The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (332 page)

From 1932, Powell fretted through a seven-year contract at Warners, despairing of the musicals he adorned as a romantic lead and light-voiced singer, often with Joan Blondell. These are only the highlights:
Blessed Event
(32, Roy del Ruth);
Gold Diggers of 1933
(33, Mervyn Le Roy);
Footlight Parade
(33, Bacon);
Dames
(34, Ray Enright);
Happiness Ahead
(34, Le Roy);
Flirtation Walk
(34, Frank Borzage);
Gold Diggers of 1935
(35, Busby Berkeley);
Page Miss Glory
(35, Le Roy);
Thanks a Million
(35, del Ruth); as Napoleon’s brother in
Hearts Divided
(36, Borzage);
Stage Struck
(36, Berkeley);
Gold Diggers of 1937
(36, Bacon);
On the Avenue
(37, del Ruth);
Varsity Show
(37, William Keighley);
Hollywood Hotel
(37, Berkeley); and
Naughty But Nice
(39, Enright).

He then went to Paramount and appeared as the man who mistakenly believes he’s a big winner in
Christmas in July
(40, Preston Sturges) before slipping back into more musicals:
Model Wife
(41, Leigh Jason);
Happy Go Lucky
(43, Curtis Bernhardt); and
Riding High
(43, George Marshall). René Clair gave him the lead in
It Happened Tomorrow
(44), but the part that really changed Powell’s image was that of Philip Marlowe in
Murder My Sweet
(45, Edward Dmytryk). At last he seemed to have won the dramatic, tuneless work he had set his heart on.

For six years he was a straight actor, even if his movies varied greatly in quality:
Cornered
(45, Dmytryk);
Johnny O’Clock
(47, Robert Rossen);
To the Ends of the Earth
(48, Robert Stevenson);
Stations West
(48, Sidney Lanfield);
Pitfall
(48, André de Toth); with June Allyson, his second wife (Joan Blondell had been first), in
The Reformer and the Redhead
(50, Melvin Frank and Norman Panama) and
Right Cross
(50, John Sturges);
The Tall Target
(51, Anthony Mann);
Cry Danger
(51, Robert Parrish); probably his best work as the writer (with pipe) in
The Bad and the Beautiful
(52, Vincente Minnelli); and in
Susan Slept Here
(54, Frank Tashlin).

As a director he made these consistently anonymous movies:
Split Second
(52);
The Conqueror
(55)—with John Wayne as Genghis Khan;
You Can’t Run Away from It
(56);
The Enemy Below
(57); and
The Hunters
(58).

Eleanor Powell
(1912–82), b. Springfield, Massachusetts
You are in solitary confinement for the rest of your life. There is a screen built into the cell wall, and it is a condition of your sentence that you may have just one sequence from a movie to play on that screen. This is my choice: black and white and a hard reflective floor, a set that recedes into darkness. Fred in all white with a black bowtie. Eleanor Powell wears three-quarter heels and a dress that stops just below the knees. She wears short sleeves and puff shoulders; the skirt is magnificently light and fluid, moving to the sway of the profound, yet casual, tap masterpiece, “Begin the Beguine,” from
Broadway Melody of 1940
(40, Norman Taurog). Much of the dance is in exact unison, but there are fleeting solos and imitation repeats, as well as exquisite arm movements, especially from Powell. I know of nothing as exhilarating or unfailingly cheerful, and maybe the loveliest moment in films is the last second or so, as the dancers finish, and Powell’s alive frock has another half-turn, like a spirit embracing the person. Give credit to Taurog, to dance director Bobby Connolly, to Astaire as always, but still this is a rare Astaire dance in that the lady actually holds the eye. Powell was not much of an actress, she was a dubbed singer, and she was single-mindedly a tap dancer. But this is a rapture.

She danced on Broadway, in the Follies, and came to movies in 1935:
George White’s Scandals
(35, George White, Thornton Freeland, and Harry Lachman);
Broadway Melody of 1936
(35, Roy Del Ruth);
Born to Dance
(36, Del Ruth);
Broadway Melody of 1938
(37, Del Ruth);
Rosalie
(37, W. S. Van Dyke), with Nelson Eddy;
Honolulu
(39, Edward Buzzell);
Lady Be Good
(41, Norman Z. McLeod);
Ship Ahoy
(42, Buzzell);
Thousands Cheer
(43, George Sidney);
I Dood It
(43, Vincente Minnelli); and
Sensations of 1945
(44, Andrew L. Stone) where she dances inside a pinball machine.

She married actor Glenn Ford in 1943 and then retired. After that, she made only one more film,
Duchess of Idaho
(50, Robert Z. Leonard). She and Ford were divorced in 1959, and she made a short-lived return as a nightclub performer.

Michael Powell
(1905–90), b. Canterbury, England
1931:
Two Crowded Hours; My Friend the King; Rynox; The Rasp; The Star Reporter
. 1932:
Hotel Splendide; Born Lucky; C.O.D.; His Lordship
. 1933:
The Fire Kaisers
. 1934:
The Night of the Party; Red Ensign; Something Always Happens; The Girl in the Crowd
. 1935:
Some Day; Lazybones; Her Last Affaire; The Love Test; The Price of a Song; The Phantom Light
. 1936:
The Brown Wallet; Crown v. Stevens; The Man Behind the Mask
. 1937:
The Edge of the World
. 1939:
The Spy in Black
(codirected with Emeric Pressburger—EP);
The Lion Has Wings
(codirected with Brian Desmond Hurst and Adrian Brunel). 1940:
The Thief of Bagdad
(codirected with Ludwig Berger and Tim Whelan);
Contraband
. 1941:
An Airman’s Letter to His Mother
(d);
49th Parallel
(EP). 1942:
One of Our Aircraft Is Missing
(EP). 1943:
The Volunteer
(s);
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
(EP). 1944:
A Canterbury Tale
(EP). 1945:
I Know Where I’m Going
(EP). 1946:
A Matter of Life and Death
(EP). 1947:
Black Narcissus
(EP). 1948:
The Red Shoes
(EP);
The Small Back Room
(EP). 1950:
Gone to Earth/The Wild Heart
(EP);
The Elusive Pimpernel
(EP). 1951:
The Tales of Hoffman
(EP). 1955:
Oh, Rosalinda!!
(EP). 1956:
The Battle of the River Plate
(EP);
Ill Met by Moonlight
. 1959:
Honeymoon
. 1960:
Peeping Tom
. 1961:
The Queen’s Guards
. 1964:
Bluebeard’s Castle
. 1966:
They’re a Weird Mob
. 1969:
Age of Consent
. 1972:
The Boy Who Turned Yellow
(s).

There is not a British director with as many worthwhile films to his credit as Michael Powell. Yet in the age of Richardson and Schlesinger, in the sixties and seventies, Powell had hardly any adequate critical appreciation. The sadness was that he was written off as an eccentric decorator of fantasies. Against persistent British attempts to dignify realism, Powell must have seemed gaudy, distasteful, and effete. All three ingredients contribute to his vision, but so do an imaginative evocation of the erotic and the supernatural; a pioneering enthusiasm for visual autonomy always likely to break out in passages of stunning delight; the adherence to what Raymond Durgnat once called “High Tory” values; a wicked sense of humor and private jokes; and most distinctive—like Colonel Blimp’s dreams—an unsettling mixture of emotional reticence and splurging fantasy. Thus, as late as 1969,
Age of Consent
, a mild beachcombing anecdote, is lit up by baroque passages of Helen Mirren, naked and underwater.

It is revealing that
Peeping Tom
was dismissed in Britain as wayward nastiness. Worst of all, Powell may have been inhibited by the feeling that his imagination was un-British. Powell stayed English despite the merry excursion to Australia when he cried out for the geography of light and shade that von Sternberg illuminated on the Paramount sound stages. Even when Britain rediscovered horror in the late 1950s, as O. O. Green has remarked, Powell was ignored. Green compared Powell and King Vidor, whose
Duel in the Sun
Jennifer Jones was reduced to
Country Life
fretfulness by Powell in
Gone to Earth:
“Vidor, intellectually, perhaps, less sophisticated, or at least less cautious, than Powell, has retained just that Wagnerian authenticity of emotional excess which gives his films that genuine mysticism, a Nietz-schean pantheism. But Powell lived in a class and a country which suspects, undermines, is embarrassed by, emotion; his diversity of qualities rarely find their holding context.”

As if in early accord with that verdict, Powell left Dulwich College for the studio Rex Ingram had set up in Nice. He assisted the ex-Dubliner, ex–Hollywood director, on
Mare Nostrum
(26),
The Magician
(26), and
The Garden of Allah
(27). Undoubtedly that experience encouraged his interest in the expressionist treatment of the supernatural; Ingram’s splendid isolation may also have confirmed a young man’s belief in “artistic” cinema. It was several years before Powell’s own films showed such strange fruit. He slogged away for some time in England as cameraman, writer, and director; only in the late 1930s do his films seem his own.

Thereafter, in vital partnership with the writer Emeric Pressburger, they struggle with great, clashing virtues—with marvelous visual imagination and uneasy, intellectual substance:
I Know Where I’m Going
is a genuinely superstitious picture;
49th Parallel
is a strange war odyssey, with escaping Germans wandering across Canada—naïve, very violent, at times unwittingly comic, but possessed by a primitive feeling for endangered civilization; an interesting sequel is
One of Our Aircraft Is Missing
—English fliers getting out of Holland;
A Matter of Life and Death
is pretentious in its way, yet very funny and absolutely secure in its dainty stepping from one world to another. But the two Conrad Veidt movies
—The Spy in Black
and
Contraband
—are exciting and atmospheric studies in Langian intrigue;
The Thief of Bagdad
is delightful;
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
a beautiful salute to Englishness. After the war, Powell expanded, attempting to fuse the talents of painters, designers, and dancers. In fact,
The Red Shoes, Tales of Hoffman
, and
Oh, Rosalinda!!
underline the search for respectability in his work. But
The Red Shoes knows
that creative dreams easily surpass reality. It raised people to dance, but it is also a lovely tribute to creative collaboration. And Anton Walbrook’s Lermontov—so hot, so cold—is a portrait of Powell himself. With a very personal mixture of wisdom and naïveté, Powell treated the artist or wizard as the last potent pagan deity.
Black Narcissus
is that rare thing, an erotic English film about the fantasies of nuns, startling whenever Kathleen Byron is involved.
The Small Back Room
profits from the use of unexpected expressionism on an ostensibly realistic subject and quivers with nervous tension. Equally,
The Elusive Pimpernel
has gorgeous moments despite a routine swashbuckling story.

After about 1950, dejection seemed to set in, only to be dispelled by
Peeping Tom
, Powell’s most completely realized and intellectually somber film. Full of dark jokes, including his own presence as the cruel father, it also shows Powell’s sense of the cinema’s own contribution to frenzy. The central character is a moving portrait of the imaginative young man who is unsociable with real people but familiar with the stars of movies. He is a shy focus puller who takes film of girls using a tripod that contains a swordstick. The stuck victims goggle horribly at the picture they make in the reflector above the camera; and so reaction stimulates the spectacle even further. The film was reasonably criticized as an exercise in de Sade’s principles, and it is the one work in which Powell discarded all inhibitions.

I was fortunate to know Michael Powell in the last decade of his life. He was in America a good deal at that time: teaching for a term at Dartmouth; as director emeritus with Coppola’s American Zoetrope; as treasured Merlin at the court of Scorsese; and in his marriage to the editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. I had the chance to watch many of his films with him, discussing them and learning the passion of his vision. It is all the more agreeable now to see Michael’s influence spreading: the ardent antirealist has inspired so many people; the man in love with color, gesture, and cinema helped to educate viewers as well as filmmakers—not least in the two volumes of his autobiography,
A Life in Movies
. The work looks better and better, simpler yet more ambiguous. The great Powell and Pressburger films do not go stale; they never relinquish their wicked fun or that jaunty air of being poised on the brink. To put an arrow in our eye—to leave a nurturing wound—that was Michael’s eternal thrill. I do not invoke the figure of Merlin lightly: Powell was English but Celtic, sublime yet devious, magical in the resolute certainty that imagination rules.

William Powell
(1892–1984), b. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Here is Josef von Sternberg describing his dealings with Powell: “As the actor who was to portray the cruel and supercilious film director [in
The Last Command
, 28] I chose William Powell, who with that performance, which, to use his own words, was forced on him, was lifted from the ranks of minor players to become a star in his own right. He acknowledged his debt to me by specifying in the new contract that was offered that he was never to be assigned to one of my films again.”