They
called themselves the Archers, the director from Canterbury and the Hungarian-born screenwriter whose partnership
resulted in Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, The Tales of
Hoffman, and many other movies now seen as touchstones of exotic cinema.
Why the name was chosen is no longer well-remembered, but from 1939 to 1956 the
Archers’ witty logo — a target decorated with badly aimed arrows, a final
shaft thwacking into the bullseye — announced pictures that fell far outside
the dry center of the British film industry yet found large audiences in the
home islands and all over the western world.
The Archers were director Michael Powell and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger,
and 40 years after their collaboration ended it is increasingly evident there
was nobody like them, then or now. Committed to the emotional use of color and
movement in a country that distrusted strong feelings, they introduced
traditional British values to eroticism and passionately modernist technique,
and invited them all to dance. Ardent antirealists, their work fell out of
favor when a grinding realism took over British movies in the Sixties, and many
years passed before their films enjoyed delighted reappraisals on both sides of
the Atlantic. Not until the Eighties and Nineties did Powell’s startling talent
become widely recognized for its brazenly meteoric modernism. Influential fans
such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola led the Michael Powell
bandwagon, praising the master who inspired them so.
Thanks to the Austin Film Society and the British Film Institute, sparkling
new prints of the key Powell & Pressburger movies are now being screened
locally for the first time in eons. And the six pictures remaining in the
series include five of their most important works, along with a shocker Powell
made by himself in 1960:
* Black Narcissus (1947) may be the greatest movie about repressed
passion ever made. High on a windswept bluff in the Himalayas in a building
once used for a harem, an order of missionary nuns are reduced to emotional
rawness by altitude, isolation, and an intractable clash of cultures. Sister
Ruth (Kathleen Byron) succumbs to ravenous hunger for a handsome plantation
overseer, and in her hysteria imagines the mother superior, Sister Clodagh
(Deborah Kerr), as her rival for the overseer’s affections. She seeks release
in violence, in a heart-stopping sequence that outdoes Hitchcock because it is
plausible, rooted in emotion rather than contrivance. Sexual tension whips
through the movie like the icy Himalayan wind you can hear in almost every
scene.
* Stairway to Heaven (1946), originally titled A Matter of Life and
Death and recently restored, treats the idea of pleading before a heavenly
court for a way out of the afterlife with eccentric humor. The movie steps from
one world to the other with a delicacy seldom managed by other afterlife
stories.
* The Red Shoes (1948) is probably the Archers’ best known and beloved
movie. This quintessential ballet film is a knowing and affectionate backstage
story, full of detail, about a Russian ballet impresario who blows hot and cold
and an aspiring dancer, played by Moira Shearer, who actually could dance.
Powell, writing his memoirs, knew why it caused a sensation. “We had all been
told for ten years to go out and die for freedom and democracy, for this and
for that, and now that the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go and
die for art.”
* The Tales of Hoffman (1951), based on Jacques Offenbach’s fantasy
opera, deploys lavish decor and choreography in a hymn to the transcendence of
the female spirit, personified by Moira Shearer, Pamela Brown, and Ludmila
Tcherina, actresses who ran the gamut from angelic to vampy. The color red is a
major character here as well.
* The Small Back Room (1949) handles the story of a crippled munitions
expert struggling against disability and bureaucracy with expressionism rather
than the earnest realism apparently required by the material. Like Black
Narcissus, it trembles with nervous tension, though of a different kind.
* Peeping Tom (1960), made by Powell without Pressburger, shocked
audiences when it was released a few months ahead of Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho. Unlike the better known movie, it still shocks people today and
is frequently cited as the forerunner of the modern horror film. Powell delved
too far for anyone’s comfort into the nastier implications of voyeurism as a
way of life with this story of an introverted film studio camera operator who
films women as he kills them. To make matters worse, there was the mechanical
plot device that doubles the victims’ terror and the killer’s thrill of
spectatorship, plus the way Powell calmly observed the action while he slipped
dark little jokes under the covers, so to speak. Years before perversity became
commonplace in movies, Powell was prescient about the frenzy born of continuous
watching, and how mass entertainment acted as midwife.
Peeping Tom was greeted with real rather than appreciative horror, and
Powell’s career fortunes waned (though he was able to make a few more movies).
Pressburger began a new career as a novelist, and Powell went off to Australia
for his last several projects. He ended up in the U.S., teaching at Dartmouth,
working as a senior director-in-residence at Coppola’s doomed studio, Zoetrope,
and married movie editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who won an Oscar for editing
Raging Bull and whose longtime creative collaboration with director
Martin Scorsese is well-established). She helped Powell complete the two
volumes of his autobiography, A Life in Movies — now out of print and
hard to find — and Million-Dollar Movie, published last year, five
years after his death. The story of the Archers is told in those books; in
Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter by
Pressburger’s grandson, Kevin McDonald; and in Arrows of Desire: The Films
of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger by Ian Christie.
Numerous are the reports of people who tried to talk Powell out of sharing
full directing and producing credit with screenwriter Pressburger, telling him
that it simply was not done and how profits would have to be shared down the
middle. Powell felt their duties overlapped so much that fairness demanded the
unusual arrangement. According to Kevin McDonald, overlap was only the half of
it:
“The true secret of Michael and Emeric’s collaboration is something which
cannot be explained. It was the uncanny empathy they had for each other’s
ideas: `He knows what I am going to say even before I say — maybe even before
I thought it — and that is very rare… there was an inner response,’ said
Emeric, using a typical metaphor, `like a violin that would respond to an
outside sound if it is tuned in a similar way.'” n
All movies are screened on Tuesdays in the Texas Union Theatre at 8pm.
Admission is free.
Black Narcissus (October 8); Stairway to Heaven (October
15); The Red Shoes (October 22); The Tales of Hoffman (October
29); The Small Back Room (November 5); Peeping Tom (November 12)
This article appears in October 4 • 1996 and October 4 • 1996 (Cover).