Was there any film director who was at the same time both more British and yet more international in spirit than Michael Powell? On the one hand, he made the most bucolic, most pastoral of British films, celebrating the landscape, the character, and ambition of Britain, yet often took on exotic subjects and locations. Only Powell would have made Black Narcissus, or set a war movie in Holland or Canada. He often blended both elements in one film, to the ire of contemporaneous critics. Take The Small Back Room, a petite black and white drama which comes within the midst of several expansive color exocticisms, such as The Red Shoes (1948) and The Elusive Pimpernel (1950). There is hardly a more “British” film than this somber character study set during WWII. Yet Powell interrupts the proceedings at one point to entertain an expressionistic sequence that shows its hero grappling with alcoholism, a sequence with giant Scotch bottles and long shadows that comes across, as many others have pointed out, like the Dali sequence in Spellbound and the DTs in The Lost Weekend.

Of course there wasn’t only Powell, there also Emeric Pressburger, yet it wasn’t this Hungarian emigre who brought continentalism to the films, but Powell himself who was impatient with the stodginess of British cinema. They were one of the great partnerships brought together by an intuitive third party, like Laurel and Hardy and Wilder and Brackett. Pressburger is pegged as the writer half of the partnership, but as Charles Barr asserts convincingly in his audio commentary track for The Small Back Room, Pressburger was also important in the post-production stage, supervising the editing and helping to shape the final film. Pressburger anchored the film front end and back while Powell embarked on flights of fancy.

Powell seems simultaneously British and un-British. His films dwell on proper yet eccentric characters, yet veer toward the exotic. He embraced color, sparkling, smashing color, as an antidote to British grayness, and his films aren’t “smooth” and commercial; for that turn to Hitchcock, or compare Powell’s Contraband to Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent to see the difference between English oddity and a highly attuned commercial sense and vision. Contraband’s scrambled egg story makes it less predictable in a commercial sense but also interesting for all that, since it reflects a sensibility that refutes gross commercialism. As a storyteller, Powell is interested in process, procedures, details, mechanics, of the times and dates of things. In this he is a little like David Lean, whose career interests mirror Powell, going from intimate “small” films to elaborate international tales, though Lean, a location masochist, really went to difficult locales whereas Powell like to construct them on a set. Powell was also interested in “the arts” as a general, uplifting enterprise, like any well-meaning social engineer from the 1950s, and his films can be as “meaningful” or politically pointed as those of Stanley Kramer. Still, Powell’s films represent a stimulating blast from the past yet with a thoroughly modern sensibility, and they are a tonic to anyone feeling bogged down by the sameness and anonymity of modern films.

Based on a recent survey, I’ll guess that Powell is attracting among the best film criticism and writers, or at least was during a phase in the late 1990s. Though the scholars don’t seem to be much interested in Powell’s notion of “the composed film,” which goes unmentioned, for example, in Ian Christie’s excellent, fun Arrows of Desire, you can feel the excitement of the scholars that surges though their prose style and ideas and their attention to details. This wasn’t always the case, as is well known from the critical literature. Movie, my favorite film magazine, placed him in the fifth tier of directors, as part of a general antipathy toward British filmmakers in favor of the more vigorous American artists (with the exception, it appears, of the late Seth Holt). As a youth I inherited this prejudice, which I was recently able to trace back to questions and remarks that Truffaut made to Hitchcock in their interview book. All an aesthetic bigot needs, however, is a dose of Powell films to see that at least in this one filmmaker British filmmaking was in good hands.

To that end, there is an agreeable influx of Powell on DVD, not as much as presumably is available in R2, but enough to help fill out the collection or introduce Powell to newcomers. The earliest films offered up chronologically are two that are part of a package called Classic British Thrillers, from MPI. The offerings are two Powell quota quickies, of which Powell did about 15 in seven years, in this case Red Ensign from 1935, and The Phantom Light, from the same year. Red Ensign concerns a Scots industrialist impeded in his vision for implementing a new ship design by a recalcitrant board and a ruthless competitor. It’s curious how similar the Powell QQs, made without Pressburger, are to the films later made in collaboration with him. Red Ensign features a dynamic brash manipulator who is like a rough sketch of The Red Shoes’s Lemontov, who also steals another guy’s girl. The Phantom Light rhymes with Canterbury Tale. Like it, Light concerns a trio of new visitors to a town where they set forth to solve a local mystery (in this case a haunted lighthouse beam that lures ships to wreckage), whose progenitor has a watchful, though here dire, supervisory view over the village. Red Ensign is also filled with in jokes and quirky passages that appear to reflect attitudes on Powell’s mind about some of his employers and other people. The Phantom Light reveals that Powell is something of a leg man, with its insistent tendency to expose Binnie Hale’s gams through much of the running time.

A third film on the disc is the James Mason vehicle, The Upturned Glass, which the actor produced and which stars his wife as well. It’s a complex thriller from 1947 that juggles time in a rather modern way, anticipating Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, for example, and in its medical crisis passages and philosophy near the end, offers pallid versions of some of the concerns that preoccupied Powell and Pressburger in A Matter of Life and Death, and others. The film has an excellent score by Muir Mathieson and Bernard Stevens.

MPI’s Classic British Thrillers has no extras to speak of, but good transfers (for a contrast compare the film’s to Kino’s washed out Contraband disc, which came out in 2001), and hit the street, if you can find it, on Tuesday, July 29, 2008.

From the QQs, Powell went on to make The Edge of the World, which brought him to the attention of Alexander Korda, who hooked him up with Pressburger for The Spy in Black and Contraband, before assigning the director to help out with colorful, big budgeted The Thief of Bagdad, the kids film that remakes a Douglas Fairbanks silent. Criterion released a double disc version of the film on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008, and it should be a treat for those who favor “sense of wonder” films.

Personally, I’ve never been much interested in fantasy films, animation, or the sense of wonder, which is a matter of personal taste, though I do note that sense of wonder buffs seem to spend more time looking at blurs along blue screen image edges than expressing interest in stories. Thus, for me, most of contemporary cinema is closed off, of complete uninterest, and Thief of Bagdad is just a movie for children. It has a modicum of interest as a film that filmmakers found influential, and bits of Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Spielberg, and Lucas can be entertainingly tracked down in it. For example, in its domineering villain and kidnapping of a princess, and its partnership between a childlike kid and a cocksman, it presages Star Wars, and it anticipates other Powell images, such as the all-seeing eye, which is echoed in Powell from the camera obscura in A Matter of Life and Death and in the eye imagery of Peeping Tom.

Enthusiast Bruce Eder gives background in his audio commentary track, and Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese share another one without overlapping. Curiously, in his commitment to showing how much the film influenced him, Coppola doesn’t mention the horse’s head that sits in the lap of the toy obsessed sultan. SoW boys will be satisfied with the video interviews with special effects experts Craig Barron, Dennis Muren, and Ray Harryhausen (who says he once saw the film’s giant spider lying discarded in a corner at the National General studios). But for Powell buffs, the treat is the war propaganda film that Powell helped make immediately after working on Thief, The Lion has Wings. It is antique and creaky, and was evidently screened as a comedy in Germany at the time, but good to have for completists. The disc also features a stills gallery and the original trailer, plus the usual 22-page booklet with cast and crew, chapter titles, transfer information, and two excellent essays, by Andrew Moor and Ian Christie.

Powell and Pressburger were eager to make The 49th Parallel, which was released in 1941, and became a Criterion two-disc set on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007, but which was, surprisingly, set in Canada, as it follows a team of German sailors on the run from an abandoned U boat who crisscross the nation, proselytize, meet resistance, and finally, as their numbers are reduced, face capture. Again it is a typically weird P&P movie, wholly unexpected in tone, setting, and more nuanced in political import than you expect for its time. P$&P essentially remade it from the other, but more “British” perspective a few years later in “One of Our Aircraft is Missing.”

Bruce Eder provides another informative audio commentary track, and the disc also presents a segment of the British news program Arena on Powell and Pressburger, “A Very British Affair,” supervised by Gavin Millar. Besides the trailer, there is also Powell’s further contribution to the war effort, The Volunteer, a recruitment film made with much input from Ralph Richardson, and a lengthy selection of audio tapes of Powell dictating or reading from his autobiography in process.

The most recent Powell film to hit DVDs and the immediate cause for these meditations is the P&P firm’s 1949 film The Small Back Room, one I’d surprisingly never heard of. Based on a novel by Nigel Balchin, one of those numerous British writers who toiled in near obscurity to the rest of the world but whose work enriched Brit Lit all through the 20th Century, the movie essentially tells the story of a man rendered impotent and his eventual achievement of potency. The man is Sammy Rice (Powell regular David Farrar), and fortunately he has the love of a good woman, Susan (the exotic Kathleen Byron) who also works with Sammy in an obscure, non-military science unit during the world (the film is set in 1943, in real time while P&P were making A Canterbury Tale). Sammy’s impotence is symbolized by a “tin foot,” a replacement right out of Maugham for a disablement incurred as a youth. It’s unclear if Sammy and Susan are having sex, though they live together, but she remains steadfast, and also sticks with him through bouts of alcoholism, which helps him forget his foot, and perhaps even his homosexual tendencies, which are hinted at obliquely in a nightclub scene (gay guilt wrestling also played a role in the book on which The Lost Weekend was based). Sammy’s specialty is fuses, and one main plot threat has a young soldier, Capt. Dick Stuart (the once venerable Michael Gough), urging Sammy to help with a series of cunning bombs dropped by the Germans that have been killing children. The extremely tense final movement of the film has Sammy finally coming up against one of the small cunning German explosives (those who recall the television series Danger UXB from 1979 will have a sense of the scene’s flavor). Naturally, a triumph over the phallic shaped device will also restore Sammy’s potency, but leave it to Powell and Pressburger to make even their “happy ending” ambiguous and perplexing.

The Small Back Room is a throwback, in a sense, to the kind of British film that people love and which P&P didn’t really make, set in a rain swept yet cozy world of cramped apartments and bureaucratic jobs, where the spirit of England is kept high despite privation and tormentous neuroses that don’t stop for the war. It’s a Brief Encounter sort of world, but P&P wouldn’t settle for such a thing. For one, they would steam it open like a rancid envelope and find out what’s really inside, and for another, they would find every opportunity to expand its playing field with passages of crazy visual extravagance. Over several viewings The Small Back Room grew to be a rich, nuanced work, and clearly one of Powell and Pressburger’s best films.

Supplements are a tad minimal for this film compared to the other recent Powell discs, but lead off with an excellent audio commentary track by film scholar Charles Barr, for whom Powell is one of several specialities. Barr is the first person I’ve heard mention average shot lengths in a track, and there is a nice moment when he pays tribute to the late Raymond Durgnat, one of my favorite writers and for a long time the lone voice of support for Powell amid critics of the 1960s.

Supplements include again audio tapes of Powell dictating or reading from his autobiography in progress, of which the chapter about a deleted scene is especially interesting, plus a video interview with Chris Challis, the cinematographer. The 16-page insert has an essay by Sight and Sound editor Nick James. The Small Back Room hits the streets on Tuesday, August, 19, 2008.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.