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.

Flying Britishers Go Dutch

“It was not a documentary; it was a detached narrative, told from the inside.” An interesting turn of phrase — Michael Powell, in A Life in Movies, describing the approach taken to ONE OF OUR AIRCRAFT IS MISSING.

Thanks to Tony Williams for reminding me that I ought to reread the section in Powell’s memoir about this film. Lots of amusing and interesting stuff, and Powell is one of the best memoirist-filmmakers, although his stories, particularly in the second volume, tend to take flight from reality until it can barely be perceived, a speck in the far blue distance. Everyone concerned kept quiet about this until after his death, and then a BBC arts programme had Kathleen Byron and Christopher Challis pointing out the tendency to confabulation. Future film scholars, approach with caution.

No information is given about how Robert Helpmann came to be able to speak Dutch, but we do learn that Lilli Palmer’s large family mastered the language “in about twenty-four hours”. None of them are credited. My late friend Lawrie reported meeting Palmer’s sister, and observed that she had all the recognisable features of the great beauty, but with the proportions slightly wrong, so that she wasn’t a beauty herself. He said the same thing about a male actor’s brother (I forget who), so he wasn’t being sexist, which was unlike him.

Powell says that one of his partner Pressburger’s best ideas was to keep the Germans in the distance, while hearing their voices as often as possible. Hiding the antagonists is quite a commonplace idea now, but it must have been fresh then. Even in Peter Ustinov’s church, where the Germans come closer, some marvelous indirection is used, as with the reflection in the pipe organ.

Ustinov (“The ugliest young man, but you couldn’t help but like him!” recalled Lawrie) reports, in a documentary about the Rank Organisation, that they had two Dutch priests as advisors on the set, but one of them insisted that a Dutch priest would always wear his crucifix and the other was adamant that he never would. They almost started another war.

The subterranean scene gives Ronald Neame a chance to get his chiaroscuro out. It moves the German characters slightly closer, but the gloom shrouds them. The look of the scene reminds one that operator Robert Krasker would go on to be D.O.P. on THE THIRD MAN. His old guvnor Neame had just fired him from GREAT EXPECTATIONS, and when they saw what he’d done with his liberty he and Lean wondered if perhaps they’d made a dreadful mistake. In fact, a huge amount of Carol Reed’s masterpiece was shot by two second units (or a second and a third), I think including the night scenes, the sewer chase, and the closing shot, so I always wondered if Krasker was perhaps given too much credit for that one.

Pressburger was a football fan, so he wrote a match into the plot, perhaps assuming that Powell might make a set-piece out of it. But, Powell notes, “I despise all games.” A man after my own heart.

As Powell notes, this is the obverse of 49TH PARALLEL, with a British crew rather than a German one descending from the sky rather than rising from the sea, and bonding as a unit rather than falling apart. It’s typical of the British propaganda films in the way it focuses on a team, rather than individual heroics, and doesn’t assume comradeship is built-in. It must be ACHIEVED. In this, it may have influenced Ustinov’s later script work on THE WAY AHEAD, which is entirely about that one idea.

Eric Portman returns — nice to hear him use his native Yorkshire accent for one of the few times (see also THE WHISPERERS) — Robert Helpmann and Pamela Brown debut, and Hay Petrie makes for a very Scottish burgomaster.

ONE OF OUR AIRMEN IS MISSING stars Professor Jordan; the Glue Man; Steerforth; Joe Gargery; Lord Tennyson; Frank Cheeryble; Catriona Potts; Jenny Jones – Mrs Waters; Helen Nosseross; The Child Catcher; Signora Doppo; The Lord Hastings; Lord Dashem; Dr. Ralph Halvorsen; Mark’s Father – A.N. Lewis; Boswell Marsh/F.X.Benedik; Ramsay – ‘The SBO’; MacDonald ‘Intelligence’; and Detective Frank Webber.

High Plane Drifting

I’ve somehow managed to not see ONE OF OUR AIRCRAFT IS MISSING until now — the only Powell & Pressburger film that’s passed me by. It turns out not to be a major one, but it’s very enjoyable and has lots of interesting bits.

David Lean edited it — before Powell likened him to “a cheap tart walking down Oxford Street.” And it’s structured in a very interesting way. The one bit of it I’d seen was the opening.

The film begins with a substantial pre-credits sequence: first off is a letter, evidently meant to establish the film as a factual account (it isn’t). It scrolls up with a drum roll and then gunshots, so we’re already playing with time: the letter intended to seem contemporaneous, but the audio is a flashback to the executions being reported.

Which means the next thing we see is a flashback to even earlier —

A beautiful dawn shot, and a superimposed caption setting the time and date — the recent past. The film is consistently gorgeous, not surprisingly since Ronald Neame (MAJOR BARBARA) photographed it, with Robert Krasker (THE THIRD MAN) and Guy Green (GREAT EXPECTATIONS) as operators. Neame would shortly graduate to producing for David Lean, then directing for himself.

Cameo — Michael Powell’s distinctive bald head is concealed, but his equally distinctively high nasal honk is not.

Cutaways show different features and personnel of the station, imparting a documentary quality bolstered by the absence of music. This is one of Powell’s rare realist films, and he felt that while music could enhance things in many ways, it could never make your film more realistic. Later he would decide that there “is no such things as realism in the cinema,” which is true, but there are different kinds of illusionism, some of which create more of a feeling of verisimilitude than others.

“They’re all back now, except B for Bertie,” says a chap on a phone, cueing a cut to the plane in question, shot from above as it glides over a shining sea. The great shadows of offscreen clouds add variety and an air of epic mystery to the frame. It makes me think of Miyazaki’s PORCO ROSSO.

Cut to inside the plane. A steering column moves eerily by itself. The camera does the same, sharply panning to the empty pilot’s seat. The camera moving in a place where there are no people makes the cockpit seem HAUNTED.

This stuff anticipates the start of A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, almost as if the Archers felt the image of a plane flying without crew was too good to be left in this film, and demanded a more metaphysical setting.

Neame lingers lovingly on the instrument binnacles, illuminated by a sharply delineated shaft of light that gently arcs up and down, imparting a strong sense of movement. The engine sound is almost drowned out by a cold wind. Cloth and cords flap about violently.

From sea, we’re suddenly over land — a real version of the plane flies through a pan, and then transforms into a model very convincingly — until it strikes a pylon and explodes, but fails to fall apart. Maybe that’s part of the film’s propaganda — British engineering is so good our planes stay intact even when bursting into flames.

But the framing and cutting are excellent — the eye is tricked into accepting the model as real, right up until the moment when its behaviour tells us it can’t be.

Powell/Lean irises in whimsically on the firestorm, and we prepare make another time jump backwards — the circular effect turns into a radio dial and an announcer speaks the title — a phrase the British public would have heard on a depressingly regular basis, despite the RAF’s care to avoid unnecessary risks. So that’s a short jump FORWARDS, but then —

2.24 into the movie and the titles begin against clouds and icy wind — the credits zoom out, like the STAR WARS main title (which could conceivably have been inspired by this). The cheeky “With the Crew of B for Bertie” title adds to the sense of faux-documentary. Now each of the main actors is introduced with pans and dissolves joining the shots together as if this were somehow all one impossible shot.

The typeface, incidentally, suggests a typewriter, adding to the impression that we’re watching a DOCUMENT.

After the crew, the rest of the players are covered in more abstract fashion: a landscape with windmill shadows stands in for those actors playing Dutch characters, and a a seascape takes care of the various navies.

Overlapping titles against travelling cloudscapes allow the heads of departments to be named. Closing the titles out, another title introduces the next flashback — the film is actually going to begin before the doomed flight.

From here on, the film will be linear, but that last title makes it seem as if only one time-jump has occurred, whereas in fact we’ve had four temporal leaps, three going back, one (slightly) forwards.

Well, I ought to be able to get at least one post out of the rest of the film…