The life and death of peeping Mike
Frederic Raphael
MILLION-DOLLAR MOVIE by Michael Powell Heinemann, £20, pp. 612 All accounts of the British film indus- try tend to be annexes to the Book of Lamentations. As in the story of English cricket, one finds no lack of wasted oppor- tunities, shattered partnerships, fine begin- nings frittered away and disastrous second innings. Michael Powell — almost as old as the century — was in at the creation and remained, like a pretty cheerful Banquo, until the last of the silver was pawned and the last dishes cleared or broken. His part- ner, Emeric Pressburger (whom he always called 'Imre', presumably because it was his name, and who almost rivalled him in longevity), was one of the legion of refugees who invigorated the cinema, both in England and in Hollywood, and furnished the industry with cosmopolitan standards which were, in most cases, much too good for the parochial tycoons who sought to control them and it.
Michael Powell was eminently English: in other words, he was of Welsh origin and often wore a kilt. The second volume of his autobiography is a sort of marathon race with death; he finished its almost 600 chat- tY pages not long before the bracket closed on his long, fruitful and peripatetic life. Much of the text consists of taped material elicited by Thelma Schoonmaker, the American editor whom Powell met when she was working for Martin Scorsese and who became his second wife. Scorsese became a fan when he 'discovered' the Powell-Pressburger films, such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in an American TV series, Million-Dollar Movie, which lends its once lavish-sounding style to the tale of a director who never disposed of such a budget. Powell's career was often funded by enthusiasm; he was a lifelong lover of the movies, with the romantic gift of almost unlimited energy. He believed, as he often repeats, that 'all art is one'. The fervour of this view does not entirely justify it; an unsympathetic critic might read it for a Parvenu claim by the film director to be on a par with Beethoven or Tolstoy. In Powell's case, it was perhaps a matter of Personal honour (and an aid to survival) to believe that what he created was more
noble and enduring than the company it often obliged him to keep. The film-maker who cannot believe that he is expressing something more than what the Studio wants soon becomes an apparatchik: to belong to 'the Industry' is also, for anyone of quality, to rebel against what it would like to see him doing.
Powell and Pressburger's great period straddled the war. Their films were markedly 'European': neither The Red Shoes nor The Tales of Hoffmann would have been made by any parochial outfit. These successes gave their company, The Archers — how many can now recall the plunk of the arrows as they hit the bullseye in the opening logo? — an apparently charmed and more or less autonomous life. It was glorious but it could never last. No British filmmaker could (or can) survive without the distributional facilities and international salesmanship of bigger out- fits.
Both Alexander Korda and the Rank Organisation (ask not for whom their gong tolled) cast rapacious eyes on Powell and Pressburger. Korda was more charming and subtle; Rank, in the form of John Davis, had greater clout and clearer pur- poses, one of which was to rival the Ameri- cans and, in particular, to evict them from British markets. The cause may have had a tincture of nobility, but the effect was catastrophic. The atmosphere of Pinewood Studios in the mid-Fifties was heavy with last gasps as the hated Davis and his syco- phants sought to sustain their dying empire with new blood and old hat. In this, of course, the life and death of the British film industry was a metaphor for Britain itself. One of Powell's greatest hits, The Battle of the River Plate, was being made when I first set timid foot in the panelled dining-room; the uniforms of our chaps and the Huns (amongst whom marinated the fledgling John Schlesinger) testified to the protraction of our finest hours as a means of postponing the moment when the last post would sound for British indepen- dence.
Powell's declined with the rest of the crew but his fall was harder than most. He was obviously a belligerent and arrogant man (how much more amenable people are when they prefer money to art!), but he was always regarded with respect until 1960 when, as his association with Pressburger began to fracture, he worked with a differ- ent screenwriter, Leo Marks, on Peeping Tom. If 1960 was also the year when Lady Chatterley came out of the shrubbery, it saw Powell consigned to the wilderness on account of an 'obscene' film which, even on the reckoning of the usually generous and — in Mickey's case — synonymous Dilys, had no redeeming feature. Today, it would probably seem like De Palma and water, but Powell's insistence that his study in voyeurism was a metaphor for the cinema's destruction of women did not cut any ice with the critical jury; nor was Peep- ing Tom succulent enough to appeal successfully to the higher court of the box office.
From 1960 onwards, Powell had a long lease on the dog-house, despite occasional `development deals', TV work and delu- sions of renaissance. His book, however, is plump with unrepentant cheerfulness; recalling happiness in sad times fills him with no hellish anguish, perhaps because he continued to take pleasure in his friends and in the company of women. 'We made love all night' is a nice immodest phrase to be able to use when in your seventies, as he seems to have been when he met and, as they used to say, conquered Thelma. Pamela Brown and his first wife, Frankie, were, along with Deborah Kerr, perhaps adequate and passionate compensation for what was done to the greatest of his loves, his film career, by people like John Davis and his henchmen, not to mention Mel Ferrer (which must be the right course).
Thanks to American cinephiles like Scorsese, Powell's reputation has now been redeemed; he and Pressburger — Izzy Diamond to Mickey's Billy Wilder — have their undoubted place in the nissen-hutted mausoleum which doubles for Britain's post-war hall of fame in the great studio in the sky. These memoirs have something of the racy shamelessness of Benvenuto Cellini's, though Powell's art may not last as long. The strange accents on French words (despite Mickey's gallic affinities) and the ascription of The Last Enemy to Richard Hillery [sic] suggest that, even posthumously, Powell had to rely on un- English help — notably Thelma — for the fulfilment of his work. He may now be at peace but, assuming that his paradise is where no John Davis runs the biz, he is cer- tainly not at rest.
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