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I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)
Bog standard, but wonderful
Reportedly, Emeric Pressburger wrote this script in four days. The plan was to film A Matter of Life and Death, but The Archers couldn't get their hands on a Technicolor camera for months. So, they threw together a movie quickly, returning to the remote parts of Scotland (this time the western island region) to film a sweet romance that the pair imbued with wonderful specificity and beautiful imagery. It honestly makes up a lot for the fact that the actual story is kind of, you know, very formula. I am not surprised to learn that the British film industry used the script as a teaching tool for years afterwards. It hits the right beats without a whole lot of deviation. It just does it so well.
For the longest time, I thought this was about a female aviator. The Criterion cover, my only real exposure to the movie for a very long time, has Wendy Hiller in profile against a non-descript background, and she kind of looks like Amelia Earhart. Nope. Hiller plays Joan Webster, the daughter of a banker in Manchester who has become engaged to one of the wealthiest men in the country, Sir Robert Bellinger (Norman Shelley), the owner of a large chemical concern. They are to be married on the remote island of Kiloran off the Scottish coast, and her journey has been precisely planed by Sir Robert, detailed in an itinerary she gets when she gets onto the train.
The imagery of the film isn't exactly subtle. The film is called I Know Where I'm Going. The film starts with a little montage of her early years where she outlines how she wants silk stockings as a girl and prefers dinner once a month at the best restaurant in town over a biweekly trip to the movies, and on the start of her trip to Kiloran, she's given an itinerary. There's even a song that shares its title with the film. When she gets to the shore of the Isle of Mull, waiting for the final leg, a boat across the water to the island of Kiloran, the itinerary gets swept out of her hands by the wind to get lost in the sea. Her plans are being swept away by the natural forces of Scotland!
The boat doesn't come because the weather won't permit it, as dictated by the local harbor master Ruairidh (Finlay Currie), and she connects with Torquil MacNeil (Robert Livesey), the actual owner and laird of Kiloran who has rented his property out to Sir Bellinger for the income. Unable to go and stuck with MacNeil in a small community, I wonder if she's going to discover that there's more to life than fine things and money?
Really, what makes this journey towards an obvious destination worthwhile is the look at local life exemplified by the contrast between a pair of Bellinger's friends, the Robinsons, who have rented out another property on the Isle of Mull and the locals who celebrate a local couple's diamond anniversary with dancing, pipes, and singing. There's also Colonel Barnstaple (Captain C. W. R. Knight), a falconer and character who threatens to gore the other locals who are planning on killing his lost golden eagle which they blame for some sheep deaths (turns out it's a fox). In amidst all of this, Joan and MacNeil get to know each other, in particular around a couple of legends of the area.
And this is where the film gets this feeling of being adapted from a very solid novel (it wasn't, it was an original idea, it just has that feel). The first is the legend of a whirlpool in the area where a Nordic prince had to prove his love by remaining in it for three days. The second involves a castle on the Isle of Mull that has a curse upon it for any MacNeil who passes within. Both of these feel like just local color at first but also end up playing both dramatically and thematically with the story at its center. The whirlpool becomes a challenge to overcome, and MacNeil has to face his family's curse and history in confronting his own potential happiness. It works really well.
And that's where the skills of both Pressburger and Powell come through. This is a rote standard story of meet cute and fall in love, and it works very well. It works because the local color is so clearly brought out by both the script and the filming while it's also used to help define character journeys. It's kind of brute forcing a formulaic script into being so much more than it has any right to being.
For what amounts to a new quickie quota film, something thrown together on the relative cheap (it reportedly had no more than 2/3 the budget of A Matter of Life and Death) to fill a gap in the schedule, The Archers could have done so much worse. This is a nice little story elevated by the talents of everyone involved.
A Canterbury Tale (1944)
Transcendental Style in Film
Inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer but filtered through a sense of innocence that the original tales don't quite share (Pasolini was closer in terms of straight recreation in his adaptation), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale is a gentle tale of grace in the English countryside where war is a reality but still very far away. Centered around the investigation of a fairly harmless crime in a quiet community just over the hill from the famous endpoint of many pilgrimages, it's a sweet and warm look at connection during wartime.
On the final train through the small village of Chillingbourne on the way to Canterbury from London are two soldiers, the American Sergeant Bob Johnson (John Sweet) and the British Sergeant Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price). Johnson got off on accident, and Gibbs got off to report to his unit stationed just outside the village. Together, they walk with the newly arrived Alison (Sheila Sim), a land girl, who gets attacked by a mysterious figure in the night who puts glue in her hair before disappearing in the direction of the town hall. Investigating, they find a motley crew of locals, headed by Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman), the local magistrate who has been dealing with the Glue Man for some weeks while welcoming the new arrivals to his small village.
The first hour is dedicated to the slow investigation of the crime, possible suspects (it's really not hard to guess who it is, but the mystery itself is never the point), and the steady discovery of pastoral life. There are explicit contrasts through dialogue of life in the countryside with life in London, most particularly from Alison who came from a line of houses that all looked the same, sold garden furniture in a shop, and dreamed of the gardens where that furniture could end up. There's also Bob using the local boys, who have broken up into two armies and play war in their free time, to help investigate where the glue could have come from. All through this is interweaved this sense of the area's history as a stopping point on the Pilgrim's Road that circled around the hill that blocks the village's view of the cathedral, the symbol of holiness always just out of sight. This becomes most potently packaged around Alison whose fiancé, a pilot lost while on a mission, had been an archeologist who had studied the Pilgrim's Road a few years before, with her in tow.
The film is largely dedicated to these little conversations and movements of plot as time slowly moves forward with people watching the world go by, contemplations of time, loss, and movement while we get these nice portraits of characters like how Bob is smarting because his girl from back home in Oregon hasn't written to him in seven weeks. With that setup (Bob talking about how he no longer has a girl and Alison being alone because her fiancé died while doing his duty), you'd expect the two to enter into a romance, but the film isn't interested in such large moves. It's smaller, quieter, and more intimate than that.
And the film does eventually move to Canterbury for its final twenty minutes or so, Peter with a mission to report the Glue Man's identity to the constabulary, Bob to finish out his leave by meeting up with a friend, and Alison checking out the caravan that she and her fiancé had shared but has been stored at a garage ever since. They are joined by their suspect who pleads for mercy, for understanding, for a certain grace considering the intent, the motive, the lack of real damage, and the appeal to a higher power. And in Canterbury, the holiness of the place just kind of overwhelms everything, a connection with the divine transcending the human experience and redirecting attentions to more important matters.
It's a really gentle and sweet film. I'm not entirely sure if the implication that the Glue Man is actually some kind of angelic influence works (the pleading is too material and the intention too petty considering how the film ends, it feels), and the central crime is just too weirdly unimpressive to carry so much of the film. However, as I said, the crime isn't the point. It's just kind of weird on how much seems to hang on it. Outside of that, though, the character stories are sweet. The acting solidly good, though the one non-professional actor, Sweet, an actual US Army sergeant, is more arch than everyone else. It looks very good from beginning to end, and it actually works within the box that it creates for itself. I've recently just finished reading Paul Schrader's book on what he labeled Transcendental Style, and I do wonder if he ever saw it because I feel like it would fit, to some degree, his thesis (at least on the level that Dreyer fit it, intermittently).
It's really nice. A bit weird. But I think it hides something special that becomes evident once the action actually reaches Canterbury.
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
A complete gem
Still in the midst of WWII, Powell and Pressburger took a cut line from One of Our Aircraft is Missing at the suggestion of their editor, David Lean (yes, that one), and built a movie around it, choosing to physically model their main character and name the film after a popular contemporary comic strip character, Colonel Blimp. The end result is a touching, human, and wonderful look at the life of a man getting older, The Archers' own Ikiru in glorious Technicolor.
The film begins with a wraparound section near the end of the long, eventful life of the titular Colonel Blimp, actually named Cliver Wynn-Candy (Roger Livesey). As a general in the home guard during WWII, he's organized the largest wargame in the home guard's history, scheduled to start at midnight, but the impudent leader of the opposition, Spud (James McKechnie) attacks early, kidnapping the general in the bath, leading to the reminiscence of Candy's long life beginning with his return from the Second Boer War. This will take him from London to Germany, back home, through WWI, and through two romances and one lasting friendship. The friendship is with the German cavalry officer, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), and the first romance is with Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr).
The running theme that I've picked up through Powell's films, most evident in his collaborations with Pressburger, is this portrait of relationships (not always romantic) across borders, about how individuals deal with their friendships especially in times of war when on opposite sides. The film picks this up in the first hour with Candy first meeting Theo in a duel because Candy, in an effort to defend British honor against German narratives about English behavior in South Africa against the Boers, insulted the German army, a situation started because Edith, then a governess in Berlin, wrote to him about the situation. The two men mark each other in the duel and become fast friends in the resort where they recuperate (Candy gets a cut above his lip that he covers with a mustache, and Theor gets a cut alongside his forehead, which he does not try to hide at all).
They fought for the honor of their countries, and once the fight was done, they set aside those differences and got to know each other as men, as individuals, and they found so much to bring them together, including Edith. She falls for Theo, Candy lies to himself that he doesn't love her, and he congratulates them as he heads back to London, filling his days between wars with game hunting while he gets shipped from one post to the next in the service of his king.
One of the interesting things about the film is that it pretty much completely skips conflicts directly. We start right after Candy has gotten back from the Boer War. We only see the opening strikes of the duel between Candy and Theo. WWI is only seen on the last day. WWII is seen from the home front. What we do spend nearly three hours watching is the moments between, the moments of friendship and romance as Candy sees his soon to be wife on that final day of WWI for the first time, Barbara (also Deborah Kerr). He also deals with the divide that wars cause personal friendships when he finds Theo in a prisoner of war camp in England, but Theo resists the overtures of rekindling their friendship, the German holding onto this antipathy towards all of England in the face of defeat that extends even to his personal friend, General Candy.
What is probably the most heart-rending break happens off screen with Theo, in the earliest days of WWII, being interviewed by British immigration about his loyalties where he talks about his wife, Edith, died, and his two sons would not even come to her funeral because they had become good Nazis while their parents had resisted the movement, an event that led to his escape from his home country. Seriously, Walbrook's performance in this scene is absolutely wonderful. And, as old men, Theo and Candy reconnect, full of reminiscences and complaints that they're useless in the face of the new world of warfare facing them.
Winston Churchill hated the film from the scripting point and tried to kill the film more than once, and a lot of it seems to have to do with Theo's speech about how to defeat Nazism, one must fight less cleanly than before. The idea was that Nazism represented such a threat that Britain would have to fight dirty, a sentiment that Theo advances in the face of Candy's outdated views of good-gamemanship in fight. Honestly, the film has a VERY rosy view of how Britain fought its wars pre-WWII. Candy goes to fight the "lies" of the English using concentration camps against the Boers (they did), and he has a speech when WWI is over about how they never descended to using chemical warfare (they did). There's a certain blinders-on approach to British manners that never quite feels real, something I would imagine that Churchill, in the war effort, would appreciate. But, whatever. He didn't.
However, that less than accurate view of the British character doesn't negatively affect the film. This is more a portrait of an ideal in Candy, the good man who fought for his country, who gave up his own happiness for a friend, who was good to those who knew him, who grew old and slow after being young and impulsive (his trip to Germany was outright forbidden by the Foreign Office, but he did it anyway). It's this warm and human look at a good man, a man living his life as best he could, having happiness, regrets, friends, and losses, in a way that still feels real despite the white-washing of British military tactics.
The performances are wonderful throughout. I've already mentioned Walbrook, but the focus inevitably falls of Kerr for her trio of performances (the third being the elderly Candy's driver, Johnny), each one being completely distinct from the last. Edith is the most restrained but forceful. Barbara is the most withdrawn. Johnny is the most brash. They're completely independent performances, and they work very well, especially thematically since Johnny's resemblance to either Barbara or Edith is never brought up (their resemblance remarked on explicitly a couple of times), creating this idea of Candy yearning for the one woman he loved and surrounding himself with women who look like her (or some variation of the eternal feminine, I guess). Of course, it's all built on Livesey's performance as Candy, and he's got this bigness to him from his youth through his elderly years (his elderly makeup is essentially a skullcap and coloring in his mustache, and it works so much better than much more elaborate elderly makeup in other movies). He's earnest and full of life and, eventually, regrets and melancholy. It's a wonderful performance.
Really, this is The Archers hitting their stride. Mostly freed from other producers concerns for the second time, and taking one more healthy step away from propaganda, they have created this marvelous portrait of a good man representing an ideal of England. It's beautiful, touching, and heartwarming. It's a complete gem of British cinema.
One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942)
Solid drama
So begins The Archers, one of the most important directing partnerships in cinema history when Michael Powell shared directing, writing, and producing credit with Emeric Pressburger for the first time. They largely focused on different aspects of production, though one was never completely removed at any time except, maybe, the editing phase when Pressburger took over, but Powell insisted for the rest of his life that they were equal creatives on their films despite the tendency of some people to call Pressburger no more than Powell's screenwriter. Freed from the dictates of direct propaganda in 49th Parallel, they came up with a companion piece, another travelogue through a beautiful country with a timely story where the opposition between Nazism and western democracy are front and center except with a whole lot less sermonizing, which is very welcome.
"B" for Bertie, a bombing aircraft from England with six men in its bowels, flies over the Channel, over Holland, and straight for Stuttgart where it successfully hits its target, takes some flak, but is able to get away long enough for the engines to fail over Holland on the way back, necessitating the crew to bail out. Five immediately come together, led by the second pilot Tom (Eric Portman), he's joined by the pilot John (Hugh Burden), the navigator Frank (Hugh Williams), the front gunner Geoff (Bernard Miles), and the rear gunner Sir George (Godfrey Tearle) while the sixth man, the wireless operator Bob (Emrys Jones) is no where to be found once they collect themselves.
Uniformed in enemy garb, only one of them able to speak any Dutch, and in an occupied country, the five decide that the best thing to do is to stick together and head westward across the country to the western coast. How they'll do that, they don't know, but they're fortunately encountered by some local children who take them to their schoolteacher, Jet (Joyce Redman), who can speak English, verifies their identity, and tells them that she can get them to the coast almost 60 kilometers away, through enemy patrols and checkpoints, that very evening if they do what she says.
What follows is an episode travelogue through Holland filled with beautiful imagery, a calm and gentle mood, and frequent spikes of suspense as they navigate the dangerous terrain. Most of this works really quite well, feeling less episodic than it could. The scenes with the schoolteacher have a direct purpose of getting them on the right path. There are scenes that are designed to show how dangerous the journey is, in particular the scene in the church, and there's this wonderful undercurrent of resistance from the locals that gets repeated with the motif of the Dutch national anthem. However, there's one scene that really just sticks out and irritates me.
The five get handed off to a reasonably wealthy Dutchman and have lunch in his home. He lives across the street from a German garrison where his young son runs out after having given the German soldiers some records. There's also a neighbor who's been trying to get on the Germans' good side who used the boy to send the records, except the boy relabeled multiple copies of the same record, all playing the Dutch national anthem, and gave them to the Germans instead. When this neighbor figures out that there are English soldiers in the house, he is ready to turn them in, but the situation has quickly changed where he can't do it because he needs to hide from Germans because of the records. This is A LOT of plotting, and it all happens over the course of about five minutes in the middle of this film about escaping British aviators, all with brand new characters just introduced in that scene (some of whom never show up again). From a thematic perspective, it makes total sense, so I can't hate it. However, from a basic narrative construction point of view, it's such a giant sore thumb in the middle of the film. It's weird that it's so prominent, so busy, and so easily dismissed once it's done.
Anyway, the sense of danger increases as the film works towards its conclusion, ending at the port city as the men are guided by Jo (Googie Withers) about how to get out to sea, including a wonderful moment where they have to row under a swing bridge without being seen by the German guard.
It's very well made, quite suspenseful, and has this gentle heart that never goes away, but I do have a couple of other smaller complaints. The ending hinges on the men getting onto a survival buoy already populated by two German soldiers, but we don't see it actually happen, so there's this jarring moment where it's hard to understand the cut. Also, the film starts with text implying that this was based on real life, including a letter describing the execution of five Dutch civilians for helping the English escape, but there's no sense in the film itself that anyone was ever caught. It's a weird contrast in retrospect.
Still, these are small concerns, smaller than my issues with 49th Parallel which I thought worked in spite of itself. This is the better version of a similar story, less prone to polemic and more concerned with a straightforward application of thriller mechanics (we actually root for our main characters instead of against them). For a first film where The Archers were independent, they chose to remain topical but more firmly rooted in solid dramatics, and it works quite well. They probably have a bright future ahead of them.
49th Parallel (1941)
Interesting Propaganda
This is an interesting view into how the needs of propaganda and drama are in opposition to each other. The former requires rhetoric and polemic while the latter requires subtlety. Michael Powell and his new, regular writing partner Emeric Pressburger made the most of the dictates of the Ministry of Information to create a film that portrayed the Nazi way of life as violent and brutal while the Western, mostly British-inspired life to be peaceful but hiding great strength. Essentially broken up into a handful of extended vignettes, 49th Parallel works best within some of its moments, in particular its second vignette, but it is consistently held back by the need to say why Canadian life is better than German life instead of just showing it.
Germen U-boat 37 sends six men onto the shores of the Hudson Bay to take a small trading post as the first small effort by Germany to take the war into Canada. Led by Lieutenant Hirth (Eric Portman), the six watch as the submarine is attacked by an Allied plane, sinking it before it could dive out of harms way. Left alone in the Canadian wilds, they take the post while they figure out how they can get back home. What follows is a long journey southwards, westwards, and back eastwards as Hirth works through a couple of plans (involving, for an extended period, an effort to reach Vancouver to catch a Japanese vessel), providing the Germans plenty of opportunity to see the benefits of life under democracy rather than fascist national socialism.
So, we get the rugged individualism of trappers in the north, manifested by Johnnie (Laurence Olivier), a remote community of Amish-like Christians led by Peter (Anton Walbrook) and populated by innocents like Anna (Glynis Johns), the benefits of unfettered consumerism in Montreal, the intellectual hiding great courage and strength in Philip Armstrong Scott (Leslie Howard), and the working class soldier Andy (Raymond Massey). The best of these is the Amish-like community where Vogel (Niall MacGinnis) relearns the simple life of baking in contrast to the militant existence he's led in Germany since the rise of Nazism, complete with a vague explanation about how good men can let evil sweep over their nation. This is where the dramatics of the film outweighs the polemic, outside of a pair of speeches from Hirth and then Peter (Hirth's is a defense of Nazism and Peter's is a defense of escaping it rather than rhetoric in support of something else), and Vogel ends up being this wonderful little heart in the first half of the film.
The weakest part is probably the section with Scott, the writer in the wilds of Alberta researching a book about the local Indians who've been gone for many years. This is when the film relies most fully on rhetoric to make its point, Scott's attack on Nazism and defense of democracy feeling dramatically inert rather than invigorating. He does get a nice moment to prove to himself that he has courage in the face of danger, but it's small in comparison to the rhetoric that overwhelms the section.
For all my complaints, though, I do think the film is pretty good overall. Through Vogel's section, I was getting filled with a wonderful feeling about the film overall, but the episodic nature and rhetoric ended up catching up with the film as Powell provided these magnificent views of natural Canada, especially in Alberta, while we were on the guardrails of this predictable need to make sure the audience knew, for sure and without any doubt, that Nazism was bad. The vessel for that is rhetoric, though, not drama, and we get this conflict between the separate needs.
That being said, it is actually a pretty good experience. Its time capsule elements are interesting. Its travelogue aspects are quite enjoyable. The performances are really quite good, even from Portman in what amounts to the thankless role of unyielding Nazi, though my favorite really is MacGinnis as Vogel. It looks great, it moves nicely even while most of the movement is towards yet another speech, while it has a fun final scene where good triumphs over evil in a small way with some creative use of the word freight. It's held back by the needs of the Ministry of Information (my skin crawls writing that for real), but Powell and Pressburger did the most within the strictures given. Honestly, it's more than others who were making propaganda at the same time could manage (including Kurosawa).
Contraband (1940)
Apprentice of Suspense
The second collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger as his writer before becoming his co-director, Contraband is another English effort at replicating Hitchcockian suspense after the master of suspense left for America. It's got an everyman walking into a nest of spies and finding his way out, all while a little romance gets to play out at the same time. It's also extremely timely, its American title (Blackout) making it more obvious than its British title, and it ends up being a fair amount of fun. It's not great, its plot mechanics to get everyone in place never quite making the most sense or holding together as well as it should, but once it gets moving, it has an infectious energy that very much works in its favor.
Captain Anderson (Conrad Veidt) commands the Danish freighter the Helvig, passing by England on its way home from New York laden with cargo, Red Cross supplies, and a handful of passengers. Chief among those is the American Mrs. Sorenson (Valerie Hobson) who marks herself antagonistically against Anderson by refusing to wear the life vest that he orders all passengers to wear. Stopped by British naval authorities for inspection for contraband in the early days of WWII, they're anchored off the British coast for the night, Anderson given a pair of passes to go on shore for dinner. Those get stolen at the same time that Mrs. Sorenson and the other American passenger, Mr. Pigeon (Esmond Knight), go missing from the vessel. Anderson, responsible for everything and everyone on his vessel, goes out in search of them, sneaking past the patrols to quick get on their trail.
So, the setup is mostly fine. It wasn't the most engaging thing, but there was a nice bit of tension around the British officers coming on board and sorting through details. The characters are decently well drawn, with a special note going to Anderson's first officer Axel Skold (Hay Petrie) who has a brother in London, Erik (also played by Petrie) who runs a nice Danish restaurant. He's just kind of fun to watch.
Where things get interesting is when Anderson catches up with Mrs. Sorenson, stays on her tail, and keeps her within his grasp. The plot kind of gets forgotten for a few minutes as they wait through one train back to port for the next, slowly getting acquainted and falling in love a bit. There's also a sequence at Erik's restaurant that feels like it's going to be just a random side adventure where Anderson uses his relationship with Erik's brother to get a free meal while he and Mrs. Sorenson bond, but does end up coming back later, especially with a tie to a song in Anderson's pocket watch (a Danish anthem).
The thing is that Mrs. Sorenson is sort of a spy, going to London to drop off some information that could have been done with a dead drop. That she has to go into London and hand it off to someone feels like someone who doesn't really understand how spycraft works wrote it out (which Pressburger probably didn't, but it's a decent enough excuse for the action that follows). She ends up falling into a German trap led by Van Dyne (Raymond Lovell), and Anderson has to escape, find some help, and rescue Mrs. Sorenson. Why doesn't he just take her with him? Because the bad guys will know something's wrong? His objective is to escape, not take down the spy ring. Anyway, that ends up being his implied objective so that an extended fight with a bunch of Danes, joined in by some rowdy and slightly inebriated Brits, can get into a fistfight in a club with some German spies. I'm not complaining too much.
I do think that the film missed out on a real opportunity with its concept, though. The film is set mainly during a blackout in London. Why? Well, because a war is on and Germany is in the middle of its blitz campaign of England. What doesn't happen in this film? Any kind of blitz. It's just nighttime. This does give us this nice moment where Anderson is able to use his navigating skills using the stars to retrace his steps, but you could still do that with some very basic sound and lighting effects to add the extra bit of tension and suspense around a bombing raid of London that feels far away, gets closer at random intervals, and creates this need to keep lights off more than just it's the right thing to do at the time.
So, it's pretty good. Its final act works wonderfully well even if the plotting to get us there doesn't make the most amount of sense. It may miss an opportunity, but that's not really a critique of the film as it is but more of me wish casting for a film they never made. There's also this nice little sequence in the middle that enters into the realm of phantasmagoria when Anderson gets knocked out that seems to presage the nightmarish visions of something later in Powell and Pressburger's filmography like The Red Shoes.
It's fun, is what I'm saying. It's a product of its time, but it can extend beyond that. If someone were to take up the mantle of master of suspense in England from Hitchcock after he left for America, Powell was not a bad way to go. He wouldn't keep making movies like this for very long, but he was pretty good at it while he did it.
The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
Fun, childish nonsense
The film Michael Powell was in the middle of making (though, reportedly as the second director Korda had hired for the production) when WWII broke out, requiring Alexander Korda to move production from England to Hollywood. This left Powell behind to make the bit of propaganda, The Lion Has Wings, while Korda hired Tim Whelan to take over production (though, reportedly there are five directors who worked on the film, though only three are credited). This manic approach to scheduling ends up coming together to create a delightful bit of nonsensical fantasy, freely adapting Arabian Nights while feeling like it was cut down from a much larger cut. This is not great cinema, but it's fun cinema. I can't fault it for that.
A blind beggar and the former King of Bagdad, Ahmad (John Justin) tells of how he came to be blinded by the evil Jaffar (Conrad Veidt), his vizier, and the innocent thief Abu (Sabu) came to be turned into a dog. Eager to get to know his people, Ahmad had gone down to listen to them in disguise, but Jaffar had used the opportunity to seize power upon his absence, arresting Ahmad, labeling him as a madman, and throwing him in prison for execution. It was there he met Abu, in prison for stealing (though, good stealing since he gave the stolen fish to some starving men), and the two escape together. Now, my first sense that there were scenes missing happened here. Abu shows that he's pickpocketed the keys to the cell, and then there's a hard cut to the two of them outside the city, getting onto a small boat, and readying to head towards the city of Basra. Where's the escape? Was it filmed? Was it just skipped over because of the chaotic production? I have no idea. It doesn't break the film. It's not like we don't know how it happened. We have just enough information to fill in the gaps ourselves, but a tense 2-3 minute scene where they two have to sneak past guards feels like such a natural fit that its absence feels prominent.
Anyway, they make it to Basra where, coincidentally, Jaffar also goes. He has designs on the princess (June Duprez), to make her his wife. For power? For love? To expand his empire? I dunno, but he wants her. Good enough. Of course, Ahmad sees her (the whole ruling about how no man is allowed to even look at her falls apart the second it comes up) and falls in love. He sneaks in (how? I dunno) and the two instantly fall in love. However, Jaffar comes across Ahmad and Abu and does his magic to turn Ahmad blind and Abu into a dog.
For all my complaints about what feels like missing footage, the film is decently well plotted out. How does Ahmad come in contact with the princess again? Well, there's a small bit of coincidence (Jaffar encounters him on the road, blind and begging), but Jaffar actively brings him to her because he knows she'll only wake from a perpetual slumber if he arrives. So, Jaffar has to keep Ahmad alive after a certain point, but he also has to bring him to her. And then, plotting can also kind of fall apart. Upon the lifting of the curse on both men, Ahmad and Abu get separated, and Abu ends up on a random beach where he picks up a random bottle that randomly has a djinn (Rex Ingram) whose been trapped for two-thousand years inside. It kind of feels like a late idea in production that wasn't actually written into the script beforehand. Considering the level of craft, though, that went into the miniatures, the special effects, and the entire sequences, it feels like there had to have been some planning. However, one thing I know is that much of Sabu's footage originally shot in England was ditched because he grew so much in the months it took to move to America. Those months could have provided Korda with the time to create these large setpieces around Sabu from scratch. I dunno.
Essentially, Aladdin took the meat of this story, slimmed it down in some sections and generally just made it make more sense (and stole heavily from Dick Williams and The Thief and the Cobbler, but that's another story).
So, it's nonsensical, but it's fun. There's an embrace of special effects and spectacle, especially when Jaffar gives the Sultan of Basra (Miles Malleson) a flying, mechanical horse, that is designed to thrill the child in all of us. And that's where the joys lie, in these frequent flights of fancy, strung together by a plot that mostly fits together, hinging on low-rent Errol Flynn to hold up as much as he can. Well, at least Sabu is there.
So, it's fun. It's thin and nonsensical, but it's fun. It's colorful, has a light tone, and looks good (though those early blue screen effects are rough). Just the sort of thing the world needs as it descends into a war.
The Lion Has Wings (1939)
Drama + Propaganda
Michael Powell was in the middle of production of The Thief of Bagdad when war broke out between England and Germany upon Hitler's invasion of Poland. Falling back on an agreement with the government, producer Alexander Korda gave whatever resources he could to the British government to help the war effort and moved the production to Hollywood. That left Powell in England to make this, The Lion Has Wings, a propaganda piece of which he made, maybe, 15% of the final product. The rest is made up of footage shot by Brian Hurst, Adrian Brunel, and Korda himself mixed with a large dose of footage acquired from the British government and newsreels. The final product is a quick and dirty little bit of "pick me up" for the masses in the earliest days of the war. It would be interesting to match this up with John Boorman's Hope and Glory as well as William Wyler's Mrs. Miniver to get overlapping looks at the start of the global conflict from the British homefront perspective.
Anyway, the first half hour is essentially one long newsreel, describing the differences in culture between Britain (peace-loving, congenial, almost classless, and free-wheeling) and that of Germany (autocratic, stiff, warlike), leading up to Hitler's provocations across the European continent that led to the Polish invasion, and finally a look at British Spitfire and bomber production. Occasionally, we get glimpses of Wing Commander Richardson (Ralph Richardson) and his wife (Merle Oberon) as he goes off to help at central air command and prepare for the first of Germany's air raids against the British mainland.
The footage shot by each director is reportedly this: Hurst directed everything with Richardson, Powell directed everything in planes, and Brunel shot the crisis section (though, I'm not entirely sure what that is). There's footage from Triumph of the Will as well as a segment from the film Fire Over England showing Queen Elizabeth (Flora Robson) giving speeches in her armor in the face of the Spanish Armada, drawing a parallel between the British responses then and contemporaneously. It seems a bit hoary, but I think it kind of works.
And that's largely my response to it all: it's a bit hoary, but it kind of works. It's unabashedly propaganda to the point where the only way to make it moreso would be to have the narrator (E. V. H. Emmett) outright call it so. However, it's actually got something like a dramatic structure. The scenes are mostly decently well done. The stuff with Richardson ranges from obvious (everything with his wife) to borderline ridiculous (the entire section dealing with the three German bombing runs, including a command center that makes no sense). However, it's Powell's stuff in the planes that works the best. They're about professional men doing a professional job in a dangerous environment (it's almost Hawksian), but there's no time for bits of personal story from any of them. It's just down and dirty men on a mission stuff.
And, because this is propaganda, the British win everything. I mean, everything. The British bombing run Kiel Canal goes off flawlessly, sinking a bunch of battleships without losing a single plane. The counterattack from Germany gets brushed away with the well-trained British pilots easily taking out the bombers, leaving no one on the ground to be hurt. In fact, the final scene is between Richardson and Oberon where Oberon, in nurse's dress, talks about how she has so little to do in her official capacity, a reality that would starkly change with the beginning of the German Blitz. It reminds me of how Hawks' own Air Force had to end with a great victory even if the story didn't call for it.
So, it's propaganda, but it's decent propaganda. The look at wartime production is interesting. The "story" beats are fine and function decently enough. The overview of how Britain is preparing defenses including explanations for barrage balloons is interesting and informative (the people of the nation should know why large inflatable blimps are hanging by steel cables from their major cities, for sure). I've seen far worse propaganda, but it's also obvious that the needs of propaganda and the needs for drama are pretty much completely diametrically opposed. They clash. It's possible to lessen the clash, but the clash will be there, nonetheless.
The Spy in Black (1939)
Across borders
Mostly notable as the first time that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger worked together, this time with Pressburger only as writer, not as codirector, The Spy in Black exists in this interesting pocket of film history. Made in 1938, less than a year before war broke out between Britain and Germany, a British film came out centered around a German U-boat captain in WWI that made him a rounded, almost sympathetic character, even as he plots to sink dozens of British warships. It's a mostly successful film that's really got dueling narrative directions, but we'll get to that.
U-boat captain Hardt (Conrad Veidt) is ordered on a secret mission to the Orkney Islands where he will meet a female German spy for a mission he won't know until he meets her. Meanwhile, we watch as a young English schoolteacher, Anne (June Duprez), engaged to the traveling Reverend Harris (Cyril Raymond) leaves for the Orkney Islands before she's drugged and replaced by German spies. On the island arrives Ms. Tiel (Valerie Hobson), having taking on the identity of Anne, and eschewing all efforts to get her to stay in the small and populated town center in favor of living in the remote schoolhouse.
The early parts of the film demonstrate the conflict within the heart of the film itself. Hardt's scenes are about how the war stripped humanity of many of its joys, in particular around food. He shows up to a hotel in a German port city, expects at least butter, gets nothing but carrots, and has to go right back out to perform his new mission. On the other hand, Tiel's scenes are about the mechanics of spycraft, somewhere between careful attention to the minutiae of the reality and an overly attentive to detail series of scenes that don't quite add the kind of tension one expects. It's not that Tiel's scenes are bad, just that they don't quite have the kind of suspenseful tension around them that they probably should. Part of this might be information kept from the audience until late in the film.
Anyway, Hardt meets with Tiel who tells him the plan. There is a disgraced English commander, now Lieutenant Ashington (Sebastian Shaw), who is angry with the Admiralty for removing his command that he's willing to give the German navy intelligence on a convoy leaving the Orkneys in order to sink it in exchange for payment. This is where a certain love triangle develops that makes the film feel like it's going to go in a particular direction, something rather mundane but potentially workable: two men falling in love with the same woman. It's here were Ford's later They Were Expendable comes to mind, about the impermanence of war and the fleeting nature of relationships made under its shadow, potentially walking towards some kind of tragic end.
But the film has something else in mind, a complete overturning of everything leading into the final act that deepens everything. It takes the idea of the impermanence of relationships under war and expands on it to include feelings of betrayal, dereliction of duty, and failure. It's a presentation of how human connection is both possible and impossible across national borders in wartime. It's a touch of Joyeaux Noel and The Dawn Patrol where there will always be other bonds that connect people crisscross national concerns but also conflict with them at the same time. It's where the efforts at actually building Hardt and Tiel as characters through the earlier parts of the film pays off.
As Hardt stands alone on that trawler's perch, having been defeated so thoroughly that he can't even move from a sinking vessel, it has this touch of tragedy, even though he's a German character, a spy working to sink British vessels, in a British film. It's not that Powell and Pressburger hated England. It seems obvious enough at this point that Powell loved his country deeply. However, he and Pressburger also seem to be humanists at heart, perhaps even utopians, who wished for human connection even in trying times of world-upheaval, a fact that helps their films have a long shelf life long after the direct conflicts are over. However, the films don't seem to be utopian themselves. They recognize that the world is big and violent without promises that all violence will end if we could just learn to get along. Instead, it strikes this balance where the focus is on individuals looking for ways through messy times, their conflicts of interest, and their basic desires.
The shadow of war was looming over Europe at the time, so making this on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland feels like a statement that even though countries may go to war, the people can still find common ground, and when they can't it's a tragedy of the individuals.
That's some waxing poetic about a movie I think is pretty good, but the final twenty minutes made it for me. Up until then, it was fine, a perfectly acceptable, if a bit overly complicated, spy adventure. And then it gained this extra dimension, deepening Hardt in a wonderful new direction, and giving us a tragic ending that surprised me. Helped in no small part by a strong cast, especially Veidt, The Spy in Black is overall a solid spy adventure that ends so much better than it begins.
The Edge of the World (1937)
Powell's first masterpiece
Michael Powell's quota quickie period was over, and he cobbled together the money for a real feature film from American producer Joe Rock to make a movie based on an idea he had about dying communities on small islands off the Scottish coast. Writing the script himself, he took his crew out to the remote island of Foula, which he renamed Hirta for the film, and he took in the rugged beauty of the island north of the Scottish coast. What he captured was beautiful, but he also framed it all with this wonderful story of a population that was on the edge of understanding that it was dying, that its way of life was going away with the advance of modernity. Melancholic, proud, and beautiful, The Edge of the World is Powell striking out on his own and proving that his apprenticeship period on the quota quickies was time well spent.
Told as a flashback ten years after the main events of the film, the final couple of years of life on Hirta is recounted by Andrew (Niall MacGinnis), centered around his friendship with Robbie (Eric Berry), his romance with Robbie's twin sister Ruth (Belle Chrystall), and the antagonistic relationship that develops with their father, Peter (John Laurie). Robbie has just come back from some time on a fishing trawler off the island, pulling in more money in one season that he could years of working for their Laird sheering sheep and fishing on the island. He sees how the world has moved on from the peasant, aboriginal life that they lead and sees that Hirta cannot survive. They have to leave. Andrew disagrees, and they decide to have a competition to decide what to do. It's more of a playful demonstration of youthfulness than a serious effort to make a decision for the island, but the two friends free climb a cliff along the island's edge which leads to Robbie falling to his death.
This isn't a plot heavy film, so it doesn't lead to major plot changes. It's a character piece, the center really being Peter as he deals with the death of his son, his daughter continuing to want to leave him for Andrew, and the steady decline of life on the island that he cannot deny. He even remarks upon how the fishing trawlers from the mainland come further out to take what the islanders can fish, requiring them using even more coal to go even further out. It's a conflict of visions with Robbie's death awakening some and deadening others to the situation, driving people away and weakening the island even further.
Through all of this, Powell uses the absolute most of the beautiful scenery of the cold, remote island. If this didn't inspire David Lean on Ryan's Daughter, I'd be extremely surprised. He has these wonderful shots of people standing on the cliffs that dominate, demonstrating how large the island is to all of these people, how they transient considering the island's life that lasted long before they came (the opening text refers to when the Romans discovered it) and long after (the framing device of Andrew returning to an empty island). It's beautiful imagery, and it's almost constant, so much of the film happening outside. That makes me note the sound design as well. We're well past the point when sound was awkwardly built out of a single, unmixed track. Here, we get overlapping sounds like music, sound effects, and dialogue all at once, and it's all happening outside where it's obvious there's constant wind. The dialogue still comes through clearly, and it's really a strong technical achievement.
The ending of the film is the dramatic justification for abandoning the island with one character having exiled himself only finding need to come back when he receives word through unconventional means, racing back to save someone's life. It's a situation that would have been much easier to manage if the island had modern conveniences, but the modest economy of the place can't justify anything more than it already has.
So, the path is inevitable, and Powell makes no mystery of that, starting with the flash-forward where the island is already depopulated. There's this marvelous sense of melancholy from the moment Andrew's face crossfades into images of the town getting ready for Sunday services ten years prior. The rugged, hard life on the island has produced a wonderful people, but they cannot stay there. Watching the dramatics of a personal tragedy define this is just wonderful writing on Powell's part, splitting the community through the microcosm of one father grieving for his son and a potential son-in-law becoming the driving force to pull everyone away.
Finally, Powell is reaching what could be his full potential as a filmmaker. Given time and money he never had cranking out five short movies a year, he's able to personally craft a tale of wonderful depth and feeling. It's about as long as most of his quota quickies, but it is so much more. It's his first great film.
The Man Behind the Mask (1936)
All of a sudden, Flash Gordon influences.
Michael Powell's final quota quickie now only exists in an abbreviated, recut form made after WWII, cutting out twenty minutes of its final runtime to get it under an hour. I feel like those missing twenty minutes would have made this a fair bit better, but the end result is interesting nonetheless. I mean, it's not good. It's a weird combination of Hitchcock's British period and, of all things, Flash Gordon, but some of what makes it less than good is an abbreviated feel to, especially, its early sections where pieces don't quite seem to fit together. I doubt the missing twenty minutes would make this a masterpiece of silly wrong man nonsense, but it would probably just make it better.
Nick (Hugh Williams) is an amateur aviator (something that never becomes important ever, so a waste) who is in love with June Slade (Jane Baxter), daughter to Lord Slade (Peter Gawthorne) who opposes their match. On the night of Lord Slade's party to celebrate his acquisition of a mysterious and ancient golden shield, New Years' Eve, Nick gets shot by an intruder with a familiar tattoo on his wrist who steals Nick's costume for the masquerade. This man steals into Lord Slade's party in Nick's costume, steals the shield, makes off with June, and Nick ends up the prime suspect.
So, the early parts of this, pretty much the whole setup, feel unnaturally truncated and staccato, especially the history that ties Nick with June's brother Jimmy (Ronald Ward). They were two parts of three to a secret brotherhood, the third being Allan Hayden (Reginald Tate), presumed dead, information pretty much hidden from the audience until his reveal at being alive. Honestly, this feels more like the fourth or fifth entry in a serial than a standalone mystery thriller.
So, the focus of the plot ends up trying to track down where June went, who she was taken by, and who he was working for all while the police are after Nick. It's unclear why either he doesn't have an alibi or why Doctor Harold (Donald Calthrop) believes him so readily, fixing him up after he gets back from that central party that he was attending. However, Nick uses him to divert the police while he goes to the shop where a tie he pulled off of his assailant was purchased, leading to the discovery of Hayden. This is compounded by the fact that Hayden is betraying his employer, The Master (Maurice Schwartz), whose lieutenant, Harrah (Gerald Fielding) is in pursuit as well.
Where the film actually works is in pieces of the whole mystery thing, like the chase and individual sequences of some suspense, like when Jimmy has to rescue Nick from Hayden in the tie shop. There are also a good number of sources of light comedy to help even the tone out, especially from Dr. Harold's American assistant, Marian (Kitty Kelly). Also, the whole presentation of The Master, who feels like a copy of Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon, especially in his astronomy tower as he gazes up at the stars in between orders to have Nick killed and the shield returned. It feels so out of place in the rest of the film's setting of the English countryside, a small city street, and a country manor that it's just fascinating how the clean angles and exacting and mannered performances, especially from Schwartz, contrasts with everything else around it.
The movements of the plot get almost incomprehensible as people get kidnapped, Nick and June keep getting pursued even though they shouldn't (or maybe they should? The ownership of the shield gets unclear for a while). And it's all anchored by characters that we never got any real time to develop (the central reason I feel like the longer cut is probably better, should it ever be discovered), leaving the film's finale to focus on The Master because no one else is particularly interesting.
So, it's not a good film. It's far from his best, and it might be the worst surviving quota quickie Powell made, but it has some limited charms. The light comedy that gets sprinkled through is nice to have, and there are some decently built sequences. However, the whole just doesn't connect particularly well, the gaping holes of the cuts too obviously hampering what's left in the film. Eh, there are worse things out there, but I wouldn't exactly rush to discover this.
The Phantom Light (1935)
Soundscape
Michael Powell has completely grown past the early, awkward stages of the sound era and can now use sound to create interesting soundscapes in service to atmosphere. This is easily his most atmospheric film to date which is unfortunately tied to a script that just doesn't quite work. There are too many outside views of the remote community centered around the coastal lighthouse and not enough from the inside, making it a mystery to such a level that it's hard to grasp what the mystery is even about. Still, that atmosphere really does help things.
Sam Higgins (Gordon Harker) arrives at Tan-Y-Bwlch in Wales to take up his position as chief lighthouse keeper after the mysterious death of its previous occupant of the role, Jack Davis. Really, he just disappeared. At the train station, he meets Binnie (Alice Bright) from out of town who's waiting for a car into town. In town, he also meets a man who lets himself be known as a journalist, Jim (Ian Hunter), who tries to bribe his way onto the lighthouse island, a bribe that Sam easily swats away. He's a twenty-five year man, you see. At the lighthouse, he meets his main helper, Claff Owen (Herbert Lomas), a local with many eerie tales of the eponymous light that shines out some nights and leads ships to their death on the rocks.
So, my problem with this is ultimately that Sam isn't there to investigate anything but Binnie and Jim are, but under false pretenses. Sam is mostly just trying to get through his first night, and he's never flustered. He's too experienced for anything else. The one fact that should fluster him, the presence of a half-mad former helper, Tom (Reginald Tate), that Sam ends up tying up to control. Sam isn't interested in the mystery. Instead, Binnie and Tom end up on the island when Tom takes a boat and demands help in the night, a boat on which Binnie had stowed-away. They both have secret interests for investigating the circumstance of Jack Davis' disappearance, but they keep them from each other, from Sam, and from the audience until pretty much the film's ending.
So, we have our main character who's essentially just managing the mess, two supporting characters who are searching for truth but we don't understand any of it, and Claff in the middle talking about the phantom light while Tom tries to escape from his bonds. It's a weird muddle where I was unsure of what was even going on, the whole thing really only held up by that atmosphere. That atmosphere is helped by this constant whirl of wind, the crashing of waves, and the wonderfully naturalistic photography that Powell uses to help set the scene, especially as Sam is approaching the lighthouse. The set on which most of the film takes place is claustrophobic but brightly lit so that we can see everything (it could have used a bit more moodiness in the lighting inside).
And then everything gets revealed. It's a money scheme that's never quite clear but involves the wrecking of ships, a naval officers brother, and the death of Jack. Even how far the conspiracy goes ends up unclear, but the action itself around the resolution is clear enough to function.
If I were given this script, I'd rewrite at least one of those three outsider roles to be from the village, most likely Binnie. Her secret identity ends up not really mattering in the long run, and the lack of any real connection to the village makes everything about it extremely opaque for far too long. Instead, make Binnie Jack's brother or daughter, or something. She knows everyone, but she can't get onto the island for whatever reason. She ends up being able to provide Sam with background and even a reason for him to be invested (he falls for her, maybe). Then we can touch on, perhaps, a conspiracy in the town that she has some sense of but no real specific knowledge of, and someone like Claff or even Tom or Jim could help fill out the details.
So, the mystery is far too opaque for far too long, but the atmosphere really does help, especially since the focus is a bit more sensational in the experience rather than about the details of the mystery. It really would have helped the film overall to have greater clarity around its central narrative. So, it's a mix, not quite successful, but pretty consistently interesting.
Crown v. Stevens (1936)
Solid thriller
Looking at that title, one would be forgiven for thinking that this is a courtroom drama. However, much to my pleasant surprise, there isn't a single shot of a single courtroom in the whole thing. The title is something I would change (an observation I don't often make), but underneath it is another Hitchcockian adventure in the underbelly of interwar England where the wrong man gets caught in between a murder and his own safety.
Chris Jensen (Patric Knowles) works at an interior designer as an office boy. He's fallen in love with a girl, Mamie (Mabel Poulton) whom he gives a diamond ring he hasn't yet paid for, feeling like a promotion is just around the corner from his boss, Mr. Stevens (Frederick Piper). However, she takes the ring, runs off with another man, leaving Chris with the bill for the ring he doesn't even have anymore, a bill due to the nefarious Maurice (Morris Harvey). However, when Chris goes to negotiate the payments, something he can't being to pay back because Mr. Stevens denied him the promotion, he finds Maurice dead, shot by a mysterious woman who ends up being Mrs. Stevens (Beatrix Thomas). Borrowing money because her husband won't let her spend the way she wants.
So, there's a murder. Chris knows who it is, but he can't give her up because Mr. Stevens could fire him for embroiling himself as well as Mr. Stevens in scandal, besides Maurice will be missed by no one. He tries to forget what's going on, striking up a romance with the designer Molly (Glennis Lorimer), and keep his head down. Meanwhile, the police are on the case, looking for clues.
What's interesting about this is how we know exactly who the killer is from the beginning, and it's all about this dance around wanting Chris to turn her in, understanding his precarious situation, and watching as Mrs. Stevens steadily self-destructs. Freed from her illicit debts but not freed from her penny-pinching husband, she's egged on by her friend Ella (Googie Withers), putting her in direct conflict with her husband, all while Chris' conscience weighs more heavily on him and the police get closer through investigation of the gun used to kill Maurice.
The plotting is mostly very tight around the movements of the police closer to Mrs. Stevens. I say mostly tight because it relies on her taking the gun she used, throwing it off a bridge, and it immediately falling into a passing boat, the occupants of which take the gun to the police. Coincidence isn't something I'm totally against in drama. It's perfectly acceptable in setting things up, but this is kind of the middle ground where it's about making the drama more difficult (fine). However, it feels so convenient that it's kind of unbelievable. It's not the film's greatest moment, but it's over and done with quickly.
The final couple of reels, though, where Mrs. Stevens feels the most cornered with Mr. Stevens asking too many questions about the gun she can no longer account for and his continued pressure for her to stop spending money and living flagrantly out of order with his moral code (she parties with Ella), is where we get this specific level of detail around her efforts that ends up feeling most Hitchcockian. The devil is in the details, and we watch as Mrs. Stevens improvises a murder, starting with sleeping pills and needing to evolve as he insists on going to the police station, not quite hobbled by the pills she secretly fed him, and needing to involve a car, a closed garage door, and time.
So, we get our ticking clock as Chris and Molly (now in on the situation) stop by to investigate while the Stevens maid, Mamie (Mabel Poulton), who quit to preserve her character when Mrs. Stevens accused her of stealing the missing pistol and ran to the police. So, Mrs. Stevens' efforts feel like she flailing, but not completely without some method to it. She could almost have gotten away with it, sneaking by suspicions if only things had worked out a slightly different way.
And that last twenty minutes really makes the film. Everything before that had been perfectly fine. I had few complaints, mostly about the coincidence of the gun drop as well as the fact that Mamie never comes back into the film, making the opening feel like something of a waste. However, it's actually pretty solid stuff overall, and the ending is kind of great.
Her Last Affaire (1935)
Hitchcockian Entertainment
Michael Powell's quota quickie period is a mixed bag overall with a lot riding on quickly written scripts as he made about five films a year. All feature length, these were testaments to work ethic more than anything else, and what's interesting to watch across the first few years of Powell's career is how increasingly sophisticated the physical productions are getting with time. The Phantom Light had some very nice sound design choices, and here, in Her Last Affaire, Powell shows an increasing command of the visual aspect, especially in terms of set design. It also helps that the script is actually pretty decent, a mystery that gets wrapped up in a dangerous situation, hanging on by a solid, likeable lead we can root for.
Alan Herriot (Hugh Williams) is secretary to Sir Julian (Francis L. Sullivan). Son of a traitor who died in prison, Alan has fallen in love with Sir Julian's daughter Judy (Sophie Stewart) while Sir Julian's wife, Lady Avril (Viola Keats) is being told by her doctor to lessen the excitement in her life for the good of her heart. Alan gets sent to Paris to do some business for Sir Julian in the runup to Sir Julian's efforts to become a cabinet minister, but Alan ends up at a small inn in the countryside with Lady Avril, giving fake names to Robb (John Laurie) who owns the place while the maid, Effie (Googie Withers), gives Alan the kind of lustful attention he probably doesn't want but is ultimately harmless. He's there with ulterior motives besides the affair that Lady Avril thinks she's there for. He wants a confession from her about what happened to his father in written form, and he won't leave without it.
What makes this work better than The Phantom Light's plot is that the characters have motivation to actually being involved with what happens. Alan is a young man looking to make something of himself. He wants to advance his career and marry the daughter of a lord, but Sir Julian won't allow it because of the potential scandal. So, he's out there trying to clear his father's name, willing to do almost anything to get that information from a willingly unfaithful woman while also being faithful himself to the woman he loves, even if he has to put on a face and play unfaithfulness to a point.
Things go wrong when Lady Avril falls dead with a chemist's bottle in her hand, a bottle that the pair had picked up on their way there but had been made incorrectly leading to a radio report about it. Convinced that she drank from the bottle, which he can't pry from her hands, Alan panics, flees, takes a boat to France, and gets to his hotel in time for any phone calls due to come.
What follows is Alan navigating the investigation, pushed heavily by Robb and alternatively subdued and then elevated by Sir Julian. He thinks he may have had a real hand in the murder (by picking up the chemist's vial from the shop) in addition to having set himself in a situation where it really does look like he was trying to have an affair with his girl's mother and boss's wife. He also lost the letter that Avril wrote, picked up by Effie right after he left, so his only proof of his ulterior motive has been lost to him. It's a balance that he has to strike, and he can only manage so well, creating this wonderful sense of tension that flows through the whole thing.
The actual resolution is fairly staccato and abrupt, but most of the endings of these quota quickies have been staccato and abrupt. I would have liked a few more minutes, not much, maybe three or so, to get a better sense of where things are going to go. As it stands, I honestly don't know if it's a bittersweet ending or a happy one. I'd be surprised if Powell and team hadn't had a specific feeling in mind and just kind of missed how the ending they settled with left a lingering question that was key to understanding where things would go from there. It's a smallish complaint, but it was still kind of jarring as a place to stop the movie.
Still, the movie looks really good, especially in the inn. There's a set of stairs in the back of the sitting room on the first floor that gets some good use. It's full of strong angles and shadows that almost makes it feel more at home in German Expressionism than a Michael Powell film, showing that he was pushing set design in interesting directions even on tight budgets and short timelines.
So, it's a pretty effective little movie. It's got tension and a story that's almost Hitchcockian. It looks good, is acted well, and moves along with a nice clip before ending a little too quickly. Still, definitely one of the best of the quota quickies from Powell that survive.
The Night of the Party (1934)
Releasing the tension
Obviously inspired by Agatha Christie and her stories of Poirot, Michael Powell's The Night of the Party takes what should have been a tightly focused murder mystery and just lets out all of the tension by actually trying to follow real police procedures. What should have been a pressure cooker of tension as everyone is trapped in an enclosed location with a murderer ends up just feeling wane as police pursue one lead and then another over the course of days and weeks afterwards. It just ends up feeling like a waste of a solid setup and concept.
Lord Studholme (Malcolm Keen) is having a party for the visiting Princess Amelia (Muriel Aked). To this party he invites a cast of characters from his daughter Peggy (Jane Baxter) to her friend Joan (Viola Keats), daughter of the police inspector Sir John (Leslie Banks), the writer Chiddiatt (Ernest Thesiger) whose work Lord Studholme's papers have regularly trashed, and Studholme's secretary, Guy (Ian Hunter) who is having a secret love affair with plans to marry Peggy. There are a handful more, but that's the real focus, everyone who could possibly have a motive for killing Lord Studholme. Though, there's extra business about John in that Lord Studholme wants to start an affair with her, but she doesn't want it while he forced her previous lover, Howard Vernon (Cecil Ramage), to sell him the love letters she had sent him.
The movie takes its time to establish everyone, a good half-hour (out of a film that's only an hour long), and it's probably the film's greatest strength. People feel individualized and specific. People get real motives for what they could do to Lord Studholme.
The plot turns at the party when the princess, deciding that she's bored and won't be told no, dictates that they should all play a game called Murder where, drawing cards out of a hat, one person is declared the murderer, a second the investigator, the lights should go off for ten minutes, and they should play act the murder and then the investigation. Chiddiatt jumps at the suggestion, getting behind it especially when he discovers that the princess has a gun with blanks in it, and everyone gets involved, Sir John's arrival negating the need to randomly choose someone to investigate. Of course, Lord Studholme gets murdered, and we have our suspects.
If Christie would have written this, it'd have happened in a remote country house, not an inner city, posh apartment. No one would have been able to leave as Sir John, or Poirot, would have kept everyone there to dig into their pasts and dramatically draw out the truth of who killed him for nefarious means. Well, that's not how Powell and his writers, Roland Pertwee and John Hastings Turner, decide to play things. Sir John gets immediately sidelined when he calls his fellow police officers at Scotland Yard to take over. They let everyone go, and the investigation becomes a series of interviews about information we already know, eventually zeroing in on one of suspects because his knowledge of certain aspects makes him the most obvious suspect.
And then we get to the courtroom scenes. I rolled my eyes instantly because courtroom scenes tacked on to the end of movies rarely work that well. They vacillate between boring and unbelievable, and at least this has the good sense to go into fully unbelievable and, one might even call it, exploitative. It's kind of amusing.
So, the actual murder mystery feels bungled, but the character work leading up to it is interesting in and of itself. It feeds into an abbreviated courtroom bit, but it ends with a kind of ridiculous bang, a ridiculous bang that I was pretty okay with, even if it was a small moment that did little to elevate what had come before. This isn't exactly some great failure, the character work is too decently well done for that, but it is something of a wet squib when it actually gets to the murder mystery part. In terms of this quota quickie period, it's very much on the low end, but that it's still sort of okay is a testament to Powell's abilities behind the camera, I think.
The Love Test (1935)
A nice little comedy
Possibly the least ambitious of these quota quickies Michael Powell had made since The Fire Raisers, The Love Test has the great advantage of being a light romantic comedy. It has a small enough cast of characters so that our focus isn't diverted too much from our main characters (like what happened in Lazybones), and it has that big heart that Powell was showing so frequently. It's a frothy bit of nothing, but it's an endearing and frothy bit of nothing.
Touching on the obvious fascination Powell had with increasing technological advancements, the film centers around a commercial chemist lab that's focused on trying to come up with something to make celluloid non-flammable. For those who've seen Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (including its quick clip from Hitchcock's Sabotage), you know that nitrate film was highly flammable and a huge problem for the film world for decades. Fox lost almost its entire silent library in a film vault fire (including most of the early work of John Ford and almost all the work of Theda Bera). This has the good sense to not delve too deeply into what the solution to this flammable celluloid could be (it seems to be some kind of coating instead of just a brand new method of making the stuff), but at least it doesn't feel as ridiculous as swimming pools at petrol stations like in Something Always Happens.
Anyway, this chemist lab is headed by Mr. Smith (Gilbert Davis) who has decided to leave in the middle of this critical time to look after his health (manifested by hiccup fits). His second in command, Thompson (David Hutcheson), thinks that he'll be a natural fit for taking on the roll, but when the office secretary, Minnie (Googie Withers), overhears the company president (Morris Harvey), it's obvious that the post will be given to Mary Lee (Judy Gunn). Overcome with emotion at potentially being passed over for a mousy woman, Thompson comes up with a plan for Mary Lee to lose her advantage by getting her to fall in love with John (Louis Hayward), another chemist in the lab. John reluctantly goes along with it (presumably because he already likes Mary Lee).
The bulk of the film is this nascent romance between the two with Mary Lee starting as an ice queen who talks about how the ideal social arrangement is the beehive with one queen and many workers (she sees herself as a worker, not a queen) and John starting as an uninitiated boob in the world of romance. The two slowly open up to each other as Mary Lee begins to like the sense of affection. It's nice.
And then the most interesting contrast happens in the film. Mary Lee decides to buy herself a dress for a dinner with John, so her neighbor, Kathleen (Eve Turner), decides to help her by providing her with everything else. At the same time, Thompson and Minnie come over to John's house to help him become Mary Lee's Casanova by teaching him how to kiss girls. So, Mary Lee strains to become pretty, and John makes out with another girl. In today's parlance, that would be considered problematic. I found it amusing, if unintentionally so.
There are complications that push Thompson to accelerate his plans which involve driving a wedge between John and Mary Lee. It's not a deep conflict, mostly relying on a couple of lies that someone immediately believes without question. However, it does provide this nice backdrop to a comic ending where John is locked up, Thompson has stolen his work, and Mary Lee has to figure out the situation on her own.
It's not deep or challenging, but it's a nice ending where good triumphs over irritatingly underhanded through the use of honesty and earnestness.
On these short features that Powell was banging out several times a year, it's obvious that his command of the physical production had solidified, his ability to coax performances out of actors was strong, and the strength and weaknesses rose and fell with the quality of the script. Here, with a modestly ambitious, tightly focused script, he's able to craft an amusing romantic comedy that still entertains 90 years later. It's nice.
Lazybones (1935)
Disconnect
There's a thematic throughline developing through Powell's quote quickies of shiftless men gaining purpose through a woman and becoming valuable members of society through the strength of their ideas. Here, it's really truncated, though. The 60-minute runtime doesn't allow for a lot of room in the storytelling, and Powell dedicates too much time to a supporting cast that don't do much more than take up room. They'd be fine window-dressing, perhaps one could call it world-building, in a 90 minute film with more time to breathe, but the 60-minute runtime requires a more ruthlessly efficient and single-minded approach to the storytelling.
The titular lazybones is Sir Reginald Ford (Ian Hunter), a lay-about lord, leader of the family made up of his siblings, with no ambitions, an inability to get out of bed in the morning due to ennui, and the potential to ask the young American Kitty (Claire Luce) to marry him. It's the seemingly common story of a nearly bankrupt older name and the newer money coming together for, potentially, a marriage of convenience and trade (the title for the cash). Kitty has a former beau from America, Mike (Bernard Nedell), who has come to England on the business of corporate espionage, set to steal government documents from Hildebrand (Michael Shepley), Reginald's brother-in-law. He uses it as an opportunity to try and repair the break with Kitty, and we have our love-triangle.
The problem is all the time spent on the family, including Reginald's two other siblings, Hugh (Denys Blakelock) and Marjory (Mary Gaskell), and a few policemen looking for Mike. They're a source of comic business, which entertains for sure, but it sacrifices our ability to understand that there's actually a possibility that Kitty might go back to Mike. It's either a lack of time to develop things or that she's never going to go to him anyway which undermines the whole effort at dramatic stakes in the film.
The other side of things that never quite feels as robust as it needs to be is the subplot about Kitty's money. She's apparently lost it all (though we never get a reason, just a line about bad investments which is good enough), leaving her with only the pub she bought near the Ford house as her only possession. She tells Reginald about it directly. He believes her. His siblings tell him that it's only a ruse to test his loyalty to her. They get married. She finds out that his family told him it was a ruse, and she instantly tries to break it off with him because he stammers a bit. It's sitcom-level writing that doesn't make the most sense. Perhaps if Powell had sold the idea that he really did believe that it was a ruse, but there's no time for that when light comic business with side characters is necessary.
The actual plot of the film that dominates the final half is the stealing of the government documents by Mike, his hiding it with Kitty, and then Kitty disappearing because she's mad at Reginald. This coincides with Reginald's self-actualization and need for work, so he makes the house a cash cow in an interesting and fun little way.
And that's kind of the thrust of the film: a plot that never really connects with characters that never quite gel, but there are amusing comic bits throughout. There's a tug of war between Mike and the chief inspector on his tail, Kemp (Bobbie Comber), including the dropping of flower vases near the policeman. Even Kitty's nanny/friend, Bridget (Sara Allgood) gets a few moments along those lines. There's the pair of drinkers who show up to the pub right at opening time to down a pair of beer and leave. There's the whole ending where Reginald puts a twist on the whole working and class thing that's honestly quite fun.
It's just that little actually connects narratively. It's obvious that Powell was working very quickly, but this script by Gerard Fairlie based on a play by Ernest Denny needed more of what it already had to bridge the narrative points more effectively. The story is lacking, but the moments are nice.
Something Always Happens (1934)
Visions of the Future from the Past
Michael Powell returns to comedy with a combination of his visionary main character with the lighter tone of something like Hotel Splendide, and he does it to results that don't quite come together. It's amusing pretty consistently, but Something Always Happens has plot elements that make no sense, a heavy reliance on coincidence, and a child character who doesn't really add much of anything. The movie is never dull or outright bad, but the screenplay really needed another pass to get everything to work together like it should.
Peter Middleton (Ian Hunter) is a hustler salesman who loses his last twenty-five pounds in a game of cards and cheerfully goes out to make another small fortune to burn through. He meets Billy (John Singer), an urchin on the streets who we get introduced to at the same time as Peter in intercutting moments that draws parallels between them. It's an effective opening that brings them together and joins them at the hip, and then...the kid doesn't really matter that much anymore. He largely gets left at the boarding house Peter gets them into, run by the softy Mrs. Badger (Muriel George) who keeps letting them stay and eat despite Peter's inability to pay.
Peter gets word on a car wanted by a foreign millionaire and finds one on the street, which happens to be owned by Cynthia Hatch (Nancy O'Neil). In a bit of masquerade (I'm still seeing Lubitsch everywhere when it comes to 30s comedies, so this feels like a Lubitsch influence), he pretends to own the car, she pretends to be a working girl, and they have dinner on him, without a penny, in an expensive restaurant. It's here where she gives him the idea to approach Ben Hatch (Peter Gawthorne), her father, a fact he doesn't know, with an idea for his petrol stations.
It's all kinds of busy to get Peter to the point where he ends up working for Hatch's rival, but at least its comic in nature, providing light entertainment as it lugubriously moves along with its plot, eventually getting us to the point where Peter is on the rise (Mrs. Badger unfortunately but understandably just disappears from the film), attacking Hatch's revenues head-on, while Cynthia works incognito as his secretary.
One of the amusing things about movies like this, movies where someone has a great, new idea, is that the ideas themselves almost always come off as kind of ridiculous (think of the suspended tarmac in The Palm Beach Story), and Peter's idea here feels so innocently naïve. The idea is to make petrol stations small resorts, complete with swimming pools, where people will decide to stop for long stretches to enjoy themselves while on a drive. You know, instead of the quick service place that we all know and...tolerate on the road 90 years later. It's not really a critique of the film, just an observation that visionaries in films tend to look mostly kind of silly years after when their ideas have become obviously wrong-headed.
Anyway, it works, Peter ends up on top. There's a battle for some new sites along a proposed bypass, Hatch does something that makes literally no sense that gives Peter complete control victory over everything, a step too far in plotting to give Peter the kind of ending that probably isn't that necessary. There's the victory of business, and then there's the victory of the heart. Powell chooses to highlight the victory of business while leaving the victory of the heart as something of a coda. This isn't exactly Rocky.
So, it's fine. The kid feels extraneous, though he does help give the opening a nice feel. It's mostly that he's just wasted, not used in Peter's grand scheme. The romance is probably the best part of it, using masquerade to bring them together, each person pretending to be someone else, and the romance developing rather naturally. The business side is alternatively silly, earnestly presented, just goes too far in giving Peter total victory. There's amusing action in the restaurant, especially around how Peter gets out of paying bills, but it feels like it's missing one more repetition to give it that special Lubitsch Touch.
For a quota quickie, this time produced by Warner Bros.' international division, it's a light entertainment that gets a few smiles as it goes. It's never going down as a forgotten Powell gem, but it was fine while it was on.
Red Ensign (1934)
Powell does Capra
If Michael Powell wasn't inspired by Frank Capra and American Madness, I would be quite surprised. Coming out two years after Capra's early masterpiece, Red Ensign shares similar beats, outlooks on the rich in depression times, and just a general approach to material about depression era conditions. It would be quite the coincidence if Powell had never seen Capra's film. That being said, this is lesser than Capra's work, but it's still a worthwhile experience on its own. Still part of his quota quickie period, it could have used longer in scripting and a slightly lengthened running time to flesh out some things (in particular its final act), but from a physical production standpoint, it's obvious that Powell was just getting more sophisticated with every passing picture.
Powell scholars refer to this as the first real Powell movie, in particular when dealing with the central character of David Barr (Leslie Banks), the visionary shipbuilder who decides to take a great personal risk with his company in a time of depression. Reportedly, Barr's efforts to push shipbuilding in Britain mirror Powell's own perceived efforts to push the British film industry at the same time, identifying with the main character on a level he hadn't felt for any other character he'd directed since he'd started. The irony, though, is that there are also parallels to how Barr is willing to do things that come close to how Banks' character in The Fire Raisers worked. But, that's another topic entirely.
Anyway, England is in Depression with the rest of the world, and the merchant marine is degrading with the times as foreign subsidized ships are dominating the seas, manifested by Manning (Alfred Drayton), a British national who uses foreign crews on foreign built ships to make his money. Barr's ambitious plan to build 20 ships of his new design is met with resistance by his board of directors, mostly Lord Dean (Frank Vosper), Barr's efforts only saved by some sweet words to June (Carol Goodner) who owns most of the shares. The bulk of the story is really focused on these corporate level efforts to fund the project which are kept at a high enough level to never get bogged down in the details, interesting in their own right, but never quite the stuff of high drama.
Where the comparisons to American Madness become the most clear and perhaps inescapable is when Barr does run out of money, having chosen to fund it himself, and the workers aren't getting paid for their week of worth. He gets up and gives a speech about what he's trying to do, about how the effort will revitalize all of British shipping, and he's sacrificing while he needs them to as well. It's extremely reminiscent of Walter Huston's speech to the crowd at the bank.
The central dramatic point happens right after this as Barr struggles to come up with the eight-thousand-pounds he needs in order to finish the project, getting permission from June for something that they also need permission from Lord Dean, all while Manning rests in the wings, ready to snatch up the design exclusively to save Barr from financial destitution. It's got some tenseness, but the film isn't outright a thriller, which is an advantage that this has over The Fire Raisers. It's a drama with character conflict instead of trying to build a setpiece of thrills. It's more modest in ambition cinematically than The Fire Raisers, it doesn't have the epic feeling of escalation that American Madness does, but within its bounds, it works decently well.
The finale, though, is this rushed bit of dramatics, heavily using montage to get us through a quick trial and turnaround of public opinion. There's business around some sabotage that never gets the right kind of attention it needs. Really, if Powell had the time that even Capra got at skid-row Columbia, instead of the rushed production schedules of these quota quickies, I think he had it in him to elevate what he was doing into something much better. As it is, though, this is a solid entertainment, a view of a visionary fighting the world to make his vision a reality (the sort of thing that Powell's contemporary Lean used, often to very opposite purpose). It's good stuff, a look at a slice of Britain in a specific moment, anchored by a strong character at the center of it all, and filmed handsomely by Powell. It's also emblematic of why I go to the very beginning of these filmmakers' careers: there are gems to be found.
The Fire Raisers (1934)
The term you're looking for is: Arsonist
What, pray tell, is a fire raiser? It's an arsonist, but...fire raiser is such a mealy-mouthed term. It feels too polite. Maybe it had greater purchase culturally in Britain in the 1930s, but 90 years later, it's an odd choice. Hard to fault Michael Powell for not having that foresight, but, seriously, arsonist is such a better term. It just sounds meaner. Anyway, this is the closest I'd say that Powell has come to failure in the opening four surviving films of his quota quickie period. A thriller without much in the way of thrills, helped none at all by being overstuffed and too broadly told, and reminding me of how John Huston had such trouble with straight thrillers throughout his tired period.
Sifting through everything post hoc, the film is about Jim Bronson (Leslie Banks), an independence insurance investigator who blackmails people who have done bad things to get those insurance payouts, getting himself a cut. The film starts with him running to a warehouse fire where he climbs up the back, recovers the financial books, and then presents them after the fact to the owner with thinly veiled threats that he'll reveal the true state of the business before the fire. It was only worth ten thousand pounds, not the insured thirty thousand. And he's set to start business.
That feels straightforward, except we have this bevy of a supporting cast. There's Bates (Harry Caine), who gets him the information about the fire early. There's his secretary Helen (Carol Goodner). There's this...guy (seriously, I don't really know who he's supposed to be, though, he becomes important later in the film, maybe he's another insurance assessor) Twist (Lawrence Anderson). At the same time, Jim has to negotiate with the insurance companies, mainly represented by Brent (Frank Cellier), who don't trust him, think he's a crook, and think he may have something to do with any claim he helps manage. Brent also has a daughter, Arden (Anne Grey) whom Jim falls in love with while he's racing his horses with his newfound wealth. Yeah, there's a lot, and when most of the men kind of look similarly, it can be hard to figure out who is who for stretches.
The dramatic turn is when Jim decides to take on the underhanded and illegal proposal from Stedding (Francis L. Sullivan), the head of a financial firm who's also a crook and who does raise fires to take advantage of the financial payoffs from the insurance companies. Brent uses Twist to get closer to what's going on. Bates becomes a stool-pigeon. Twist wants to protect Helen because he's sweet on her.
Why do I think this is all kind of dead as a thriller? I wouldn't call the film a complete bomb. The characters, once we get to know who's who, are fine. There are some nice moments here and there. But, the thrills are just absent, and I think it's a combination of the primitive sound mixing (getting more complex with every film, but still pretty archaic), Jim's culpability in everything, making him less of a heroic figure in any light, and the general opaqueness around Twist, who becomes the main point of tension as the central figure under duress.
Essentially, Brent knows that there is a fire raiser gang doing everything, and through Twist he has enough circumstantial and witness-based evidence gathered inappropriately to know who's behind it all. However, to be good enough for the police, he wants to catch the gang in the act (without ever calling the police because obviously, I guess). This is something that Stedding figures out, and suddenly Twist, this guy we've had trouble figuring out why he's in the movie at all, is in trouble, Jim is having a crisis of conscience because the effort before this effort led to the deaths of dozens of people, and the women are all in the background being stiff-upper-lipped about it all while trying to support the guy who's kind of responsible for it all anyway.
It's a very odd mix that doesn't really work, undermining the whole third act as it steams forward into the mechanics of thrillers.
Thrillers are hard and work very specifically, is what I've figured out.
For a quota quickie, this would entertain the masses in between larger features as they spent their Saturday in the theater, escaping the heat. As an actual entertainment to keep one going for about 70 minutes, it doesn't really work. It's handsome, has some good performances, and some delightful miniature work (that is never convincing, but I love miniatures). I mean, it's not good. It fails at being a thriller, its attention more towards creating a complicated character who gets lost in his own film, but it's not bad.
His Lordship (1932)
Powell does Lubitsch
Michael Powell changes production companies and makes his first surviving musical, a fun and amusing, almost delightful, comedy of manners that uses the ideas of class as jumping grounds for light comedy and no more. Satirical in intent but musical in execution, His Lordship feels like a Lubitsch homage, especially Love Parade, his first musical, and Powell pulls it off quite well.
Bert Gibbs (Jerry Verno) is a plumber by trade by holds possession of a peerage making him the Right Honorable Lord Thornheath. It was a title granted to his father for decades of loyal service, an honor that killed him because it was a betrayal of his working class roots. It's also a title that Bert shuns because he's walking out with a girl, Lenina (Polly Ward), who's dedicated to the socialist cause, our opening scene watching as Bert agrees to join the Legion of Liberty headed by two conmen, Comrade Curzon (Michael Hogan) and Comrade Howard (V. C. Clinton-Baddeley), but it's really only for the girl. He's presented with a path to wealth when the movie star Ilya (Jante McGrew) tracks him down through her ex-husband and publicist, Washington Roosevelt Lincoln (Ben Welden), looking for any lord to marry for some publicity.
So, this is essentially a pro-English, pro-working class musical comedy where Bert navigates the Russian conmen (who have a number singing to each other about how corrupt they are) and the American movie star to keep his innocence and honor. It's all presented through this lightly comic tone done to a fair bit of perfectly acceptable musical numbers with Verno at the center of most of it.
For a film that's so short (just over an hour) and so much going on, it's actually somewhat impressive that we never really feel like anything is getting a major short shrift. It helps that it's a comedy so our two Russian comrades who insist that they're not foreign but born in England despite their outrageous accents not feeling like much more than caricatures can work as long as they entertain. And that's really what they are: caricatures of a critique against communist revolutionaries in England at the time, begging for and obsessed with money while advocating for a classless society without it while outright admitting to themselves that they just make everything up. It works in the context of pitting Bert in the middle of the socialists and the capitalists to reach for the basic humanity of his situation (in song).
The other side of the coin, Ilya, is where the film spends most of the second half as Bert agrees to the situation after Lenina chucks him because she finds out about his hidden peerage, and he gets his whirlwind romance with the movie star. It's all done as one musical number sung by Lincoln, set in one room as a pliant set of reporters and photographers document the changes in clothes and backdrops, documenting their torrid romance that's playing out farcically before them including a fight in a nightclub with another suitor for Ilya and even a hunting trip to the Scottish highlands. Comedies are often built of moments, and the moments here are really quite fun.
And, of course, Bert maintains his good, common sense, down to earth yeomanry by backing out, winning Lenina back, and still getting paid for his trouble anyway. It's not a challenging work. It doesn't have anything much to say about the class situation that it throws out main character into, preferring to set up the irony of his situation (his peerage and his discomfort with it) and then just use the rest for light satirical jabs at just about everyone. And the package delivers quite nicely.
Early sound is the era I find the most interesting, so I should note the increasingly complex sound design that Powell is embracing. Musicals are hard, especially with primitive sound technology, because sound is at the center of it all, needs to balance instrumentation with vocals, and tends towards a fair amount of editing, especially if you include dance, which Powell does here. Not everything feels closely modern or refined, but there's a lot of complicated moves, including cuts within dialogue, keeping soundtracks from one shot over another, and letting the music take over the soundtrack completely that don't feel like revolutionary moves from the advances he had made on Hotel Splendide, but they do feel like next steps, making the mixes more complicated and delicately assembled. It's a technical step up that can't be ignored.
So, the movie is fun. It's disposable and amusing, a bit derivative of Lubitsch (Bert and Lenina's number near the beginning feels a whole lot like "Let's Be Common" from Love Parade), but that's not something to just discard. That sort of entertainment can still entertain nearly 100 years later, and I think it does.
Hotel Splendide (1932)
A small treasure
An advantage of a really short film is that if your final ten minutes are really fun then they end up representing a much larger percentage of the overall experience than in a normal feature length film. This allows those final ten minutes to elevate the viewing more fully, providing a capper with greater effect. Well, that's what happens with Hotel Splendide, Michael Powell's second surviving feature where the first 40 minutes are a slightly amusing look at a combination of comedy of errors and criminal investigation which bleed into a final ten minutes that takes everything that came before and resolves it with a light and confident touch.
Jerry Mason (Jerry Verno) is a clerk in an office who dreams of bigger things, manifested by his reading a book about how to be more confident while sneaking into his superior's office to playact to himself with a mirror, dominating his own image, an embarrassing situation that gets found out. At the same time, Gentleman Charlie (Edgar Norfolk) has just been released from prison after five years without ever giving up where he hid some expensive pearls which he buried on the Western coast of England in a spot that his compatriot tells him is now occupied by the titular Hotel Splendide. Coincidentally enough, Jerry receives notice that his uncle has died, leaving him the Hotel in his testament. So, we're off for our two characters to arrive at the same place at nearly the same time with different purposes.
None of this is as awkwardly presented as the early sound effort Rynox. There are still heavy signs of the primitive nature of the sound equipment (there's only one sequence with music, for instance, since multi-track mixing was still not within the small Film Engineering company's grasp), but Powell's stretching his limits as much as he can. Soundscapes tend to be a bit more even, especially since he allows cuts in the middle of dialogue from one shot to a reverse with the sound of the first shot continuing, and he even uses ADR to work through what must have been troubling sound issues on set (lips don't quite match in a few scenes while there's a certain hollow sound to things, like the actors are in a booth not on set). It's all done to make the sound better, though, meaning that Powell was not happy to just accept the limited tools he had at his disposal as they were.
Anyway, the comedy of errors comes up as Jerry shows up to the hotel with dreams of a glorious seaside retreat deserving of its name, only to find a house with a few rooms run by the sweet Joyce (Vera Sherborne) and populated by a handful of stolid, older people. Jerry has large ideas about how to bring in new guests, digging up the garden to put up a flag, accidentally finding the tin with the jewels, and casting them aside, before Charlie shows up ready to dig for his own part. There's business about showing two couples the same set of rooms that's fun to play out. There's business around the dinners, Jerry's sense of pomposity regarding his position, and the maid's exasperation of everything. It's lightly amusing.
And then we start getting reveals about an old woman, a secret investigation, what's in the box, double crosses, and it's all captured in the last ten minutes or so. I wouldn't go so far as to call this section madcap, but it's as close as Powell was probably ever going to get. And it's really quite fun, especially when a cat is discovered, almost the whole hotel's population has gathered around it, and they tiptoe behind it in line as "Funeral March of the Marionettes" takes over the soundtrack.
Is it a great comedy of the era? No, but it is fun in that genteel British sort of way. It's a light comedy, something made for cheap and fast because it was a quota quickie, and that actually makes it somewhat more impressive. I saw how Powell strained under similar circumstances with Rynox, a film that was amusing enough but never quite came together. This feels much more accomplished and well assembled, like Powell was suddenly much more comfortable with the process. The locations and sets feel more natural. The film feels less confined, even if it does only really exist on 3 sets (perhaps more, depending on how you count the Hotel Splendide rooms), and everyone feels like they have an appropriate amount of space to operate within the film's limited running time.
Really, for a 52-minute film, that actually feels like something of an accomplishment on its own.
So, it's a small treasure of a discovery from Powell's earliest days. It was fun.
Rynox (1931)
Awkward, but decent
Michael Powell's first surviving film is his third with sole credit, the first two, Two Crowded Hours and My Friend the King being considered lost. Rynox was part of series of films that Powell made that were called quota quickies, short 4-5 reel films with minimal budgets (reportedly for this it was only about five thousand pounds), and very abbreviated shooting schedules. These were the kinds of film that Capra thought he was making: akin to newspapers to be watched once and discarded. I'm glad that some exist at least.
Rynox was made at one of the most awkward points in history: the first couple of years of the sound era. It's obvious that the production company he was working for, Film Engineering, wasn't a dominant force in the English film scene at the time, so that this film's soundscape feels like it was plucked right from the earliest of Hollywood sound films 2 years prior is not much of a surprise. Reverse shots have completely different ambient levels of noise not quite at the same level of John Ford's football game in Salute, but it's close. And the lack of musical score takes moments that could be just standard and quiet into awkwardly stilted. It's just part of that growing period of early sound that every filmmaker had to figure out (except, well, Lubitsch), and Powell is the first filmmaker I've discovered who started right at that beginning.
Anyway, the story is about the titular company Rynox owned by F. X. Benedik (Stewart Rome). The company has serious debt problems, and Benedik is being pestered by a strange bum named Boswell Marsh. He assures his business partner that all will be well soon, making brief mention of some materials, a rubber substitute, that will work out for them (I'm not entirely sure what Rynox does). His son, Tony (John Longden), is engaged to his business partner's daughter, Peter (Dorothy Boyd).
Really, there's not a whole lot of story here because the film is only 46 minutes long. The opening is stilted exposition with people talking in F. X.'s office, and it's a small slog. There are introductions of our minor characters, one of whom never seems to go anywhere, their treasurer Samuel (Charles Paton) who is talked about becoming a partner but which doesn't affect anything, and it highlights how the film is just too short for its own good. The treasurer is just a bit of a dead zone, but the real problem is Tony.
Tony is barely introduced, mostly just as F. X.'s son and Peter's fiancé while Peter (that name is throwing me, because it's definitely a girl) ends up the main focus of their introductory scene. However, Tony becomes the focus in the final sequence, including getting into a fight with Captain James (Edmund Willard), who has a secret that he's threatening to make public if he doesn't get paid off. It leads to a fight that ends up unnecessary, consciously so, with Tony talking about how James couldn't understand why he got into the fight. And I don't understand why he got into the fight.
Listen, I don't think this 45-minute film needs to be two-and-a-half hours long, but a solid 20-30 minutes to get it to a real feature length could have focused on people like Tony to bulk that up so that his decision makes sense in that ironically character-based sort of way.
That being said, the second half of the film is a mysterious reveal that is actually quite fun. It's easy to see why the critical reception at the time would have been positive, because the whole thing ends up being recast in a fun (if actually kind of pretty dark) sort of way. It's almost Hitchcockian in its mechanics. It was one of three different possibilities I had in my head (not the one I focused on most, though, to my eternal shame), but it worked.
So, its awkwardness of early sound and its abbreviated runtime hinder it a good bit, but the actual story with its little twists works decently well. It has some very nice compositions like when Peter goes to a gun store to buy Tony a wedding gift, Powell frames her nicely with a gun rack in the foreground and the storekeeper framed just as nicely in a tighter visual spot. It's a mix, but it's very far from the worst start.
Halloween Ends (2022)
Deeply misunderstood
Well, I really don't get the consensus. Halloween Ends is easily the best sequel since the original film, the one that does the most to actually expand on the original ideas, the one with the best handle on the kind of horror that Carpenter originally strived for, and the one with the best overall approach to its character-based storytelling. Sure, Michael Myers doesn't appear until something like halfway through the film, but we got much more interesting stuff instead. Do we really need another retread of Michael stabbing dumb teenagers, or can we get a portrait of evil transferring over to a new vessel, the shape transforming into something new?
One year after the events of the two previous entries in David Gordon Green's Halloween films, Michael Myers has disappeared without a trace, and Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) accidentally kills the child he's babysitting on Halloween night. Several years later, the specter of Myers still lingers over Haddonfield like a sickness, never lifting, especially around the eponymous holiday. Corey has been released from police custody, though he can't shake the guilt or shame the town feels towards him as he works at a mechanic's yard with his father. He's accepted that he's a loner.
Meanwhile, Allyson (Andi Matichak) has moved in with her grandmother Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) after the death of her mother at the hands of Myers at the end of the previous film. Allyson works in a doctor's office, also comes off as a loner while her grandmother tries to push her out the door to live a life. When Laurie encounters Corey at a gas station, being bullied by four high school kids, she orchestrates the meeting between her granddaughter and this seemingly nice boy.
And that's really the heart of this film: a romance between a broken young man and the girl who sees a kindred spirit in him with a question in the middle of it. Where does the evil come from? Is it something that was always in Corey that just came out, or was it from an external force, like the sickness infecting Haddonfield? Considering the plot progression, I'd say that the film leans more towards one than the other, but it never has that moment where someone just explains the "proper" interpretation. People, especially Laurie, do talk about it explicitly, but they just don't answer the question, leaving it up to the audience.
The dramatics involve the pressures put on Corey and, to a lesser extent, Allyson as the four days before Halloween progress, with heightened moments that keep pushing them both forwards towards a point where they want to burn it all down (Corey saying that he'll bring the match is probably the best moment in the film, and it's a whispered line). And it corresponds with the discovery, about halfway through the film, of Corey discovering Michael living as a scavenger in a sewer beneath a bridge.
The relationship between Corey and Michael, mostly wordless since Michael can't talk and Corey can't really explain what's going on with him, is the portrait of evil passing the torch, changing form. They become symbiotic as Corey's descent into evil makes Michael stronger, while Michael's willingness to just commit evil for no reason feeds Corey's nihilism. By the point that Corey is putting on his own mask to commit his own violence, the performance by Campbell gains this wonderfully subtle quality of menace that gets highlighted in a few moments, really selling the journey.
The finale is absolutely great as Corey fully embraces the legacy that he's stepping into...until it's not, the film quickly changes direction so the marketing team could focus on a roughly five-minute sequence between Michael and Laurie. I won't go so far as to say that this doesn't work at all. It's fine in a schlocky kind of way, but it just simply does not fit the film that came before it. If there was one person that Michael should have faced off (assuming a face off was necessary, which it wasn't) it would have been Corey, the younger man getting stronger and accepting the evil that's leaching out of the older man. But, franchise movie in a series that'd hit a rough spot with the previous film, negating any desire from any executive to take risks.
It's amazing that Jason Blum allowed David Gordon Green and Danny McBride to go as afar field as they did for so long because 90% of this film is great. Just outright great. The kind of thing you expect from hiring the guy who made George Washington or Undertow or Joe to make a Halloween film and given the support he needed. I really wonder if there's an alternate ending out there, that the ending we got was the result of reshoots.
Anyway, despite the completely unnatural way that the ending fits, it only does a little to get me away from appreciation of the film as a whole. Corey's journey is specifically drawn and really quite compelling. The performances are all very good. Green gets some wonderful moments of tension that he drags out as much as they will allow. Even the kills are good in that sort of way that people want from a slasher, they just have to get through a well-done character piece first. I know, how boring.
Halloween Kills (2021)
A mess, but I like it
I've seen this once before, a couple of years ago, right after its release. I was somewhat mixed on the film, but I just did not understand the vitriol some were throwing at it. Yeah, the repetitions of "Evil Dies Tonight" got old and there was some obviously, hit you over the head moralizing, but I didn't hate it. It was obvious that David Gordon Green was trying to do something about trauma infecting a community, and I appreciated that. Upon this revisit, though, I'm even more on board with it. I think this film has been deeply misunderstood. I don't think it's a masterpiece. It's got weird moments and a subplot that just feels like more of a distraction than a contribution, but I think the central ideas work quite well.
Immediately following the events of the previous film, we pick up with Cameron (Dylan Arnold) finding sheriff's deputy Frank Hawkins (Will Patton) on the ground, barely alive after he had been stabbed in the neck. Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer), and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) speed towards the hospital. Meanwhile, Michael Myers escapes from his hellfire to kill a dozen first responders and start his march back to somewhere. Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall) leads a toast to the dead from 40 years ago in a bar (definitely bringing the mood down), and this is where the film introduces its central idea.
The idea is that trauma grows if you let it. There's a lot going on in this film, but what it ultimately comes down to is that the trauma that these people let fester ends up strengthening Michael Myers. Why? Because Michael Myers is not a man. Michael Myers is fear personified. The more attention he gets, the more powerful he grows. Now, that is something interesting, a twist on the whole Myers mythos that no sequel has touched on. What they have touched on is a series of theories about why Myers kills, and the film makes its dismissal of all of that rather explicit, especially with Laurie insisting it's all about her while convalescing next to Frank who tells her that it's not about her at all.
So, if it's not about Laurie, who is it about? Well, Laurie isn't the only Michael Myers victim. That's the point of bringing up as many of the characters from the first film as possible. Tommy, Lonnie (Robert Longstreet), Lindsey (Kyle Richards), and Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens) all had encounters with the boogeyman, and they carry those scars. And then Tommy spreads it. He forces it upon the rest of the town, a situation made all the worse by the actual reappearance of Michael Myers, driving everyone into a frenzy.
And so, we get people getting in cars, arming up, and looking to take out Michael because the law has failed. Is this a celebration of mob justice? Not that I'd mind it entirely, but it's not. Is it an admonition against mob justice? Yes, but within the context of the actual system of legal force having already failed. The evil isn't normal. It's manifest of fear. What's the solution? What can kill Michael Myers? The scary answer? Nothing. Nothing can kill him. Myers is a natural force.
How does that manifest dramatically? Well, mostly with Michael cutting his way through people in tensely built sequences. Green has this desire to make the victims in these movies individuals with memorable moments, so when he introduces an older couple who are going to get murdered in a couple of minutes, he gives them a minute to play with a drone and talk about how Cheese-Its go great with a nice wine. The moment ends up sticking out because it's this weirdly comic moment where we introduce two characters right before they get fluorescent tubes shoved into their throats, so I end up of two minds about stuff like this. I like that Green is providing the care for characters to feel unique and, to some degree, real or, at least, not just meat for a knife. However, they really do stick out.
The real center of that kind of thing is Big John (Scott MacArthur) and Little John (Michael McDonald), a couple who live in the old Myers house. Myers never gets a motive beyond, "kill and return home" (which I am very fine with, it doesn't explain anything). And so, it's a pathway there while the town kind of flails about trying to figure things out. The two are, of course, distinctive from the rest, given time to establish themselves as characters, and they're also destined for death. I appreciate these characters more than the old couple because they are in the film for longer, but they never connect with anyone else beyond some kids briefly. It feels like they should be more tragic than comic.
The one subplot that really just doesn't work is the other escaped mental patient. I get it. I think it works thematically (the people's rage builds and builds until it will lash out at whatever), but it's placed at a weird spot in the film (essentially at the start of the third act which then moves on to smaller scale action), no one really seems to learn anything from it. Not that I demand arcs in this stuff, but the central characters involved in the riot just move on to do some more violence minutes later. It's also a lot of business in an overstuffed movie, and it seems to be more of a side-point than feeding the central one about fear, though they're obviously related.
So, the film definitely has ideas. I think they're fairly well presented, but overstuffing everything didn't help matters. Where's the story though? It's actually a story of chaos, of not knowing where to go or what to do to stay safe. It's about a community reacting to tragedy in a variety of ways, and not being able to actually win. That gets dispersed across a lot of characters (Laurie convalescing in the hospital, Frank holding onto his guilt from 40 years earlier, Tommy trying to be protective in a way that he hadn't been able to as a child, Allyson acting like she's going to end this family curse), and that introduces a lot of little subplots (Cameron starts the film on the outs with Allyson, but it just gets forgotten rather than addressed).
So, it's something of a mess, but I find this throughline in the film that I latch onto pretty hard. It's an intelligent way to address the idea of Michael Myers, expand it while keeping it within the bounds of what Green and co had reclaimed in their remake, while Green fills it with...unique characters. Not everything works, and the whole "Evil dies tonight," stuff ends up a distraction and far less of an asset (justifying the memefication of the film a bit). However, Green was approaching these films not as just slashers but as explorations of fear. I think it actually ends up working, even if the final package is a bit jankier than it should be.