The Spy in Black (Michael Powell, 1939).
Michael Powell knew where he was going. From the first day he set foot in a movie studio at nineteen and was put to work sweeping the floor, he had no doubts about his life’s purpose. “I just knew I was a director, and couldn’t understand why people didn’t stand in line to offer me a film,” Powell wrote of his presumptuous younger self. By 1938, he was a rising young filmmaker under contract to producer Alexander Korda, with the prospect of directing the great German star Conrad Veidt in a World War I thriller, The Spy in Black (1939), set against the mist-shrouded cliffs and basalt columns of the Orkney Islands. On reading the original script, however, he found it flat and lackluster, full of the “pleasant British dialogue scenes” he despised. Then, at a story conference arranged by Korda, he listened to a soft-spoken Hungarian contract writer spin out his ideas for a complete overhaul of the story, and was spellbound by the man’s narrative gift. It was Emeric Pressburger, of whom he later declared, “I don’t know a better writer. I don’t wish to know a better writer, and I hope I never shall.”
With contrasting backgrounds, temperaments, and talents, Powell and Pressburger discovered from that first meeting a creative chemistry that would blaze for more than a decade. As the Archers—eventually sharing producing, directing, and writing credits on their films—they became the most original filmmakers of the 1940s in Britain, with few peers in the world. It’s as if they were raising new islands up out of the sea; each film—each scene, each shot—feels so electrifyingly different. A full retrospective of their work, mounted by the British Film Institute in London in 2023, travels this summer to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Among the rarities on view are all of Powell’s surviving films made between 1931 and 1936, restored by the BFI to pristine, gleaming clarity. He dismissed most of these early efforts as potboilers, but none is without interest. He jazzes up talky, stage-bound scripts and often silly plots with flurries of rapid, Soviet-style montage and expressionistic angles and lighting, while signature themes emerge in some films that allowed him more creative input.
These movies are utterly British in their settings and characters, yet it is easy to see the traces of Powell’s three-year apprenticeship under the American director Rex Ingram at the Victorine Studios in Nice, France, in the mid-1920s. He could hardly imitate the epic scale of Ingram’s sagas on his shoestring budgets, but he had learned how to command a set (he called himself “the sorcerer’s apprentice”), and he had soaked up the films of inventive European masters such as René Clair and Marcel L’Herbier. To the end of his days, Powell never abandoned his loyalty to silent films as the purest form of cinema, and his insistence on the primacy of images would drive the gradual evolution of the Archers’ style toward the “composed” film, an ideal of wordless visuals wedded to music that would culminate in the operatic spectacle The Tales of Hoffmann (1951).
Rynox (Michael Powell, 1931).
When Powell returned home to England in 1928 and went to work at Elstree Studios, outside London, as a script reader and stills photographer, the talkie revolution loomed. With Hollywood far ahead in adapting to the new sound technology and threatening to wholly dominate the beleaguered British film industry, a law went into effect that year requiring exhibitors in the United Kingdom to show a certain quota of British-made films. The result was a flood of “quota quickies”: cheaply-made second features often financed by American studios so that they could keep their own films on British screens. Like Hollywood’s Poverty Row and B-unit productions, they were limited by minuscule budgets, brief shooting schedules, and second-string stars, but they granted some freedom to directors, since those putting up the money often cared about little except keeping costs down.
The Fox Film Corporation financed Powell’s first directorial effort, made in partnership with the American Jerry Jackson, a neophyte independent producer based in London. Two Crowded Hours (1931), a comic thriller about a taxi driver entangled in a murder case, was made in twelve days; Powell recalled his debut effort as a smashing success that earned critical raves for its wit and style. (Alas, it is currently considered a lost film.) His second effort, Rynox (1931), had a budget of £8,000 and a running time of 45 minutes, throughout which Powell artfully uses shots of mirrors and window frames to set up the twist ending to the film’s murder plot. The hard-charging businessman at its center—willing to gamble everything on his revolutionary new product—is the first of the director’s obsessive creators.
These characters seem like avatars for Powell himself, as he champed at the bit for greater opportunities. Always on the lookout for subjects big enough to match his cinematic ambitions, he carried around a file labeled “Ideas”; in 1931 he added a clipping to it. The news item was about the islands of St. Kilda, the remotest specks of land in the British Isles, from which the last inhabitants had evacuated the year before, unable to sustain life in such a harsh and inaccessible environment. Powell loved islands for their singularity and idiosyncrasy, and began envisioning a movie about ultima Thule—the furthest limit, the border of the known. He cherished this gloriously impractical dream for six years, while turning out 23 films as a director for hire.
He adorned them with grace notes like the moment in his sixth film, Hotel Splendide (1932), when the protagonist arrives at the titular property he has inherited, a dingy little fleabag, and sees the collapse of his dreams in a fantastic shot of a grand hotel melting away—the kind of subjective device that had been common in silents but was rare in talkies. Jerry Verno, who plays the disappointed owner, was a pert Cockney comedian who had starred as the cabbie in Powell’s first film and appeared again in His Lordship (1932), the one true misfire among the director’s juvenilia. An intriguing premise—Verno plays a plumber who is dismayed to learn that he is a hereditary lord, and seeks to hide the fact from his radical left-wing fiancée—is sunk by a leaden-footed attempt at musical satire and some grotesquely overplayed performances.
Something Always Happens (Michael Powell, 1934).
Something Always Happens (1934) opens with a great deal of charm and raffish London atmosphere as an idle grifter (Ian Hunter) who has just lost all his money in an all-night card game hooks up with a light-fingered orphan on the run in a street market. Disappointingly, the happy-go-lucky con artist morphs into another ruthless businessman, and the plot turns into an industrial drama about rival companies building petrol stations. Powell kept himself interested by inserting rhyming cuts at every opportunity, turning the editing into a word- or image-matching game.
A number of Powell’s quota quickies are workplace dramas; the most interesting is The Love Test (1935), set in a lab where scientists are working to develop non-flammable celluloid. They experiment on kewpie dolls, allowing for some surreal and disturbing images of the kitschy figurines consumed by flames. The male staff are appalled when a woman is promoted to head the department, and they do all they can to sabotage her—and their own work. It is bracing to see sexism exposed at its most irrational and childish, but the movie lets down its feminist premise with a heroine who never seems quite as capable or brilliant as she is supposed to be, and who is easily distracted by the lure of romance.
Indeed, she is less memorable than the flirtatious secretary played with great verve by Googie Withers in her first of several performances for Powell—crowned by her role in the Archers’ One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942) as a dashing, tough-as-nails Dutch resistance operative, typical of the spirited, independent women in their films. Withers turns up as a savvy maid in Her Last Affaire (1935) and a pampered ex–chorus girl in Crown v. Stevens (1936). Two of Powell’s last quota quickies, these are among the most polished and entertaining, the latter featuring a deliciously heartless femme fatale and a chilling scene of attempted murder in a suburban garage. But Powell did not want to make thrillers or murder mysteries; he would leave those to his friend and sometime mentor at Elstree, Alfred Hitchcock.
The Phantom Light (Michael Powell, 1935).
Powell directed four films under a deal with Gaumont-British, a well-established studio, and he made the most of their slightly higher budgets and A-picture status. It was there that he first worked with production designer Alfred Junge and editor Derek Twist, who would become key collaborators. Powell cowrote the stories for The Fire Raisers and Red Ensign (both 1934) for Leslie Banks, an actor who specialized in suave arrogance. In the first he plays a smart operator who descends from shady schemes to outright crime, joining a gang that burns down buildings for the insurance. The attempt to make this crook into an attractive antihero does not quite come off—Banks made a better villain, though that role is amply filled here by the unctuous Francis L. Sullivan—but the film is a crackling portrait of the cozy relationship between business and crime.
In Red Ensign, Banks is the designer of a new, faster cargo ship. A rule-breaking visionary battling the cautiously unimaginative and selfishly corrupt, he is also a monomaniac willing to lie and cheat in order to get his way. His defense is the patriotic nature of his mission to revive the Depression-blighted British shipping industry so that Britannia can once again rule the waves. The plot turns in part on a proposed law creating a quota for British-built ships, making it tempting to read this as an allegory for the motion-picture industry, voicing Powell’s frustration with penny-pinching, risk-averse producers content to crank out mediocrity rather than competing with Hollywood for audiences and with Europe for artistic glory. This reading helps to bypass the film’s confusing politics, as it condemns cutthroat capitalism but also seems Ayn Rand–ish in its glorification of a relentless leader who overcomes labor agitators and persuades workers to toil for no pay in service of his ambition. The film’s glory is its documentary footage of Glasgow’s famous Clydeside shipyards, a muscular celebration of soaring cranes, molten metal, pounding machinery, and the skeleton of a great ship taking shape. Even more Soviet-influenced is the editing of a dramatic crowd scene, with a whip pan into a rat-a-tat series of close-ups of workers yelling, accompanied by the metallic rattle of their hammers. (Let there be no confusion, though, about the “red” ensign, which is the flag of the British merchant navy.)
Powell found a subject even closer to his heart in The Phantom Light (1935), though he did not originate the story. Still fruitlessly seeking a backer for his St. Kilda project, he indulged his love for remote, briny, and insular regions, here a lighthouse off the wild coast of Wales. The arrival of a skeptical Cockney lighthouse keeper (Gordon Harker) in a village where some inhabitants speak only Welsh, fishermen sing on the craggy cliffs while mending their nets, and stories of ghosts and madness are whispered plays as a preview of Powell’s later island movies, especially I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), with its materialistic Londoner reluctantly seduced by the enchantment of the Hebrides. The plot defuses mystery with the old B-movie chestnut about criminals using haunted-house trickery as a cover for their schemes, but Powell effectively blends comedy with sinister atmosphere and cinematic brio, from the “phantom ride” that opens the film—the camera on the front of a train speeding along winding tracks—to the dazzling, abstract shots of the revolving lighthouse lens.
The Edge of the World (Michael Powell, 1937).
In 1936, Powell finally found a producer, Joe Rock (another American), willing to finance his dream project, only to learn that he could not film on St. Kilda, the archipelago having become a bird sanctuary. Undeterred, he found a substitute in Foula, the most far-flung of the Shetland islands, which offered sheer rock cliffs thrusting up out of the waves, turf-roofed stone cottages, and rough-hewn islanders. He spent months on Foula with an intrepid crew and a small cast augmented by locals. Almost every scene of The Edge of the World (1937) is set in the open air, and the film is constantly enlivened by the fickle, vaporous light, the sun scattering on the waves and cloud-shadows silently crossing bare hillsides. The fancy editing of the quota quickies now serves the purest cinema poetry: the symphony of boiling surf, brooding cloudbanks, and blustering wind in a climactic storm; long lap dissolves and superimpositions peopling the landscape with memories and ghosts.
Powell himself plays an English yachtsman in the opening scene, with his future wife Frankie Reidy as his companion; they are the audience for the story of the island’s last days, recounted by their guide (the moodily handsome Irish actor Niall McGinnis). Although Robert Flaherty had urged Powell to make the film a straight documentary, he created a ballad-like story that weaves a family feud, star-crossed lovers, and tragic death into the conflict over whether to leave or stay on the island. That decision is at the heart of the film, and we are agonizingly able to see both sides: the sensible and finally inescapable argument that clinging to an unsustainable way of life causes needless suffering, and the grief at seeing that way of life disappear forever.
I Know Where I'm Going! (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1945).
The embrace of ambivalence is one of the greatest gifts of the Archers’ films, owing much to Pressburger’s storytelling genius. A Jew who had narrowly escaped from Berlin in 1933, he had the daring idea of making The Spy in Black’s hero a German, the enemy; we don’t want to see him win, but neither do we want to see him lose, and the plot lays bare the guilt-ridden betrayals and bitter sacrifices required by espionage. Powell’s quota quickies show his attraction to complex antiheroes—which he would take to the limit in Peeping Tom (1960)—but it takes great writing to pull this off. A Canterbury Tale (1944) refuses to judge Eric Portman’s character, a misogynist whose obsession with the past tips into madness, but also a poetic voice of wisdom and a lonely weirdo who evokes pity. The central figure in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) arouses insolubly mixed feelings; he represents the sclerotic old order, but also lost ideals of decency and the ordinary tragedy of time’s irrevocable passage.
It was Pressburger who brought Powell the seed for what would become the Archers’ greatest island movie, I Know Where I’m Going! It was filmed partly on the Isle of Mull in the Hebrides, teased by playful wind, fog wraiths, and dancing, watery sunlight; but it is above all a film of voices and stories. It centers on an island, Kiloran, that is never seen. For all their bravura, and the opulent excess of their later films, Powell and Pressburger understood that much of art’s power comes from what is left out. Like IKWIG’s heroine, we find that we don’t want things made too easy; we want to catch our own fish rather than have them delivered, to swim in the ocean rather than a pool. Pressburger’s narrative ellipses and Powell’s bold montage require leaps of the viewer’s imagination; each comes with a satisfying twang, like that of an arrow launched from a bow and singing toward its target.