A Young Person’s Guide To: Powell & Pressburger*

Hidden Treasures in the Canon

Throughout the 1940s, the Archers frequently cast Roger Livesey in crucial supporting roles. The two films in which he plays a lead role—I Know Where I’m Going! and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp—are delightfully representative of Powell and Pressburger’s canon throughout their war pictures. Of these two, IKWIG! is the more accessible, at least on the surface.

I Know Where I’m Going!, their last black and white film, runs at a respectable feature length and revisits a love story known to film-goers everywhere—that of the fish out of water. An enterprising young woman (played by Wendy Hiller, a frequent collaborator with George Bernard Shaw) is engaged to a wealthy industrialist and has arranged to marry him on an island north of Scotland. However, many factors obstruct her ability to carry out this marriage.

She is instead marooned in a coastal fishing village and falls in love with its most prominent son (Livesey). The film has an ethereal appeal—owing to its primitive Gaelic location and the low fog that permeates every scene—and its frequent montages and musical numbers give it the feel of a musical. While IKWIG! was unavailable for viewing for many years, it has since become the hidden treasure in the Archers’ canon, and has most notably influenced the modern classic Local Hero.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 1943

By contrast, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp seems, on the surface, less universal. Its protagonist is a British icon of the wars that never quite made it to the States (he’s kind of the British equivalent of Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons), the film is over three hours long, and for many years it was only available in bowdlerized editions. . . if in fact it was available at all. While its length and veddy British qualities might make it a challenge for first-time Archers followers, it makes for a fun follow-up to their more accessible work. Livesey’s performance—which spans forty years in the life of a career officer for the Army—is a marvel, as is Deborah Kerr’s triple-turn as a dream woman for three of the men in the film.

Powell and Pressburger pioneered many narrative techniques on which later generations of filmmakers would draw (an extended montage involving Blimp’s spoils of war—with its bouncy score and tragic punctuation—would serve as inspiration for several similar sequences in Wes Anderson’s movies). Further, the film moves at a sprightly clip, and the characters are so engaging, that the film seems as though it’s half that length.

Watch This Last

Many casual fans would suspect I’d take this moment to mention Peeping Tom. While Powell’s most notorious post-Archers directorial credit is indeed difficult to watch (when I first saw it I felt as though I was watching a beloved relative struggle with early-onset dementia), Powell and Pressburger’s solo work is outside the scope of this article.

Instead, I will cite A Canterbury Tale as the least essential of Powell and Pressburger’s films. Though it’s half the length of Colonel Blimp, the episodic structure (a gesture towards the similarly interminable Chaucer poem from which it derives its title) makes the film feel as though it is three and a half hours long. The protagonists are surprisingly boring, and lead “actor” Sergeant John Sweet spends his only feature film reading his lines as though they were written on cue cards and trying not to stare into the camera.

Trivia

Michael Powell’s cocker spaniels Eric and Spangle appear in four of the Archers’ features—The Spy in Black, I Know Where I’m Going!, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and A Matter of Life and Death. One of his spaniels also has a starring role in the short film An Airman’s Letter to His Mother. According to a 1983 article “written” by Erik and Spangle for the British magazine Films and Filming, “Mr Pressburger wrote us into the scripts of the films you mention, but the camera obscura scene [in A Matter of Life and Death – Original Ed.] was our own idea.”

Further Reading

Professor Ian Christie has written several books on the Archers, and has also provided audio commentary and liner notes on several Criterion Collection DVDs. While many of his essays cover similar ground, his book Arrows of Desire provides a good introduction to the Powell and Pressburger canon and sheds light on some trivia and elements of their work you may have missed on the first viewing.

PnP super-fan Steve Crook has put together a superb website, filled with background information, naughty things you may not have noticed, and testimonials from famous fans and plebes alike. Visit it here.

*With apologies to Benjamin Britten

RELATED LINKS:

Character Actor In A Movie Star’s Body: Roger Livesey, Popshifter November/December 2009 issue

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