A Canterbury Tale

Notes for an introduction to a film club screening.

Powell and Pressburger – an alliterative pairing whose enunciation immediately summons up an aura of magic and enchantment for me. I first came across their films in the 1980s when they were being rediscovered after several decades of neglect and critical disdain. I remember going to see them in the NFT and the repertory cinemas of London (the Scala and the Everyman were particular favourites). I fell in love with them and experienced an indefinable thrill every time I saw them. They were a part of my self-education, my teenage cultural awakening and they have remained a vital part of my life ever since, re-awakening those feelings every time I see them. I feel such an affinity for them that it probably wouldn’t be going too far to say that they are an inherent part of my soul. My English soul.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were, for 17 years between 1939-1956, an inseparable creative partnership, their intuitive understanding of one another leading to a series of films which were collaborations in the most intimate and complete sense. Emeric expressed the close conjunction of their artistic temperaments, saying ‘ he knows what I am going to say even before I say it – maybe even before I have thought it – and that is very rare’. Powell, with typical impishness, described their relationship as being like ‘a marriage without sex’, the qualification an addendum which perhaps didn’t need spelling out. All the films they made for the independent production company they set up in 1942 and called The Archers were credited as being written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Their logo saw a golden arrow joining 8 others on the Technicolor target (or monochrome if it was a black and white film), although it thunked in just outside the bullseye. Powell sent Emeric a copy of a rhyme written by James Agee: ‘The arrow was pure gold/But somehow missed the target./But as all Golden Arrow trippers know/’Tis better to miss Naples than hit Margate’.

There was no creative hierarchy or division, this was a collective act of creation. Michael Powell explained the idea behind this amalgamated credit some years later; ‘We wanted the titles to express the order of importance as we thought it’ he said, ‘so we decided on Written, Produced and Directed. In other words you’ve got to have a bloody good story to start with and it’s got to be well developed and then it’s got to be well produced, you’ve got to find the money and dress it properly, and that sort of thing…and then directing is purely one of the other things, like photography’. Of course they each had their particular role, but wouldn’t exclude the other from influencing their work. Powell would further elaborate in an interview for Variety in 1980: ‘in theory we made the films together; in practice, of course, I’m a director, just as Emeric had a long struggle to establish himself as a writer. So basically our ideas were usually Emeric’s conception as a story and Emeric’s working out in script form, from then we worked together and I would take over the direction, but every decision that was of any importance, including, of course, the editing particularly…was all made by the two of us together’.

Emeric was Hungarian, born in Miskolc in the northeastern part of the country. His father was an estate manager (the Pressburgers came from Pressburg, once the regional capital of Hungary but by this time, as Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia). He had a rural childhood growing up on farms, a pastoral upbringing which would strongly influence his worldview and his writing. This is made manifest in A Canterbury Tale above all else. He was educated in the city of Temesvar. When the maps were redrawn by the Allies in the aftermath of the first world war Temesvar was swallowed up by Romania and became Timisoara. It was the start of Emeric’s stateless roamings through the 20th century, his Hungarian nationality and his Jewish identity making him a target for the unwanted attentions of a succession of oppressive powers. He escaped to Prague before making his way to Germany (always his preferred destination) and eventually to the UFA studios in Berlin. His time there as a screenwriter and editor gave him an education in film-making and production which was to stand him in excellent stead for his later work. The Nazis came to power, however, and it wasn’t long before Jews in the film industry were targeted. 31st March 1933 was Jewish Boycott Day, a purge of the studios which saw a mass exodus of talented artists and engineers. Emeric stayed on in Berlin, reluctant to leave. But a phone call tipping him and impressing upon him the urgency of his immediate departure led him to flee to France with swiftly procured passports. He lived and worked in Paris for a couple of years before sailing over to England in 1935.

Three years later, in 1938, he travelled to Denham studios to start working on a picture for his fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda (soundtrack to be composed by Miklos Rosza, another Hungarian!) called The Spy in Black and was introduced to its brash and sometimes abrasive director, Michael Powell. The quiet Hungarian and the romantically extravagant Englishman almost immediately formed a bond which would last until their deaths. Perhaps even beyond. Powell’s second volume of memoirs, Million-Dollar Movie, describes a meeting with Emeric in his modest country dwelling, Shoemaker’s Cottage (‘a little number that looks as if it had been run up by the Brothers Grimm’), 50 years since their first encounter. They talk companionably about the old times, and about their artistic relationship. Emeric expounds on their philosophy, concluding that they remained always amateurs, dedicated to their vision. It’s only as the conversation reaches its conclusion that Powell reveals that Emeric was, at this point, already dead. It’s typical of the mutual generosity inherent in their partnership that, at the end of his lengthy 2 volume autobiography, he should let his dear friend have the final word.

Michael Powell himself was a Man of Kent (as distinct from a Kentish Man). He grew up in the Kentish Weald and Downland, a landscape of oast houses, hop fields, chestnut woods, meandering rivers, ridgeways and downland meadows. His family was based at Howletts farm near Canterbury then Hoath, even nearer to the city in which he received his early education. Like Emeric, his was a rural upbringing. A Canterbury Tale finds him returning to the landscape of his childhood. During the filming, he stayed at an inn in Fordwich, just a few miles from the old farms he remembered so vividly (as the first volume of his autobiography, A Life In Movies, attests). But despite this, A Canterbury Tale is Emeric’s film. Powell admits as much, and Emeric, always a modest man, said ‘this is the only one of them that is entirely mine’. It’s good to emphasise Emeric’s contribution because it is often eclipsed by the focus on Powell as the ‘auteur’ director (the fault of Martin Scorsese and the Cahiers du Cinema mob). Emeric’s stamp can be seen in the outsider perspective which predominates in this portrait of the Kentish landscape and spirit. In particular, the perspective of John Sweet’s Sgt Bob Johnson from Oregon. He’s perpetually mystified and amused by English ways; by their phones, their obsession with tea, their stoicism, their uncooperative mirrrors, their habit of shaking hands.

Eventually, Emeric became more English than anyone. Anton Walbrook’s extraordinarily moving refugee speech in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is essentially his expression of his own feelings. He found a home in these isles after years of enforced wandering and exile. And he ended up in Shoemaker’s Cottage in Suffolk, a true English country home. But he always remained Hungarian at heart. Many of his closest friends were Hungarian. And he never lost his taste for Hungarian cooking, spiced with plenty of paprika; a taste he shared with his English friend. As Kevin Macdonald writes in his biography of his grandfather Emeric, ‘Michael was enthusiastic about another of Emeric’s great loves. On cold winter evenings in London he was introduced to Hungarian cooking. Pots of goulash, bowls of cucumber salad and flocks of chicken paprika were set before him. But most of all Michael remembered the turkey’. Theo’s (Anton Walbrook’s) speech in Colonel Blimp, talking of his close friendship with Roger Livesey’s Clive Candy, echoed Emeric’s feelings and friendship with Michael Powell. They referred to each other with loving familiarity as ‘old horse’ or ‘Holmes and ‘Watson’ (Emeric, surprisingly, Holmes). Emeric was both supremely English and the eternal outsider. A condition which lent him his unique insight into the national character.

A Canterbury Tale was filmed in 1943, as preparations for D-Day were in full swing. Signs of the war are evident. There is extensive bomb damage evident in the centre of Canterbury. Denham studio sets were substituted for parts of cathedral. The stained glass in the Nave had been removed for the duration to preserve it from potential destruction. These scenes were a triumph for German designer Alfred Junge (who had spent a period of internment on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien), who would later go on to create the Himalayas on Pinewood stagesets for Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus. The cathedral bells had also been cossetted away for their own protection. Those are not the real ones used for dissolve shots at beginning and end. They are miniatures, but with real bell ringers ‘miming’ them to assure realistic changes.

Emeric was not allowed into Kent during the shooting even as daily visitor to set. This was the decision of Percy Sillitoe, the chief constable of Kent, who deemed him a risk as a technical ‘illegal alien’ (Hungary was a Nazi ally). He stayed in Powell’s cottage in Bratton Fleming in Devon. The troops seen in Canterbury at end were on their manoeuvres in preparing for D-Day, a piece of historical verisimilitude which gives the film an added frisson in the modern day. Who knows how many of those individuals marching through the pilgrim’s gates made it back. Of course, the landings were over by the time film was released in 1944. This was already history (unthinkable otherwise that such manoeuvres would be revealed).

Emeric said that A Canterbury Tale was the first stage in the Archer’s ‘Crusade against materialism’. In the context of the war and the vision of the world which would be built after its end, he asked ‘who is going to think about the human values, the values that we are fighting for’. Looking back at Canterbury Tales created a sense of continuity, linking the ancestral past with the present, conjoined by the mystical connection with landscape and memory. They were moral tales, blending chilvalry and noble sentiment with bawdy humour. Exactly the sort of thing which would court the approval of J. Arthur Rank, that arch Methodist. Having initially contemplated a period adaption, Micheal and Emeric decided to do a modern version. Emeric posited ‘a tale of 4 modern pilgrims, of the old road that runs to Canterbury, and of the English countryside which is eternal’. This sense of the eternal is central to the mystical quality of the film, the sense that time is insubstantial; that the landscape makes the past and the stories and lives which have become a part of and helped to shape its contours, its woodlands, streams and meadows immanent, particularly along the old ways trod by so many feet and carved by so many cartwheels over the centuries. Colpepper’s speech before his evening lecture makes this explicit. "Well there are more ways than one of getting close to your ancestors. Follow the old road and as you walk, think of them, and the old England. They climbed Chillingbourne Hill, just as you did, they sweated and paused for breath, just as you did today. And when you see the bluebells in the spring and the wild thyme, the broom and the heather, you're only seeing what their eyes saw. Ford the same rivers, the same birds are singing. When you lie flat on your back, and rest, and watch the clouds sailing as I often do, you're so close to those other people, that you can hear the thrumming of the hoofs of their horses, the sound of the wheels on the road, and their laughter, and talk, and the music of the instruments they carried. And when I turn the bend in the road, where they too, saw the towers of Canterbury, I feel I've only to turn my head, to see them on the road behind me."

The opening quote from Chaucer, with pilgrims riding on horseback, also creates a palpable sense of connection. 'Whanne that Aprille with his shoures sote/The droghte of Marche hat perced to the rote.../And small fowles maken melodye,/That slepen al the night with open ye/(So Priketh hem nature in hir corages):/Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages'. The hawk transmogrifying into a spitfire is a bravura piece of visual poetry eliding past and present (and many have noted the parallel with 2001:A Space Odyssey). This is the anti-materialism that Emeric speaks of. But there are also links with the British documentary movement, the poetic realism of Humphrey Jennings in particular (Listen to Britain, Heart of Britain, Words for Battle, A Diary for Timothy, Spare Time). The blend of location shooting with the heightened effects of studio shoots creates this heady blend of the poetic and the real. There is also and interest in observing, in going off and exploring; hence the non-sequential and meandering narrative, like the serpentine Stour we see running across the Kentish plain. This deviation form sequential narrative was, in its own traditional way, very modern. This might go some way towards explaining the lack of understanding by contemporary reviewers, such as the unsympathetic Dilys Powell.

Powell and Pressburger had always fostered a fine repertory company of actors. Powell had wanted to draw upon his stars from Colonel Blimp, Roger Livesey and Deborah Kerr, to take the central roles in A Canterbury Tale. But Livesey simply didn’t understand the part of Colpepper. Like a number of critics, contemporary and otherwise, he found the glueman aspect distasteful. Deborah Kerr had just signed to MGM and was also at the tempestuous (always tempestuous with Micky) end of a relationship with Powell. Thomas Culpepper was played by Eric Portman, who had previously been in the Powell and Pressburger pictures One of Aircraft is Missing and its converse companion, 49th Parallel, in which he was monstrously memorable as the vessel for Nazi doctrine Leiutentant Hirth. The three leads were all giving their first film performances. Michael Powell met Sheila Sim at a party with her new fiancé, Richard Attenborough (who would have a small part in Powell and Pressburger’s timeless masterpiece, A Matter of Life and Death). They were later to marry, and she would eventually become Lady Attenborough. Dennis Price had been found in a theatre production some months before and Powell had kept him in mind ever since. Sgt John Sweet, the gloriously innocent heart of the film, was an American GI whom Powell had spotted in a touring US army production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. He made a big impression on him as the narrator. His simple and unaffected performance feels true and enormously affecting due to its lack of artifice. Also featured is Esmond Knight in a triple role. He intones the opening Chaucerian narration, plays the ‘village idiot’ with his strangely arch, 18th century aspect (a wise fool), and the waxed-moustached, pipe-clenching soldier at Colpepper’s lecture. Michael Powell had wanted him for Portman’s role as Hirth in 49th Parallel. But he had been persuaded by Vernon Sewell to join the navy. His ship The Prince of Wales was hit by the Bismarck, an encounter in which he lost one eye and was blinded in the other. Powell cast him in the film Silver Fleet (an Archers production directed by Sewell) anyway and always included him in later pictures where possible , as here. Knight eventually regained some sight in his remaining eye. But his hugely enjoyable comic turn here is all the more admirable knowing the circumstances under which it was delivered. Also look out for station guard at the start, an immediately recognisable presence even here in his youth. He never really changed. I won’t tell you who it is, but you can always greet him with a saucy ‘oh, hello’.

The film is also blessed by Erwin Hillier’s luminous cinematography. He had a background in the German UFA studio. He started work as camera assistant on Fritz Lang’s M, and may indeed have bumped into Emeric Pressbuger, who also worked at UFA, at some time. They had a shared apprenticeship. The black and white contrasts, shadows and light blending in the mysterious night, have all the hallmarks of German expressionism. A style which would also be transposed, via another German cinematographer, Karl Freund, into the Universal horror style of Frankenstein (and there are definite echoes of horror in A Canterbury Tale – it would have been interesting to see what a Powell and Pressburger/Hammer collaboration would have produced). Michael Powell also noted Hillier’s obsession with cloudscapes, another significant feature of A Canterbury Tale. ‘The only thing he was a bit loony about was clouds in the sky’, he notes in A Life In Movies. ‘He detested a clear sky, and it sometimes seemed to me that he forgot about the story and the actors in order to gratify this passion. “Meekee, Meekee, please wait another few minutes”, he would plead. “There is a little cloud over there and it is coming our way, I’m sure it is”.

Allan Gray’s music perfectly blends in with the sound of bells at the beginning and end. And his angelic choir perfectly expresses the mystery of the landscape, the spirit of place. There is also a social dimension here. The contrast of the city with the countryside. A nascent ecological consciousness is evident, embodied in Colpepper’s favoured reading, Soil and Soul. Colpepper is religious figure with a decidedly ancient aspect. Michael Powell noted of Eric Portman’s Culpepper that he ‘had the face of a medieval ascetic’, which ‘could quite easily have been torn out of a medieval manuscript’. This medieval aspect also plays into the misogyny of the glueman, his historical refusal to acknowledge the place of women in society (although the glue also acts as a metaphor for social cohesion, and for the pouring in of knowledge and learning), This is seen in his refusal to allow women to work on his farm. The film acts as a rebalancing of this divisive vision of the past. Through his observation of women at work, and their lack of fear (none of the ‘victims’ of the glueman whom Alison interviews, all engaged in active and responsible working roles, express anything more than irritation at his activities) he learns as well; as he does through his relationship with Alison.

In the end, all receive their blessings. The entry into Canterbury is transcendent and really quite profoundly moving. Emeric succeeded completely in his crusade against materialism. Even Colpepper, his sins revealed before him, his confession made, receives some sort of exclulpation, although he stands penitently apart from the crowd. We end with the chiming of the bells and a return to Chaucer. Time transcended. The pilgrim’s way remains open. Enter through the gates and find the truth that lies within your heart.

Michael Gough

Investigating the crypt - as Arthur Holmwood in Dracula

Michael Gough (who died recently at the age of 94) had a film career full of odd contradictions. He had the patrician bearing and beautifully modulated received pronunciation tones of the trained stage actor, but spent much of his time slumming it in the grimier margins of the British horror movie industry. He had strong and distinctively handsome features, but was generally to be found playing the most untrustworthy and solitary of villain. A good point of comparison would be Denholm Elliott, who regularly played well-bred characters gone to seed, his authentically clammy backstreet abortionist in Alfie and twitching, fearful victim agoraphobically awaiting his diabolical fate in Hammer’s last horror film To The Devil A Daughter being typical. Gough never exuded such an air of sweaty desperation, always maintaining a disdainful superiority to the grubby surroundings (and company) in which he found himself, a bearing which perhaps reflected Gough’s own attitude to the material he was appearing in. The graduation from the idealistic characters which he played in the immediate post war years to the sinister and manipulative villains which he tended to portray in the 60s and 70s can be seen partly as a result of a cultural and generational shift. The authoritative patrician elocution and gestures of the classical stage actor became less of an indicator of noble heroism, and more of the envious and repressive character of an older generation, who a younger generation of writers and film-makers saw as bent on control and exploitation. The conservative romanticism of Powell and Pressburger was out of fashion as the vogue for kitchen sink realism took hold in the late 50s, followed by the hyperkinetic pop styles of the 60s (as epitomised by the films of Richard Lester) and the end of the road exploitation of the 70s. In many ways, the vivid Technicolor gothic of Hammer was the inheritor of this strand of British romanticism, and Gough appeared as a would-be hero in the studio’s second breakthrough film Dracula. He also appeared in the films of Ken Russell and Derek Jarman, later purveyors of idiosyncratic romanticism, in which he once more escaped from the roguish roles of blue-blooded villainy into which he was typecast.

Captain Stuart in The Small Back Room - uncomplicated goodness

In the early years of his film career (which was always ran parallel with a distinguished stage career) he appeared in the 1949 Powell and Pressburger film The Small Back Room, based on the novel by Nigel Balchin. The story is set during the dying days of the war, and Gough plays Captain Stuart, an explosives expert who has to deal with new and complex species of bomb which are being dropped by the Germans, each of which presents a deadly puzzle which has to be solved. Gough is young and fresh-faced here, his character sensitive, empathetic and fearless, one of Emeric Pressburger’s uncomplicatedly good souls. His off-screen death on the shingles of Chesil Beach shocks David Farrar’s enervated anti-hero Sammy Rice into emerging from his alcoholic shell of self-pity to defuse the booby-trapped bomb which has made its unstable nest on the shifting pebbles of the Dorset coast. Gough was once more heroic in one of Powell and Pressburger’s dull war films, Ill Met By Moonlight (1957), from the tail end of their career together as The Archers. The imaginative brio of their wartime films, which transcended their time and propagandistic purpose, towered above the prosaic nature of these workmanlike (if occasionally enjoyable) later efforts. Gough plays Andoni Zoidakis, a Cretan resistance fighter, who looks the part in rounded cap and with the sweeping upward flourish of a thick black moustache, all until he opens his mouth and is instantly an Englishman making a half-hearted stab at an exotic accent.

Cretan in a landscape - Ill Met By Moonlight

A year later and Gough was playing the role of Arthur Holmwood in Terence Fisher’s second full colour gothic horror for Hammer, Dracula. Arthur is a rather ineffectual, powerless character, and plays a distinctly subsidiary second fiddle to Peter Cushing’s decisive and athletic savant Van Helsing. Something of a convenient idiot to whom things must be explained, it’s a thankless role, and critics and commentators have not been kind. Sinclair McKay, in his history of Hammer A Thing Of Unspeakable Horro, refers to ‘the toe-curlingly awful performance of Michael Gough as Arthur Holmwood’, and Howard Maxford, in Hammer House of Horror: Behind the Screams, notes that ‘Michael Gough, it must be said, makes a rather dreary Arthur Holmwood, though the rest of the supporting cast helps to disguise his apparent lack of interest in the role’. Dracula was to prove something of a pivotal moment for Gough. His mere presence in such a hugely successful film, and its initiation of an opportunistic horror boom, meant that he could find plentiful work within the genre. And from hereon in, he would shrug off such bland portrayals of dull normality and begin to enjoy the pleasures of unabashed villainy.

This retreat from heroism was fully evident by the time of his second film for Hammer, Phantom of the Opera (1962), in which he plays composer Lord Ambrose D’Arcy, whose inspiration has long since dried up, and who steals the music of his admirer and soon to be vengeful phantom Professor Petrie and unapologetically publishes it as his own. Gough had by this time begun to appear in numerous horror films which rode in the slipstream of Hammer’s success, but relied on sensationalism rather than good production values, direction and acting. Notorious amongst these was Horrors of the Black Museum, which tested the limits of current censorship. It was the first of three films released by Anglo-Amalgamated, which culminated in Michael Powell’s reviled Peeping Tom. Interestingly, all three had their voyeuristic exploitation elements embedded within the storylines. Horrors of the Black Museum is about a hack writer who sends out an assistant to commit baroque and bloody murders which he then turns into best-selling novels. Circus of Horrors features a circus whose demented owner despatches any performers who threaten to reveal his dark secrets through conveniently arranged ‘accidents’ within the ring (knife throwing acts, lion tamers confronted with suddenly untamed lions etc). And Peeping Tom offers a complex reflection on the voyeuristic basis of cinema with its story of a cameraman who films murders committed with his adapted equipment, recording the terror of his victims’ death throes for his later private enjoyment in his personal dark room. David Pirie writes extensively about this period in Heritage of Horror:The English Gothic Horror. This was the time in which John Trevelyan was just beginning his tenure as secretary of the BBFC (the British Board of Film Censors), and was attempting to usher in a more liberal approach to censorship (often in the face of strident opposition from his fellows on the board), perhaps in view of the huge success of Hammer’s horror films at a time in which business in the film industry was generally declining. The leeway which Trevelyan gave to the makers of Horrors of the Black Museum and Anglo-Amalgamated’s follow-up Circus of Horrors backfired on him when several councils refused to grant Circus of Horrors a certificate. This arbitrary imposition of authority from local government was precisely the kind of thing which the BBFC was set up in the early years of the century to avoid. As a result, Trevelyan’s initial attempts at compromise proved something of a disaster, and the moral outrage directed at Peeping Tom resulted in its swift withdrawal from its limited cinema release. Matthew Sweet, in his book Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema, points out that such outrage could have been transformed into good, sensationalist publicity, and suggests that Anglo-Amalgamated chairman Nat Cohen pulled the film from the cinemas in order to protect his potential, much desired knighthood.

Lee and Gough face off - Dr Terror's House of Horrors

Horrors of the Black Museum, with its horrific opening scene featuring a pair of binoculars with spiked eyepieces, marked a new beginning for Gough, who became a low rent version of horror stars like Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and seemed happy to earn a crust with some pretty tawdry fare. He appeared in numerous low-budget horror films from this point on. He made two ape movies at either end of the sixties, one giant sized (Konga) and the other of normal stature but with anthropoid tendencies (Trog), both of which rival the works of Ed Wood for ineptitude and sheer enjoyability (at least from the clips I’ve seen). He made two above average films for Hammer’s rival company Amicus (although truth to tell they never posed any serious threat) – The Skull and Dr Terror’s House of Horrors. The latter was the company’s first foray into the portmanteau format, a series of brief stories arising from a central and usually rather contrived narrative device (in this case fortunes read to the travellers in a railway carriage by the mysterious Dr Schreck). Gough appears in the story featuring Christopher Lee as the pompous and self-important art critic Franklyn Marsh. He portrays Eric Landor, an impoverished artist who reacts to a devastatingly high-handed demolition of his latest traditionally inclined work by Marsh by setting him up for a humiliating fall. He invites him to an exhibition by an exciting new abstract painter. Lee is effusive in his praise, leading Landor to reveal that the artist is present in person. He goes back to fetch him and leads a chimpanzee out by the hand (shades of the artwork reproduced in James Lever’s mock star autobiography Me Cheetah). Landor continues to hold Marsh up to mockery, reminding him of his moment of critical idiocy at every turn and corner. Eventually, Marsh comes across his tormentor drunkenly staggering through the night streets and impulsively runs him down. Landor survives, but loses his hands, and unable to bear the thought of life without his art, commits suicide. But Marsh is not to be allowed to rest easy. Soon, and particularly during storm-racked nights, it seems, he is pestered the artist’s creeping hand, which evades any attempt at disposal and haunts him like some persistent, fleshy scuttling vermin.

Besieging the Tardis - The Celestial Toymaker

The story played well on the contrast between Lee and Gough’s personae. Lee always tended to be stiff and pompous, playing aristocratic or establishment characters (or Carpathian Counts, of course). Gough, on the other hand, had that rebel sneer, the insolent curl of the lip which would always place him on the other side of the divide (probably another reason why Michael Powell liked him). His characters were never actively evil, but they had a louche decadance which took aesthetic pleasure in their contrived maleficence. There was something a little sharp-edged, contemptuous and calculating about his onscreen persona. He had angular, vulpine features and a scouring regard which meant that he was never likely to mature into loveably vague or amusingly snooty aristo roles accorded to acting royalty such as John Gielgud or Ralph Richardson (or Maggie Smith, for that matter). If Richardson was eventually to ascend to the level of godhood in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, Gough would have been more suited to playing his mephistophelean counterpart. At around the same time that he was making Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, Gough appeared in the William Hartnell Doctor Who The Celestial Toymaker, bedecked in the oriental finery of mandarin chinoiserie. His imperious manner is manifested to the full as he plays the Gnostic demi-god of his own subcreation, guiding the Doctor and his companions (Stephen and Dodo in this instance) through the moves of a deadly godgame (cf John Clute in The Encycopedia of Fantasy). Gough secured his connections with Doctor Who by marrying Anneke Wills, the actress who played Polly, the companion who replaced Dodo in The War Machines. He would return many years later during the Peter Davison tenure for the 1983 story Arc of Infinity, in which he played another regal character of corrupt and self-serving mores, the traitorous Time Lord Councillor Hedin. The celestial toymaker was always a favourite of longterm (or simply obsessive) Who fans, and there were plans to bring the character back for a story with Sylvester’s McCoy’s Doctor, but the axe fell before they could come to fruition.

Gough tended to appear in less salubrious fare during the later 60s and 70s, however. Kim Newman, in Nightmare Movies, his guide to contemporary horror films (a new edition of which is due imminently - with a bfi interview with Mark Kermode to mark its publication), points to ‘a limbo of fly-by-night productions and colourful entrepreneurs who had their own, supremely disreputable, flourishing horror comic tradition, and awards Gough the dubious honour of being ‘the nearest thing to a star in this area’. These films probably do more than any more reputable and more generously budgeted pictures (not that there were many by the 70s) to capture the seedy and dissolute spirit of the age. In The Corpse (1970), which Matthew Sweet describes as ‘a minor but intoxicatingly poetic horror film’, Gough plays a horrible, tyrannical father whose wife and daughter finally decide that they can’t go on and collaborate in his murder. In the manner of an absurdist play, he simply continues the blandly abusive family routines as if nothing had happened. I’ve not seen that film, but I have seen Horror Hospital (1973), in which Gough plays a demented medic who runs a rest home in the country promising ‘hairy holidays – fun in the sun for the under 30s’. For no very good reason, he turns the guests who answer such an enticing advertisement into lobotomised zombies or violent psychopaths who do his bidding. Our hero is that epitome of seventies simian libidinousness Robin Askwith (who also regularly cropped up in Lindsay Anderson movies and bared his all in Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales). It was directed by Antony Balch, who had made three (deliberately) bewildering short films with William Burroughs in the early to mid 60s, Towers Open Fire (which incorporated routines from Burroughs’ Nova Express), Bill and Tony (ie Burroughs and Balch) and The Cut-Ups. The latter applied Burroughs’ and Brion Gysin’s textual cut-up techniques, designed to jolt the mind out of its customary associations with random collisions and juxtapositions, to celluloid. It certainly shook the viewers at the Cinephone in Oxford Street out of their usual mindset, although they tended to head for the exit as a result. Horror Hospital exhibits a similarly relaxed attitude to logic, sense and meaning and is, in its own undoubtedly exploitational way, just as bizarre.

Grizzled genre veteran - Sleepy Hollow

Gough found work in the 70s and on into the 80s with British romantics Ken Russell (in Women In Love and the Gaudier-Brzeska biopic Savage Messiah) and Derek Jarman. He donned papal red for the juicy role of Cardinal del Monte (sorry) in Carravagio and proved an authoritative Bertrand Russell in Wittgenstein, also giving sensitively articulating Jarman’s poetry in The Garden. Finally, his aloof and disdainful screen portrayals were recognised by Hollywood in the traditional manner, and he was offered the part of a butler. This was the start of a fruitful working relationship with Tim Burton, who says nice things about him on the commentary track of Sleepy Hollow. Gough played Bruce Wayne’s unflappable gentleman’s gentleman Alfred in the two Tim Burton Batmans, and stuck it out for the following two efforts (he’d been in much worse, after all. Mind you…) In Burton’s Sleepy Hollow he played Hardenbrook the notary, surrounded by his dry, curling official parchments. He was wolfish and grizzled, with one staring milk-white eye, and took his place alongside many other veteran British actors who were given free reign to be odd. It effectively marked his entrance into the Tim Burton retirement home for distinguished horror film veterans (Christopher Lee had already appeared in the opening scenes of the film as the burgomaster and Vincent Price was given a dignified late role as the creator of Edward Scissorhands). Gough had already appeared alongside Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee and Barbara Steele in The Curse of the Crimson Altar in 1968, but the film had pretty definitively wasted its fabulous cast, cobbling together an incoherent collection of clichés to tiresome effect. Trish Keenan and James Cargill of Broadcast expressed affection for it, however, imagining themselves as the house band for the rather desperate attempt at a with it party scene which starts the film. Burton remained loyal and constant to his veteran actors, and Gough went on to provide voices for Corpse Bride and Alice In Wonderland (he brought the dodo to life, whilst Christopher Lee intoned the jabberwocky). These films act as a tribute to Gough’s work in the genre.

The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff - Cameraman

I went to see the prosaically titled The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff – Cameraman at the cinema the other night, a film which now sadly stands as a tribute to the great cinematographer, who died last year. Cardiff is a great subject for such documentary treatment, being a congenial and modest man, with an amused anecdotalist’s ear and an apparent ability to get on with pretty much anybody, even stereotypically irate Hollywood tyrants such as Henry Hathaway. And of course, there is the unmissable opportunity to see examples of his work on the big screen. The Powell and Pressburger films were the undoubted highlights of his career, and it’s all the more remarkable that these were the first films that he shot as principal photographer. The scenes from A Matter of Life and Death, with June tearfully listening to David Niven’s Peter as he pours forth a final rush of romantic eloquence from his crashing plane, and Black Narcissus, with Kathleen Byron’s Sister Ruth gliding through the corridors of the Himalayan nunnery like a demented spectre before appearing at the outer door with a stare of focussed hatred and red-eyed wildness which could melt the surrounding snow in a wide radius, never fail to send a shiver down my spine. The emotional impact of both is hugely amplified by Cardiff’s expressionistic use of colour; the red glow in both the airplane cockpit and the radio communication room; and the red of Sister Ruth’s dress and eyes set against the whites and muted pastels of the nunnery and distant mountains. Although a dvd is set to be released on 19th July, these really do benefit from being seen on the big screen. As do the original films, of course. A revival of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is doing the rounds as an accompaniement to the documentary, which looks like it will show off Cardiff’s Technicolor to dazzling effect. A Matter of Life and Death is also being screened at our local Picture House. In most moods, I would cite this as being my favourite film of all time (for reasons outlined in previous posts). It does seem to be the default choice of Powell and Pressburger for screening outside London, however (last year’s re-issue of The Red Shoes aside). It would be great to have been given the opportunity to see Cardiff’s work on Black Narcissus this time (it is being shown over the Summer at Somerset House, for all you big city folk). Indeed, I’d love to be able to see The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp on the big screen again, or lesser known Powell and Pressburger gems such as the lush rural melodrama Gone To Earth, the brooding and intense The Small Back Room, or the dreamy evocation of the Kentish countryside A Canterbury Tale.

The film could almost be seen as a literary adaptation, since a lot of the material is familiar from Cardiff’s autobiographical volume of reminiscences of his life in film, Magic Hour. This has an introduction by Martin Scorsese, and it is only a few minutes before his inevitable appearance on the screen. He talks in his usual rapid, intense sentences, which tend to come to a sudden halt during which he inserts a nervous smile, as if self-consciously trying to bring a touch of levity to his almost violent expression of his passion for cinema. Despite his ubiquity, Scorsese’s presence is always welcome, as his knowledge is genuinely comprehensive, and his enthusiasm infectious (it seems rather churlish to suggest that he could do with being a bit more critical on occasion). The anecdotes which Cardiff both tells and sets down in writing have become fixed in form through the telling, and have reached a state of performative polish which makes them work perfectly against the backdrop of a photograph slowly panned across or zoomed in on, or as the prelude to a suitably chosen film extract. His position slightly outside the magic circle of stars and directors, whilst still being in close contact with them, gives him a degree of perspective which allows for fresh insight, free of the distortions of self-mythologising ego. Any slight embellishments, natural in the telling of a tale, can be forgiven in the light of the sheer range of his experiences in the film world, which date from the silent era right up until the time at which the documentary was filmed. There are scenes in which he is working on a recent movie, expressing his reluctance to retire and his hope that he’ll have a heart attack and die on the job (he has an unsentimental sense of humour, with a healthy instinct for the absurd).

Cardiff was born into an itinerant theatrical family, who toured theatres and halls as a variety act with him in tow, and soon taking to the stage himself. His reminiscences of his early life give a fascinating insight into the continuity between and intersection of the worlds of stage and screen. In Magic Hour, Cardiff tells us that his father, a comedian, performed on the stage with Charlie Chaplin in a Fred Karno show. When he met him much later in life in Switzerland and asked him about this, he was delighted to discover that Chaplin still remembered this show, and had clear recollections of working with his father. Cardiff’s parents took roles as extras in films whilst ‘resting’, and he relates the thespian scam of creating a circulating queue when collecting the day’s wage of a guinea, with a variety of disguises adopted to accumulate extra coinage. The camera picks out wee Jackie sheltering between the arms of his father, a dapper bow-tied and boatered figure, in a group photograph taken in front of the Hippodrome, and again, sitting at his side, in line with a black-face troupe at the seaside (a real sign of changing times).

Cardiff gravitated towards screen rather than stage, working his way up through the industry after early opportunistic experiences as a child actor gained through accompanying his parents in the search for roles as extras. He went from clapperboy to focus puller, to working on camera teams at Elstree and with Alexander Korda at Denham Studios (where he also worked on the special effects unit for Things To Come). He was a self-educated man, his early peripatetic lifestyle offering little opportunity for more settled schooling, and was an avaricious reader with a real thirst for learning. This autodidactic drive gave him an unorthodox range of reference points, which were well employed when he was examined by a board of big studio cheeses looking to select someone to send over to the USA to learn how to operate the new Technicolor equipment. Cardiff cheerfully admitted to his complete lack of technical knowledge, but impressed them with his appreciation of the representation of the effects of light in paintings by the Old Masters. He got the job.

Cardiff gives us a guide to this hulking piece of equipment, which is shot as if it is a monumental sculpture in enamelled chrome, which in a way it is now - a monument to a bygone age. This very unportable technology was hauled around the world at the behest of the eccentrically wealthy travellers the Count and Countess von Keller, and there are some marvellous pieces of footage shot at a variety of exotic locations. There’s the Taj Mahal, an Indian temple covered with sensuous wall sculptures, and Vesuvius, which was undergoing a minor eruption at the time, which resulted in burnt shoe soles and a significant shortening of the tripod of the very expensive camera equipment. Cardiff also lugged it onto the seas for the semi-fictional wartime drama Western Approaches, made for the Crown Film Unit in the style of the documentary movement. The footage from this was stunning, with the waves of the Irish sea swelling above the tiny lifeboat in which Cardiff, his equipment, director Pat Jackson and several merchant seamen were crouched. These scenes resembled a World War Two restaging of Hokkusai’s famous print The Wave. There’s a glorious shot of the sun on the sea’s horizon, whose colours were achieved using a combination of filters and film development techniques, and which strays slightly from the documentary ethos to express a more poetic realism. It’s a foretaste of the imaginative and unabashedly romantic uses to which Cardiff would put the Technicolor process.

Jack and Michael Powell on the Burrows

He was given the perfect opportunity to apply his painterly eye by Michael Powell, who noticed his camera work on the scene in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in which he conjures the heads of the Colonel’s hunting trophies onto the walls of his house with the crack of a gunshot until every space is filled. Powell was sufficiently impressed to offer an impulsive invitation to shoot his next film. This was to become A Matter of Life and Death. Although not strictly his debut (he’d shot The Great Mr Handel in 1942) this was an impressive film to be involved with so early in his career, and he brought all the knowledge he had accumulated to bear, both in terms of his technical expertise and of his appreciation of the use of the representation of light in painting. Set designer Alfred Junge tried to impose his own ideas of how to light his backdrops, but Cardiff stood his ground and did things his way. The contrast between the black and white, bureaucratic heaven and the vibrant colour of the Earth and the Universe allowed him to demonstrate that he could master the chiaroscuro gradations of monochrome and the enhanced realism of the Technicolor palette. Marius Goring’s famous line ‘one is starved for Technicolor up there’ could almost be seen as a small tribute to the sensuous quality of Cardiff’s colour photography. Photos of Powell and Cardiff on the dunes of Braunton Burrows above the wide expanse of Saunton Sands are testament to the closeness with which the two worked. One anecdote which underlines the pragmatism with which Cardiff approached technical challenges concerns the creation of a mist which gradually clears to reveal the landscape of sea and sand. He achieved this through the simple expedient of breathing on the lens. The fact that I now know that what I see on the screen is the dissipating condensation from Jack Cardiff’s breath, the transient imprint of a moment of his life, makes the scene even more magical. It provides an appropriately evanescent borderland between Heaven and Earth, life and the afterlife, black and white and Technicolor. Through the incidental improvisation of an effect, it creates a small poetic enhancement of the film’s meditation on the precious and fragile beauty of human life.

Cardiff went on to shoot Powell and Pressburger’s next film, Black Narcissus, which furthered his burgeoning reputation as a supreme cinematic colourist. In the documentary, he emphasises the degree to which various painters have influenced his cinematography and approach to lighting. The interiors of Vermeer, with figures engaged in the unremarkable minutiae of daily domesticity or simply lost in thought obliquely highlighted and etched by shadow via light slanting through windows, were a particular model. The muted tones of the nunnery are reminiscent of Gwen John, who herself painted several portraits from 1913 onward of nuns from the Order of the Sisters of Charity in Meudon, near Paris, where she had settled (whether Cardiff was aware of these I don’t know). This restrained palette is predominant throughout most of the film, before it is violently disrupted by the vivid primary colours which burst forth when Sister Ruth’s suppressed desire explodes into madness. Cardiff points to the expressionist reds and greens of Van Gogh as being an influence here.

Gwen John's nun

His love and knowledge of art was another facet of his self-education, and played a major part in forming his ideas of colour and lighting (and its corollary, shadow). He sits in front of paintings in the National Gallery and extols the virtues of the Dutch masters, the Impressionists and above all Turner. As he contemplates Rain, Steam and Speed (the richly atmospheric painting of an approaching train crossing a viaduct), he observes that he would have been a great cinematographer were he alive today. Cardiff ushers us into his own studio and shows us a selection of his own paintings, in which he copies the styles of his favourite artists. He is typically disparaging about his efforts, claiming that this is merely his way of analysing the work of his heroes and discovering how they achieved their characteristic effects. The results are, nevertheless, nothing to be ashamed of. He is completely in thrall to the great artists, and it is they, rather than other cameramen, who seem to have been his greatest inspiration. In Magic Hour, ostensibly a memoir about his life in the film world, he devotes considerable space to his encounters with various artists, such Utrillo, de Chirico (certainly an influence on parts of the Red Shoes ballet) and Braque. He also runs into Jean Cocteau, an artist who leapt with a light and airy step between the varied worlds of theatre, poetry, art, music, ballet and, of course, film. He seems overawed at the prospect of meeting the elderly Jane Avril, the model for some of Toulouse-Lautrec’s most famous depictions of Montmartre night life. Alas, she died shortly after he learnt of her whereabouts, and the meeting never took place.

Expressionist reds

Cardiff went on to shoot one more film, The Red Shoes, with Powell and Pressburger. His Technicolor cinematography reached new heights of gaudy expressionism here, especially in the celebrated dance sequence in which Moira Shearer puts on the red shoes. The air of heightened expressionism is enhanced by his close-ups of the faces of the dancers, in particular Moira Shearer as the rising ballerina Vicky Page. Their exaggerated stage make-up, designed to make an impression at a distance, distorts their features and makes them look as if they have just stepped out of a painting by Munch or Ensor. The Red Shoes isn’t one of my favourite Powell and Pressburger films, perhaps because I have little interest in the high culture world of the ballet in which it is set. Powell himself would display an increasing tendency to breath the elevated airs of the classical art world, with adaptations of Die Fledermaus (transformed into Oh! Rosalinda and updated to post-war Vienna) and Tales of Hoffmann (much admired by George Romero and Martin Scorsese, but not so much by me). Apart from anything else, these marginalized Emeric Pressburger’s gift for characterisation and storytelling, which were of paramount importance to the partnership. Perhaps he was admitting to the failure of his high art pretensions when he had Moira Shearer murdered by the scopophiliac cameraman protagonist of Peeping Tom. He did go on to make an hour long film of Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle in 1964 for German TV, however. Powell always claimed that The Red Shoes was about being prepared to die for one’s art, a view repeated as orthodoxy here. But Vicky doesn’t die for her art, but rather through the mental torment caused by the competing attempts to control her exerted by Anton Walbrook’s dictatorial svengali Lermontov and Marius Goring’s Julian, her jealous young composer husband. The love story between Vicky and Julian doesn’t seem remotely passionate enough to inspire the wildly operatic act of self-immolation which forms the film’s abrupt conclusion. Marius Goring is frankly more convincing (and certainly more charming) as the foppish Conductor 71 wielding his barley sugar walking cane in A Matter of Life and Death than as an artist and lover who would drive a woman to despair and death.

Kathleen Byron

Moira Shearer is one of a triumvirate of Powell and Pressburger leading ladies in the film, and it’s great to see both her, Kim Hunter and especially Kathleen Byron, all of whom, sadly, have now passed away. During his years working in Hollywood, Cardiff enjoyed warm friendships with many of the most glamorous actresses of the era. He seems to have been the sort of person in whose company they naturally felt comfortable, and in whom they felt they could confide. Marlene Dietrich took a shine to the young Jack when they were both working on Knight Without Armour at the Denham Studios for Alexander Korda. He was fascinated by the way in which she directed her own lighting, applying her make-up to best advantage of its shadows and reflections, ending with a light sprinkling of gold dust in the hair. Cardiff evidently learnt from Marlene, and he discusses the great beauties with whom he worked with a coolly analytical eye. He falls under their spell yet also manages to maintain the degree of distance necessary for his work. His own photographic portraits are wonderful, although he dismisses them in a typically offhand manner as being the products of an amateur. The full face picture of Audrey Hepburn, whose dark eyebrows he finds a particularly distinctive feature, adorns the film’s poster. Marilyn Monroe specifically asked for him to take her picture, and the resultant portrait is gorgeously sensuous even by her standards, with windblown hair straying across her face. It was apparently Arthur Miller’s favourite photograph of her.

Personal portrait gallery

Cardiff also took super 8 films on set, and these give a fascinating insight into the informal behaviour of actors and actresses whose images have been fixed by their screen roles, or presented in carefully pre-determined contexts such as magazine shoots or Parky-style interview schmoozes. Some seem little different from their screen personae. John Wayne still wears his cowboy gear and practices his gunslinging, even when he’s in the Sahara to play the role of foreign legionnaire. Ava Gardner seems broody and a little sad. But Sophia Loren comes to vivid, gleeful life. Seeing her act up to Cardiff’s camera with such playful ebullience, it comes as little surprise to read in Magic Hour that they had a very close relationship, a chaste semi-affair conducted in secret on the set of the otherwise forgettable 1957 film Legend of the Lost. Cardiff also filmed Kirk Douglas doing his own stunts on The Vikings, tiptoeing lightly across the oars of a longship (and falling in the water) and climbing up the gate of the castle perched vertiginously above the Croatian cliffs and sea (which stood in with surprising conviction for the Norwegian fjords). Douglas broke with his general reluctance to be interviewed since his stroke in 1996 to take part in this film, and this, together with the participation of many others, is a testament to the respect and affection in which Cardiff was held. The contrast between Douglas’ frailty and age in his contemporary interview and the youth and physical daring evident in the old super 8 films (those stunts look genuinely dangerous) has an inevitably poignant effect (something which seems to be ingrained in the super 8 medium). Cardiff gives short shrift to the idea that cinema is inherently tragic, however, having fairly brusquely gone along his row of photographic portraits and pointed out how many of them are dead.

Ava Gardner in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

Cardiff established himself as a major colour cameraman in Hollywood, and even if the films weren’t always of the finest quality (the 50s weren’t really a vintage era for American cinema) his visual contributions were always striking. We get to see glimpses of War and Peace (with its cavalry charge and dream-like duel in the dawn-lit snow), the fantasia of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (with Ava Gardner’s otherworldly siren), a sped up run through a highly complex ten minute take in Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn, and of course, The African Queen, which offers its own rich fund of anecdotes based around the trying conditions of its shoot, with crocodiles and rapids and other hazards. Lauren Bacall, who accompanied Bogie for the filming, is on hand to provide wry recollections. Everyone got dysentery at some point, since the water filter from which they were drinking was singularly failing to effect any filtration whatsoever, leaving them to drink pure African river water. Bogart and John Huston remained unaffected, however, since they only drank whisky.

It’s fair to say that Cardiff’s work as a director, which occupied him through the 60s and into the 70s, never rose above an efficient journeyman quality, and often the material on offer was simply bad. Sons and Lovers, the DH Lawrence adaptation to which most attention is paid here, was well received by the critics in its day, but has not gone on to be thought of as an enduring classic. Scorsese’s reply to a question about Young Cassidy, the Irish-set film which Cardiff took over from John Ford, is ‘I’ve got a print’, a reflexive response which falls short of his usual instantaneous effusion. Cardiff puts up a half-hearted defence of Girl On A Motorcycle, his attempt at an erotic reverie with Marianne Faithfull and Alain Delon, claiming that some of its notoriously awful dialogue made more sense in French, but the US title, Naked Under Leather, gives a more honest account of its appeal. Unsurprisingly, no mention is made of his final directorial effort, The Mutations (1973), a woeful horror movie in which meddlesome youths poke about in a suspiciously ill-attended fairground, a-la Scooby Doo, and fall foul of Donald Pleasance’s experiment-happy mad scientist, who turns his failed hybrids into sideshow freaks. Tom Baker leadenly plays his hideously scarred assistant, walking with patent henchman lurch, fresh from working with Pasolini on Canterbury Tales and biding his time before the call up for Doctor Who a year or so later. It’s worth seeing only for period 70s London detail and atmosphere (and attitudes).

Perhaps realising that he had reached rock bottom with a film which took a prurient interest in showing real sideshow freaks, Cardiff returned to working as a cameraman in Hollywood. The films he made in this final period are hardly the stuff of legend, and are interesting chiefly in the complete contrast they offer with the cinematic climate of the decades in which he had previously worked in this capacity. There’s a certain perverse fascination in discovering that the man who shot Black Narcissus, Under Capricorn and The African Queen was also behind the camera for Rambo 2: First Blood, Conan the Destroyer and The Awakening. At least the latter, a turgid adaptation of Bram Stoker’s dull novel The Legend of the Seven Stars (Hammer did it slightly better – and with a much catchier title – as Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb in 1973), allows for the participation of Charlton Heston. Cardiff’s work was never less than efficient and professional, however, and he maintained a high reputation which kept him in constant demand. There’s something lacking in their flat photographic realism, however (other shortcomings of the films themselves notwithstanding). Perhaps his greatest work was done in the artificial environs of the studios. It was here that he could create his own romanticised and highly coloured visions of reality, cinematic dreams which endure to this day.

Archers' Restraint

Sammy and Susan

The Small Back Room is a lesser known Powell and Pressburger film, perhaps because of its essential quietude, it's lack of the usual fireworks and fantasy. As a small scale black and white film which followed in the footsteps of the dazzling technicolor fantasias of A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, it's perhaps unsurprising that it has been occluded by their gaudy splendour. It's noticeable that commentators almost immediately refer to the hallucinatory scene of exaggerated expressionism which evokes the protagonist's battle with alcoholism and by extension despair, in which ranks of oversized clocks thunder out the passing seconds and a giant whisky bottle threatens to roll over him and crush him into the ground. But this is a scene which goes against the grain of the rest of the film, which relies much more on looks and glances, feelings unspoken but somehow known in order to portray the psychological effect of the war on those working at home. It is a film which won critical respect at the time, but attracted a meagre audience. It is ripe for rediscovery, for although it is very different in tone from their other works, it still ranks amongst Powell and Pressburger’s finest, which is praise indeed.

The film opens with a point of view shot through the windscreen of a car which is speeding through blackout London, until it is brought to a halt by a traffic light which commands it to ‘stop’ through the crossed shades which serve to reduce its luminosity. This serves as an opening metaphor for the way in which lives are interrupted and effectively put into suspension by the disruption of wartime. The titles locate the film as taking place in Spring 1943, when the war had become a long-established reality. The film focuses on the self-tormenting personality of Sammy Rice (played with aching stoicism by David Farrar), an expert in military ordinance, but as usual, Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell give rich life to even the most minor of characters. There is a pre-Carry On Sidney James (yet to the more familiarly matey Sid) as the sympathetic but no nonsense ‘not in my gaff’ publican ‘Knucksie’; Cyril Cusack giving a portrayal of touching hesitancy as Corporal Taylor, who is wracked by the knowledge that his marriage is breaking up during the long hours of his absence; the bluff and almost confrontational indifference of Colonel Strang, with his steely gaze (you can see that those eyes are blue even in black and white) and calculated distance failing to disguise his concern and sense of personal responsibility; and the extraordinarily moustached (in the military fashion) Colonel Holland, with his aptness to call a spade a spade.

We follow Captain Stuart, played by a very youthful Michael Gough, who was the occupant of the car whose viewpoint we shared, as he enters a plush marbled lobby which is filled with the muti-lingual and cultural babel of an international locus. It is a scene which displays Emeric Pressburger’s delight in mixing such disparate voices and accents, so richly demonstrated in A Matter of Life and Death. As we listen to this aural collage, the camera pans down a series of neatly lettered notices which provide a visually analogous set of signposts to the nationalities chattering in the background: Norwegian Merchant Seamens’ Enquiry Office; Czechoslovak Cultur Institut; American Red Cross; Free French Information Bureau; Polish Enlistment Office; International Red Cross London Office; Ministry of Supply S.E. Regional Offices. These all carry an air of importance global co-operation which is borne out by the smartly uniformed people we see engaged in meaningful conversation. At the bottom of this impressively variegated column of signage is taped a piece of scrap cardboard on which is a hastily penned ‘Professor Mair’s Research Section – first left’ with an accompanying arrow to point the way. This seems a rather more provisional and marginalized outfit, an impression not dispelled by Captain’s Stuart’s trek across an unlit courtyard to a building dwarfed by a large and looming block of flats of offices behind. This is the small back room of the title, where the beleaguered research team tries to carry out its work, with much unwanted intervention.

The story is essentially two-fold. Stuart is here to enlist the aid of the team in investigating the nature of a new secret weapon which the Germans may be using, but which is so shrouded in mystery that it might not even exist. This is a fairly straight war story, although it is complicated by Powell and Pressberger’s emphasis (taking their cue from Nigel Balchin’s novel, which drew on his own experiences) on the interdepartmental rivalries which are thrown up by the efforts to develop a new artillery gun. Sammy’s ostensible boss, ‘RB’ Waring, played with unctuous charm by Jack Warner, is more interested in his own self-promotion than in producing an efficient weapon. There is a very modern-sounding emphasis on figures, a word which makes Colonel Holland harrumph with contempt, and the ways in which they can be manipulated to give the required results. RB is there to sell an idea, and the tedious details of its actual applicability are considered unimportant, even though lives may be at stake as a result. There is a lovely scene which visually summarises the world in which Sammy has to operate, in which the camera pans along the rack above a long bench in a pub where lunch is being served. It is filled with the bowler hats of civil servants, broken only by one military cap until we come to the end of the row and Sammy’s trilby. This is the arena of faceless bureaucracy where the real games of power are played out and whose rules must to some extent be learned in order to make any progress.

The centre of the film is the love story between Sammy and Susan, superbly played by Kathleen Byron. In many ways, it is a reversal of the roles they played in Black Narcissus. In that film, Byron’s iconic depiction of the breakdown of Sister Ruth came after her rejection by Farrar’s indifferent Mr Dean. Here, it is Sammy who suffers the breakdown after Susan has apparently left him. But it is Susan upon whom he depends, and who is his strength throughout the film, and she never abandons him. Sammy’s ‘tin foot’, which we assume has been lost in a previous attempt to defuse a bomb, acts as a symbol of his feelings of impotence and powerlessness, and of his resultant bitterness. This is made evident in the nightclub scene, when he is left at the table as Susan goes off to dance with the partner of an old acquaintance of hers. Sammy gives her his blessing to thus enjoy herself, but we can sense that this is one more element to add to the mix of poisonous self-abnegation.

conflagration of the repressed

We never learn precisely the origins of this self-loathing, but it threatens the relationship he has with Susan. It is she who must prop him up without seeming to control him. They have a routine whereby she offers him a drink, and he refuses, the decision therefore appearing to be his. It is his need for her which triggers the expressionist nightmare scene mentioned above (oddly enough, not a dream sequence – rather a representation of inner torment) when she fails to turn up at a pre-arranged time. There is a palpable sense throughout the film of emotions being suppressed, put on hold. But they constantly threaten to flare up, something symbolically represented by the newspaper which Susan holds across the mouth of the fireplace to let it draw bursting into flames. Sid James is reluctant to let Sammy have a drink, too, partly out of personal concern, but also because he knows he is capable of breaking the place up, something he has evidently done before. The details of the relationship in this film, the sense of its strength, is conveyed in looks and glances. It is a film of close-ups, which convey both intimacy and the claustrophobia of lives dictated to by the exigencies of wartime duty which can suddenly call Sammy away to an unknown place like Bala, or insist upon Susan working through a lunch hour which they had intended to spend together. Ultimately, Susan is trying to guide Sammy towards regaining his sense of self-respect, something which also requires him to take responsibility for his work and do something to assert its importance and integrity. She wants him to become the self which she can see, and which she loves, but which is in danger of being destroyed by forces outside and within.

Finally, Sammy gets the chance to confront himself after he has reached the depths of self-destructive despair. He’s driven the sympathetic Knucksie to kick him out of the pub, finds that he has also forced Susan to leave him (she’s taken her picture out of the frame) and proceeds to destroy his own home, having hit the whisky bottle which has served as the symbol of his resistance to his alcoholism. It at this point that he receives the call informing him that one of the new bombs has been discovered. It is a crisis which offers him the chance of salvation.

Ancient sanctuary

The landscape in which the finale of the film takes place is a highly symbolic one. Sammy meets Colonel Strang outside St Catherine’s Chapel, the clifftop remains of Abbotsbury Abbey. This is the last of a line of sanctuaries in which Sammy has found refuge throughout the film. We have seen him observing the testing of a gun from within the stones of Stonehenge, and as he leaves this protected circle the screen has faded to show him walking to the entrance of the research rooms, which are another area of safe retreat. His rooms are another sanctuary, as is Knucksie’s pub. Now he must leave the sanctuary of St Catherine’s chapel and descend to the wide, desolate sweep of Chesil Beach where the bomb has landed. This is a landscape made for existential confrontations. It is empty and gray, the pebble bank divided by the salt lake behind and the flattened strips of sea and sky. The naked sound of wind, with no vegetation to temper it, provides the aural dimension to this desolation. Concrete blocks are scattered at regular intervals, giving the landscape the surrealistic flavour of a Paul Nash painting. From the slope of the beach where the bomb has been isolated in a mini-bunker, Sammy is completely alone. He has a speaker which connects him with the others, but it is one way. There will be no reply. The instability of the shingle surface is an externalisation of Sammy’s personality, and of the disruptions and daily uncertainties which he and Susan, and many others, have experienced and which has taken its gradual toll on their psyches. The defusing of the bomb is more than just his effort towards saving lives. Through purposeful action, the realisation of his own worth, he is defusing the rage which is always threatening to erupt from just beneath the surface of his fragile self-control. As he says, this is personal. The depiction of the romantic English landscape is beautifully done in itself (as it was in the Welsh scenes) as we would expect from Powell and Pressburger, who had ranged from the Hebridean Isles to the North Devon sands in previous films.

The film ends with Sammy having regained some measure of self-respect, taking on the responsibility of working directly for Colonel Holland, which will connect his work more directly with those who will be using it. The final scene finds him returning home, where he finds Susan waiting for him. Dawn is breaking outside (indicated by a slightly awkwardly operated mechanical bird which launches itself from a fence post) but she draws the curtains, shutting the outside world out. She turns on the light, and the chaos which he has wreaked on his own inner sanctum has all been repaired. The photo is back in its frame and even the whisky bottle whose contents he had decimated is back in its place. As Tim Lucas has pointed out in his review of the film, there is something very moving about the quiet restoration of order which this scene depicts. Kathleen Byron looks so joyful at the fact that Sammy has finally come back to her in spirit, that he has at last lived up to what she has known he could become. Her radiant face is the last thing we see in the film, which is an indication of her absolute centrality. It is her finest hour (and that includes her stunning depiction of the breakdown of Sister Ruth in Black Narcissus). In the second volume of his autobiography, Million Dollar Movie, Michael Powell wonders ‘why didn’t I make more picture with Kathleen Byron, if I thought so highly of her?’ I wonder too. Kathleen died in January of this year. Do watch this film as a tribute to her unique presence.

Kathleen's joy