the dead brother of Guardsman John Fellowes; the dark secret that had to be confronted was his execution in retaliation for shooting an unarmed prisoner. Even though his memory was finally laid to rest at the end of the film, in all the important ways nothing moved on. If Powell had signed on to this project with visions of creating an “epic of military glory” then what he finally delivered, intentionally or otherwise, was a coda to the collapse of British power. In comparison to the logistical and technological grandeur of the British aircraft carriers in the propaganda short The Volunteer (1944) or even the faded romance of River Plate’s warship reenactment, the military action displayed in The Queen’s Guards was small, piecemeal and amateurish. The image of John’s father Captain Fellowes, crippled and moving around his apartment with the aid of a winch system constructed by his dead, disgraced elder son, contained all of the frustration, cruelty, pathos and, in an obvious and even sadistic way, the reduced circumstances of Britain at the end of the 1950s. This was not so much the “sad farewell” that Everson described, but a dispirited glimpse of a new reality.
Pressburger, of course, was a true Royalist until the end of his life (in the 1980 Arena documentary, he blows off Martin Scorsese in favour of a Buckingham Palace garden party); for Powell, it was all part of the show, the romantic spectacle of England, the grand narrative of British power. The last film he shot in Britain was supposed to be a glorious tribute to this tradition, rather than its epitaph. It is notable, and startling, that immediately before this, with Peeping Tom, he had managed to present a picture of England that English critics and the British establishment really did not want to see. The descent from the deck of the HMS Ajax to the Soho lodgings of a murdered prostitute was steep and shocking and Powell would not be forgiven for it. Among other things, Peeping Tom had continued to fight Pressburger’s “war on materialism” even though the war had already been lost. The morbid psychosis of Mark Lewis was both the product of a sadistic father and a pathology nurtured and given a unique opportunity for murderous expression by the new consumer culture of postwar Britain. Powell had no real feel for pop culture (witness the toe-curling cameo of a jiving Jess Conrad in The Queen’s Guards) but his description of Peeping Tom as “Pop Art” made sense when placed alongside the morbid irony of Richard Hamilton or the fetish objects of Allen Jones. Peeping Tom was, of course, a pop culture product itself, and, in the manner of Hamilton and Jones, a subversive and self-reflexive one — a lurid horror movie shot in sleazy Eastman Colour. David Pirie would later describe it as the third entry of Anglo-Amalgamated’s “Sadian trilogy” after Arthur Crabtree’s Horrors of the Black Museum and Sidney Hayers’s Circus of Horrors and it did partly belong here, but Powell was, as ever, at an odd angle to his immediate environment.
The British Board of Censors, demanding cuts before the critics got to see the final product, understood that Powell had made a serious film and treated it with respect. Following the premier, English critics would accuse Powell of being a sadist — they were not necessarily wrong about this — but they genrally failed to credit the fact that Powell knew how to use violence for metaphysical ends and always had done:
When Dr. Reeves has his motorcycle accident [in A Matter of Life and Death] we see him burnt alive, one of the most sympathetic characters in the story. It is the same with The Red Shoes, when Moira Shearer leaps to her death on the railway line and has her feet cut off by the train, and when Marius kisses her legs and the torn and grimy tights. It shocks the audience into sensibility.
What else was he trying to do with Peeping Tom — “a story about a man who kills with his camera”? Viewers may well have been “shocked” to have had their own voyeurism reflected back to them with such clinical and unflinching clarity and contempt. The film portrayed its psychopathic subject with some measure of pity and understanding while reversing the moral judgement back onto those watching. It told its audience that they were also products of a sick society: corrupt consumers, nihilistic materialists, ersatz pornographers, connoisseurs of violence. Maybe in the 1940s, the British deserved to be lifted and even extolled, but now, in 1960, with Peeping Tom, they had got the film that they deserved. The Queen’s Guards may have acted as a corrective to this, but, for whatever reason, it failed in the task. On top of the new consumer society there was a congealed crust of pageantry which only had one real role left — to disguise the rapid social and economic and moral decay of the nation. In very different ways, within the space of two years, Powell had effectively killed off the national myth that he had spent decades serving. Whatever was left of the spirit of One of Our Aircraft is Missing and A Canterbury Tale was finally buried by Peeping Tom and The Queen’s Guards.
