The Sunday Intertitle: Ship in a Battle

Watching FOR FREEDOM got me curious to re-see THE BATTLE OF THE RIVER PLATE, the Archers’ penultimate film. Michael Powell always stood by this one, reserving his disappointment for ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT, into which he’d wanted to pour mythic and romantic feeling, but which Emeric Pressburger had treated as more of a straight commando yarn.

I think they’re both uninteresting by the Archers’ previous standards, and I say that with plenty of disappointment myself, as a great Powell & Pressburger worshipper. I can see that TBOTRP is by far the more ambitious film, though — a gigantic undertaking with real life ships, studio interiors, model shots (impressive, but the surface tension of water will screw you up every time), second unit stuff of Monte Video Montevideo, and a colossal cast of speaking parts, some of them very starry.

Powell did such a big research job on it that, some years later when his movie career was more or less washed up, he turned it into a book, which I used to own, but then I loaned it to my brother and that was that.

With music by Brian Easdale and cinematography by Christopher Challis — whose work was every bit as good as Jack Cardiff’s but who had the misfortune of working on less brilliant P&P films (TALES OF HOFFMANN and THE SMALL BACK ROOM are the best of his batch, and nothing to be sneezed at, but OH… ROSALINDA!!, THE ELUSIVE PIMPERNEL, and GONE TO EARTH, while they have their fans, don’t stack up too well compared to the films of the ’40s) — the movie is what they call impressively mounted, and has a real sweep for the first two-thirds. But then the real-life story ends with the Graf Spee, our antagonist pocket battleship, trapped in a harbour and then scuttled by its own captain (and embarrassed and grudging Peter Finch). This makes for a diminuendo rather than a climax, and to narrate the events the writers are forced, or anyhow choose, to literally add commentary tracks from men with telescopes and binoculars, and an American radio announcer, plus assorted bit-players including Christopher Lee.

And then, while the black-and-white, no-music approach of ONE OF OUR AIRCRAFT IS MISSING gave that film a consistent veneer of realism (British 40s movie realism, anyhow), and BLACK NARCISSUS went the opposite route by filming everything in the studio (the few nature reserve exteriors let the thing down a little), that kind of consistent approach wasn’t available here — the stylistic Overton window of 50s VistaVision naval pics positively dictates that you must use real ships AND studio interiors AND model shots, which can never be forced to fit together seamlessly.

The film hews fairly close to the established facts, and the performances are decidedly less flamboyant than usual, but with the Technicolor and the orchestra and the necessary artifice, the movie can’t really get you anywhere close to the impact of something like DAS BOOT, even if much of what we see IS real.

The film slightly upset me right from the start, by telling us we were going to get a short list of not everybody, but some key people, who helped in its making. And then we get a very long list, but before it’s halfway over the credits start appearing plastered on top. I suppose if you’re a window who lost her husband on the HMS Esse and you’re watching out for his name, you might just about be able to spot it, but it proved impossible for me to read the respectful text with Anthony Quayle being thrust at me. This seems to get at something pretty basic about nearly all post-war war movies — they have a dash of solemnity and insist that we must all respect the noble sacrifices made, but then, with their every other breath, they trample all over the very notion of respect.

I don’t come to Powell/Pressburger for respect and solemnity, actually, I come for barmy excess, romanticism and genius. The only really quirky thing here is that the battleships get their own cast list. I do like that.

I couldn’t spot the real Captain Dove from FOR FREEDOM: he’s supposedly in there, watching Bernard Lee play him as a bluff Yorkshireman (he was a fairly posh Londoner). It was tricky spotting anyone, as the film (shot in VistaVision) keeps them all rather at arm’s length. Emphasising group unity rather than individualism is fine, but when we DO get a close-up it doesn’t seem to be for any real reason. A sad decline, when one recalls the ecstatic, agonized faces of THE RED SHOES or BLACK NARCISSUS.

The war energized the British film industry and gave it a subject to be serious about, really for the first time, without forgetting the need to entertain (tiptoeing between the censor’s taboos had previously left British filmmakers little chance to say anything meaningful). This passion lasted for about five years after the war and could be applied to fresh subjects, but by the mid-fifties the impetus had waned and bureaucracy was reasserting its pre-war stranglehold. If you want to understand Powell’s downfall, PEEPING TOM isn’t the place to start — you could either take the box-office disappointment of TALES OF HOFFMANN as the first real disaster, or look at the films P&P made in reaction to that failure — the films where they started to betray their own genius.

THE BATTLE OF THE RIVER PLATE stars P.O. T. Crean R.N.; Colonel Brighton; Howard Beale; King Richard the Lion-Heart; King Aeetes; ‘M’; Augustus Snodgrass; Sir Andrew Ffoulkes; Ghanshyam; Don Jarvis; John Steed; Stub Ear; Nayland Smith; Fu Manchu; The Master; Robert Burns; Xerxes (uncredited); Bob Rusk; General Streck; Sgt. Wilson; Lyndon B. Johnson; Heironymous Merkin; Alan-a-Dale; Cavendish ‘The Surveyor’; and Captain Dove.