Cypriots in the Streets

I’ve always felt that Michael Powell was slightly wrong about THE BATTLE OF THE RIVER PLATE (he liked it) and slightly wrong about ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT (he didn’t like it) — IMBM seems to me the stronger and more interesting film, TBOTRP the duller and more conventional.

Cyprus was experiencing political instability as the Archers prepared their film, so it’s shot in the French Alps, with a lot of production design work going in to make it feel Greek. A few Greek actors might have helped, but Powell had always cast with little care to national or even racial consistency — getting Mikis Theodorakis to do the music was a very smart idea though. Powell later said that he spent so much effort faking up Crete that he had no energy left to be creative.

Still, allowing for all that, there’s a greater spirit of romance and adventure to this film than its predecessor mustered. It centres on a group of “amateur” commandos and their Greek partisan accomplices, working together as a tight team — the very spirit of comradeship which attracted Powell to filmmaking as a boy, and which the best Archers films had often celebrated, whether in the military, the ballet, or some other world. (BLACK NARCISSUS is a rare example of teamwork going wrong, the group disintegrating due to the distracting beauty of the world — perhaps also a danger for filmmakers?)

It’s strange that a man of such boundless energy — still visible when Powell was in his 70s, with the stride of a youngster — should be defeated by the challenge of re-dressing some villages, but Powell is perhaps more a studio man than a location one, though you get marvelous scenic stuff in many of his films. He would choose his sites without regard for difficulty of access, we’re told. But the South of France in THE RED SHOES (where Powell had done a lot of his growing up), though lovingly shot by Jack Cardiff, is not the interesting stuff. The best bits of GONE TO EARTH, set in Shropshire Kent, Powell’s birthplace and childhood home, are studio closeups — you can basically switch the film off after the stunning pre-credits sequence in my opinion.

The only room this movie gives for Powell’s sense of fantasy is in the frequent special effects shots of the moon, which are gorgeous, the loveliest I’ve ever seen, aiming for realism but achieving poetry.

It’s probably a good thing that Powell was compelled to shoot in b&w, as there’s a lot of day-for-night footage which tends not to work in colour. And his command of the VistaVision frame seems more assured this time — at least we get some closeups, and they’re dramatically well placed.

An unusual thing about this war picture is the almost total absence of death. Christopher Lee turns up as a Nazi early on (instead of a commando, which is what he’d actually been, but he also spoke excellent German so his casting here makes sense) and gets offed as usual (I can’t prove that Lee died in more movies than anyone else but it FEELS true [if we discount stuntmen, who sometimes die multiple times in a film — come to think of it, in some DRACULAs Lee manages that too]). After that, it’s war without tears, a rather jolly affair in which the tension — will kidnapped German general Marius Goring succeed in laying a trail for his compatriots to follow? — is largely faked up by a cunning narrative device.

Powell was very unhappy with the performances, and maybe he had a hard time with Dirk Bogarde — not everyone warmed to DB, or he to them. But I think the decision to make his character a kind of T.E. Lawrence of Cyprus, dandyish in his national dress, is enjoyable. David Oxley, as his chum, arguably presents insufficient contrast, though — he’d immediately sink down into nameless supporting stooges, and did very little film work after this. Most of the fun comes from people like John Cairney and Michael Gough as only slightly unlikely Cretans, and Cyril Cusack steals the show as an undercover man who’s gone native and smells badly of goat.

ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT stars Dr. Simon Sparrow; Conductor 71; Sir Hugo Baskerville; Latrine; Glaucus; Philip Truscott; Gen. Fulgencio Batista; Master of the Moon; Hylas; Gerald Croft; Sir Henry Baskerville; Dr. Petrie; Col. Lebotov; and Illya Kuryakim.

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.

When the monsters die

When the Universal monster movies went into their decadent phase (the barbaric phase is the cool one — the civilised phase, who needs it?) they started teaming them up, right? But when Hammer horror went into its decadent phase, it was all tits, all the time, and then Dracula met hippies and kung fu. Quite a different vibe.

OK, the slogan does kind of justify the idea. If only the film did.

I wonder what it would have been like if they’d emulated Universal (as they already had in many ways, down to the choice of monsters) and started combining franchises? I guess combining FRANKENSTEIN with DRACULA would force you to choose whether Peter Cushing played Victor Frankenstein or Van Helsing. But if Frankenstein met the werewolf, he could reanimate Oliver Reed… of course, I still maintain that mad science doesn’t naturally fit with lycanthropy or vampirism (HOUSE OF DRACULA, to its credit, did try to sell us on the idea that both were medical conditions which could be treated by your friendly neighbourhood mad scientist, which sort of addresses that issue.)

Of course, by the time depseration was settling in at the House of Horror, Ollie was probably out of their price range, but maybe you could tempt him back by playing on his past relationship with the studio. Plus free beer and all the goldfish you can eat!

The werewolf could bite Frankenstein and turn him into a werewolf too, so that every time he makes a monster he feels compelled to tear into pieces the moment it gets off the slab. A study in frustration.

It might look… something like… THIS! (No, it wouldn’t.)

It might have been interesting to merge the Karnstein saga (THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, LUST FOR A VAMPIRE, TWINS OF EVIL) with DRACULA, and certainly there would be no clash of genre or tone or mythos, but equally it’s hard to see how the results would be markedly different from a regular DRAC sequel. Maybe if Ingrid Pitt’s Carmilla was in some way set up in opposition to Chris Lee’s Count?

I’m quite a big fan of BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB, one of the best films made by a director who died before finishing it (see also A DANDY IN ASPIC) but generally I find both Universal and Hammer’s MUMMY sequels to be a snooze. That one mixes things up in an intriguing way (hint: there’s no real mummy in it). So, if we admit that the shambling gauze-swathed zombie is a rather limited character, perhaps relegating him to co-star status is a good solution? Dracula and the Mummy strike me as comparable revenant figures who could conceivably meet and, who knows, hit it off, maybe get married? CARRY ON SCREAMING already positioned a sarcophagus-occupant in a mad scientist’s lair, awaiting reanimation, so one could also imagine Peter Cushing’s Victor Von F., cinema’s most fanatical failure outside of Wile E. Coyote, bringing an expired pharaoh back to shuffling life. You could make the Mummy actually BE the Frankenstein’s monster of that instalment, since Hammer made a habit of introducing a new creature with every episode of the franchise.

You could of course get EXTREMELY silly and have Cushing revivify Jekyll and Hyde (but replace Paul Massie, please), the Phantom of the Opera, Sherlock Holmes, the Gorgon, the Reptile, Rasputin, and Jack the Ripper’s daughter, the one with the hands. Quite a houseful! With a narrative so fragmented, it might be an idea to call in Amicus and make it an anthology film.