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.

Children’s Crusade

It’s understandable, I guess, that I should have underrated A CANTERBURY TALE in favour of the Technicolor pics Powell & Pressburger made on either side of it. In fact, I’m not so sure it doesn’t deserve to be in the shade of the astonishing COLONEL BLIMP and AMOLAD. But the point is, if those films weren’t there, I’d have noticed how great ACT is a lot sooner. Each time I view it I find it more moving — and also find whole episodes I’d forgotten.

The film is oddly structured: there’s a kind of detective story to unmask “the Glue Man,” a mysterious individual pouring glue in the hair of girls who date American soldiers. A disparate trio — an American GI, a land girl, and a British officer — join forces to catch the miscreant. But the film is not really too concerned with its plot: the crimes, though unpleasant, are not life-or-death affairs, there’s only one suspect, and the characters get continually distracted by other affairs. Then, after the Glue Man is exposed, the movie continues on for some time, revealing a completely different set of priorities.

The most typical hero-type, Dennis Price, is the least interesting figure. John Sweet, the American, fascinates not because he’s been put there to appeal to the American audience, but because Sweet is so uncannily naturalistic, so un-movie-star-like. And Sheila Sim is wonderful. I wish she’d taken more time out from being Mrs. Richard Attenborough to star in more films. I don’t know this for sure, but it may be that her reason for not doing so was precisely the fact that she had worked for Powell. Not everyone had a very positive experience on his sets.

But here’s someone who seems to be having a fine time: the tiny child in this scene.

I love it when kids don’t seem to realise the camera is rolling. It’s acceptable that he says “Thank you” when he’s given the drink, even though another character is talking — shows he’s been well bright-up. But then he speaks again, saying something like “Fuh-wuw foo-fuh,” cutting across Price’s dialogue.

It’s just possible that both lines were scripted. As Carol Reed said, child actors never forget their lines, but they do forget their cues, so it might be the right lines at the wrong time. But it feels like he’s just existing on camera rather than giving a performance, saying whatever comes into his little head exactly as if he were in a real room with real people. (Powell took the view that actors should never be shown the back of a set, so that it would seem more like a real place — this technique has clearly woven its magic spell on our young ad-libber.)

Powell is known as something of a martinet, but he was capable of accepting performances that delighted and surprised him rather than those that simply fulfilled his expectations.