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Philadelphia Inquirer (25/Feb/1990) - Michael Powell

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Michael Powell

Powell's colleague Richard Attenborough saluted him in London on Tuesday, saying, "Of his generation, he was unquestionably the most innovative and creatively brilliant filmmaker this country ever boasted." Note that Powell's "generation" of Britons includes Alfred Hitchcock, Alexander Korda and David Lean.

In New York, Martin Scorsese cited Powell's "great influence on my work" and called him "one of the giants of world cinema."

Why all the fuss? Michael Powell was not a filmmaker; he was a deity worshiped by cinephiles everywhere. He had a unique vision and his films even those shot on sound stages — boast an almost palpable sense of place.

In Britain, where he made virtually all of his 30-odd features, Powell was a rogue surrealist among the realists. He exploited the inherent dreaminess of the medium, matter-of-factly defending his approach with "Of course, all films are surrealist. They are making something that looks like the real world but isn't."

Powell, born in 1905 in Bekesbourne, Kent, was roughly the same age as the infant medium of film. Though trained as a banker, he opted for a career in film and in the late 1920s toiled as a photographer on Hitchcock projects. Powell's earliest produced screenplays were for Caste (1930) and Hotel Splendide (1932), "quota quickies" hastily made to boost Britain's domestic film industry.

After a string of such quickies, Powell made his mark as a writer-director with the quirky shot-on-location film Edge of the World (1937), a mystical, folkloric account of villagers in Scotland's Shetland Isles. It was named best foreign film by the New York Film Critics Circle.

The turning point in Powell's career came in 1938 when Korda, an emigre Hungarian, introduced his countryman Emeric Pressburger to the director. The unlikely marriage of the bohemian Briton and peppery Hungarian produced England's greatest films. With the exception of The Thief of Bagdad, a fantasy Powell directed with Ludwig Berger and Tim Whelan in 1940, and Peeping Tom, a notorious Powell thriller made in 1959, his best work was in collaboration with Pressburger.

Though the credits read, "written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger," it was generally understood that Pressburger invented the stories and wrote them in fractured English and that Powell polished the scripts and directed the films.

Their first collaboration, the U-boat melodrama The Spy in Black (1938), meditated on the German national character, a theme that would emerge in subsequent Powell-Pressburger films. Their movies suggested that there were good Germans and bad, a provocative subject for patriotic Englishmen on the eve of World War II.

Reflecting the relationship of their filmmakers, Powell-Pressburger films were dialogues between a Northern European and a Central European. Their legendary The 49th Parallel (1940) — about Nazi spies in Canada — and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) — about the 40-year friendship between a British and a German soldier — were startling accounts of how British gentlemanliness might be crushed by Teutonic "total war."

The 49th Parallel earned Pressburger an Oscar for "best screen story." Colonel Blimp earned both men the contempt of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who found the film starring Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrook and Deborah Kerr "too critical" of the English military. Friends warned Powell off Blimp, telling him that if he made it "the old man (Churchill) will be very cross and you'll never get a knighthood."

Powell never did.

Also during wartime, he and Pressburger made the enchanted romance I Know Where I'm Going (1945), starring Livesey as a Scottish laird and Wendy Hiller as a headstrong woman determined to marry a millionaire. The film's lilting look at the Scottish landscape and people presaged Local Hero by 40 years.

Stairway to Heaven (1946) earned Powell and Pressburger international acclaim. This realistic/fantastic account of a wounded World War II pilot (David Niven) shows him in limbo between death and life, pleading before a heavenly tribunal to let him live so that he can marry Kim Hunter, a Wac. The fighter-pilot sequences are fantasylike, the heavenly scenes as realistic as a British bureau of licenses.

Where Stairway to Heaven was a matter of life or death, Black Narcissus (1946) was a matter of faith or flesh. This breathtakingly beautiful color film set in the Himalayas (but shot in England) stars Kerr as the sister superior in an order of nuns dispatched to run a mountaintop infirmary in a converted brothel. As in all Powell-Pressburger films, the personality of the place possesses the souls of its inhabitants.

And, of course, there is The Red Shoes (1948), which stars Moira Shearer as the ballerina who must choose between love or work. Inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, The Red Shoes is most haunting.

Though Powell would continue to make movies through the 1970s, his baroque sensibility was at odds with the prevailing British taste for realism. At first he was dismissed for such films as his adaptation of Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), which was called "a spectacular failure." Like most of his films, its mood of romanticism vs. pessimism seems modern.

Powell was virtually forgotten in this country until 1980 when the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted a retrospective of "The Films of Powell and Pressburger." Championed by Scorsese, Francis Coppola and George Lucas, Powell was rediscovered.

Shortly after the death of his wife, Frances Reidy in 1983, Powell attended the premiere for Coppola's One From the Heart at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Asked by a reporter if he had any regrets, the 77-year-old Powell replied, "Thirty-five years ago I made a movie about the incompatibility of love and work called The Red Shoes. I regret that I didn't believe its message."

The following year Powell married Thelma Schoonmaker, Oscar-winning editor of Raging Bull and other Scorsese films. He bloomed, wrote two volumes of his memoirs (the first was published in 1987, the year before Pressburger died) and talked about possible film projects. Last seen by the same reporter a year ago, Powell was optimistic, conceding that perhaps love and work were compatible after all.

Like the end of his best movies, the last years of Powell's life were a triumph of romance over pessimism.

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