Two Early Thrillers by Michael Powell, Part 2

Contraband (1940)
***^½


With Great Britain declaring war on Germany within weeks of its release, The Spy in Black, the first collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, was a smash hit in Britain. It was also a huge success across the Atlantic when Columbia Pictures released it in October 1939 in the US, where it was retitled U-Boat 29 after the name of the submarine Conrad Veidt commands in the film. (It didn't hurt the film's box office that less than a month before it opened in the US, the first British Navy ship to be lost in the war, the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous, had sunk with the loss of 518 lives after being torpedoed by an actual German submarine named U-29.) When Powell suggested to Pressburger that they follow up The Spy in Black with another picture starring Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson, Pressburger told him he would think about it while Powell vacationed in Scotland. A few days later Powell received a message from Pressburger saying that he had begun writing the story for the proposed film and needed Powell to return to London immediately to work with him on it.

Like The Spy in Black, the new film, titled Contraband, was an espionage thriller. Conrad Veidt plays Capt. Andersen, the captain of a Danish freighter, and Valerie Hobson plays a mysterious passenger, Mrs. Sorensen. As the ship passes through the English Channel on its way to Rotterdam, it is stopped by the British naval authorities, who are searching all merchant ships and seizing war matériel bound for Germany. Mrs. Sorensen first attracts Capt. Andersen's attention with her contrary behavior at the breakfast table, where she refuses to wear her life jacket as required. During a dressing down in the captain's quarters, she uses the opportunity to steal two shore passes the British have provided the captain and his first mate so they can make an overnight trip to London. Capt. Andersen soon sets off in pursuit of Mrs. Sorensen and her friend (Esmond Knight, who had appeared in two of Powell's earlier quota quickies and would go on to make six more films with Powell, most notably Black Narcissus).

This section of the film occupies about twenty minutes of its hour and a half running time, and even Powell admitted in his autobiography, A Life in Movies, that it is the least interesting part of the picture: "So far, it was a conventional beginning to an obvious romance between two attractive principals. Only the . . . charisma of the actor and actress, saved the scenes between them from banality." Indeed, the purpose of this section of the film was as much propagandistic—to send Hitler the message that Britain was fully prepared to control the seas and prevent war matériel from reaching Germany—as it was to set the narrative in motion.

After the action moves to London, the film picks up considerably as it becomes a tremendously thrilling race against the clock as Capt. Andersen and Mrs. Sorensen try to deliver a vital message to the War Office while tangling with a band of vicious Nazi spies and falling in love. All of this takes place in the dead of night during the London blackout. Powell called the picture "basically a chase in the blackout" and lamented that the US title, Blackout, wasn't used in Britain. He was right, for if there has ever been a movie with a more evocative sense of the wartime blackout in London, I've not seen it.

Contraband is in every respect an advance over The Spy in Black. Apart from that rather rudimentary opening passage on the freighter, the film is more inventive, more consistent in tone, progresses more smoothly from one event to the next, and is better paced, building in intensity without the occasional narrative lull of The Spy in Black. Much of this is surely down to the fact that the screenplay was completely original. Even though The Spy in Black kept little from the novel it was based on aside from the title and almost completely reorganized what did remain, Powell and Pressburger were still in some ways constrained by the basic elements of the source material. In Contraband, however, they were free to tailor the plot to their stars and to their own interests and inclinations. In this, Contraband was the forerunner of their great films of the 1940s, which by and large were based on original ideas that were then molded into a form reflecting the imaginations of the creative pair.

Unlike The Spy in Black, Contraband contains large doses of humor—not just the comic relief of Spy, but a deft blend of whimsicality and suspense that recalls the best films of Alfred Hitchcock from the the 1930s. Moreover, Powell and Pressburger emphasize the interplay and the evolving romantic relationship between Veidt and Hobson in the same way Hitchcock so memorably did with Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps and Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood in The Lady Vanishes. This not only makes their characters more central to the plot, but gives Veidt and Hobson a chance to shine, to show the range they were capable of, in a way the more somber tone of The Spy in Black didn't.

Additional humor is provided by the Scottish actor Hay Petrie, who specialized in eccentric characters and had a small but vivid role in The Spy in Black. He has two parts in Contraband, one as Capt. Andersen's first mate, the other as his twin brother who owns a London restaurant called The Three Vikings and who, along with his staff, becomes instrumental in helping Capt. Andersen rescue Mrs. Sorensen from the Nazi spies and foil their scheme. The Nazi gang, by the way, far from being humorous, is genuinely sinister, led by character actor Raymond Lovell, who is aided by three henchmen whom Veidt and Hobson call the Brothers Grimm, played by chubby Peter Bull, a baby-faced Leo Genn, and a hatchet-faced actor named Stuart Latham.

The plot of Contraband permits Powell—aided by the brilliant production design of Alfred Junge (they would work together on six more films, including some of Powell's most important films of the 1940s, right up to Black Narcissus), and the cinematography of the great Freddie Young (Lawrence of Arabia)—to show off his nascent flair for the kind of stylish set pieces that would become a hallmark of the later Powell-Pressburger films. The scenes in the elaborately detailed headquarters of the spies, hidden in the basement of a night club. The tour of several night clubs by Capt. Andersen and the staff of The Three Vikings to locate the spies' hideout, guided only by Andersen's memory of the music he heard from the basement before escaping. (A scene with 19-year old Deborah Kerr as a cigarette girl in one of these night clubs ended up on the cutting room floor.) No less than two vertiginous chases across rooftops that will send the pulses of acrophobes everywhere racing. A shootout between Andersen and the Nazis in the Patriotic Bust Co., filled with plaster busts of Neville Chamberlain. All these are masterfully realized set pieces that approach the best of Alfred Hitchcock's.

"It was all pure corn, but corn served up by professionals, and it worked," Powell says of Contraband. That may be an accurate description of the picture, but in saying this, I think Powell understates his achievement. The film may lack the rarefied aesthetic aspirations of Powell and Pressburger's later masterpieces, yet to call it merely "professional" downplays the level of artistry and inspiration present here. As an intelligent and imaginatively executed piece of purely escapist suspense entertainment, it "works" and then some, fulfilling genre expectations while delivering a wholly pleasurable experience of its own.

Two Early Thrillers by Michael Powell, Part 1

The Spy in Black (1939)

***





During the 1930s Michael Powell (1905-1990) directed more than twenty movies, most of them "quota quickies." These were hastily assembled films made to fulfill the requirements of the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927, which stipulated that a certain number of films shown in British theaters be British-made, a law created to protect the domestic film industry in the face of competition from the US and the Continent. For Powell the Act was a boon because it meant that an inexperienced but enthusiastic director like himself could gain a great deal of practical filmmaking experience, including how to finish a film on schedule and on budget, in a short amount of time. In 1935 alone he completed seven pictures.



The noted producer and director Alexander Korda—he had produced or directed prestige films like The Private Life of Henry VIII, Rembrandt, and The Scarlet Pimpernel—so admired Powell's 1937 film The Edge of the World, a sensitive account of a community in the Shetland Islands forced to relocate to the mainland, shot mostly on location, that he put Powell under contract. Powell's first project for Korda was another picture set in Scotland, The Spy in Black, a star vehicle intended for Korda's contract players Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson that was stalled for lack of a good script. Also on the film was a screenwriter working for Korda, Emeric Pressburger (like Korda a Hungarian émigré), whom Korda had called in to rescue the film by rewriting the screenplay. So impressed were Powell and Pressburger by each other's talent and so great was the rapport between the two men that they not only went on to work together on more than twenty additional movies, but in 1943 formed their own production company, The Archers, and from 1942 on signed their films jointly: "Written, Produced, and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger."

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

The Spy in Black, their first collaboration, is an espionage thriller very much in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock's tremendously successful spy thrillers of the 1930s. The action takes place during World War One in the Orkney Islands of northern Scotland, where the British Grand Fleet, the main fleet of the British Navy, was based during the war. Conrad Veidt plays Captain Hardt, the commander of a German U-boat who is ordered to land on a remote island in the Orkneys and rendezvous with a German spy. Their mission is to find out when the fleet will be leaving the safety of the mined harbor and put out to sea. With this information German submarines can lie in wait, attack the entire fleet, and destroy the British Navy.



When Hardt arrives, riding a motorcycle to avoid suspicion, he finds that the German spy who will be helping him is a young woman (Valerie Hobson) masquerading as the island's new schoolmistress. Providing the vital information about the fleet's departure will be a disaffected, alcoholic British naval officer (Sebastian Shaw). Hardt immediately finds himself attracted to the beautiful young spy, who clearly is also attracted to him. But she insists that they keep their relationship strictly professional, going so far as to lock him in his room at the school house at night, ostensibly to keep the cleaning woman from blundering into the room in the morning. The tension between romance and duty seems to be the main focus of the film, for the plan appears to be going so well that there is little chance of anyone finding out about it.



As might be expected in a work taking its cues from Hitchcock, the plot of the picture turns out to be far more labyrinthine than it at first appears. During the last part of the film, the pace of events rapidly escalates, culminating in an exciting chase on the high seas between Hardt, trying to escape on a hijacked passenger ferry with Hobson on board, and a pursuing British destroyer, a chase complete with moral conflict (the destroyer has orders to sink the ferry with its civilian passengers and crew) and sudden ironic reversals. Taking another cue from Hitchcock, Pressburger leavens the espionage plot with comic relief in the form of several bumbling, eccentric islanders.



In his 1986 autobiography, A Life in Movies, Powell acknowledged the film's modest nature, calling it "a little film . . . an expanded quota-quickie." Powell's characteristic commitment to quality and detail, however, pushed The Spy in Black beyond the limitations of the material and the scale of production he was working with. Knowing that the picture's budget precluded a second unit crew, Powell took three colleagues who had worked with him on The Edge of the World on a surreptitious three-day trip to the Orkneys. Even though the rest of the movie was made at Korda's studio in Denham, west of London, the footage they shot in the Orkneys, skillfully interpolated into the studio footage as establishing shots and matte shots, adds a real feeling of authenticity to the finished picture. Powell also pressed the film's young cinematographer to achieve atmospheric effects with lighting, with the placement and framing of actors within the decor, and with the use of close-ups—all in emulation of the style of German Expressionism. Most important, he used the film as a showcase for Conrad Veidt, an actor he clearly was in awe of—he calls him a "great actor" and "legendary personality"—but whose talent he felt had not been properly used in the pictures Veidt had made in Britain since leaving Germany in 1933. Powell emphasizes Veidt's imposing physique and facial features to bring out what he describes as Veidt's "overpowering" screen presence, making his character and his performance the centerpiece of the film. Veidt does a remarkable job with his ambiguous character, making a person we should look upon as an enemy in many ways sympathetic—intelligent, charming, and rather dashing.



If The Spy in Black falls short of Hitchcock's best films of this type, and if it doesn't reach the exalted heights Powell and Pressburger would later achieve with their masterpieces of the 1940s, it's still a good, entertaining genre movie. Although the picture is set during World War One, audiences of the time would surely have recognized its topical relevance, for by the time of the film's release in the UK in mid-August 1939, it was clear that military conflict with Germany was unavoidable. Indeed, less than a month later Britain and Germany were at war.



Next week I'll be writing on Contraband (1940), Powell and Pressburger's follow-up to The Spy in Black.

Two by Michael Powell

"There is not a British director with as many worthwhile films to his credit as Michael Powell."

—David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

THE TALES OF HOFFMANN (1951) ****

Generally speaking, I'm not a great fan of opera. Because of the inherently realistic nature of movies, with the camera's ability to bring the viewer close to the action, the very things that make me wary of opera—its slow pacing, rather static dramatics, and high level of artifice—would seem to make it a difficult art form to turn into a real motion picture rather than just a recording of a stage performance. Yet I have seen two filmed operas that succeeded brilliantly as real movies. Franco Zeffirelli took a completely realistic approach with Verdi's La Traviata (1983), filming it like a real drama taking place in real locations. Ingmar Bergman filmed The Magic Flute (1975) as a performance of Mozart's opera that includes both backstage and audience scenes. Both approaches worked beautifully.

The great Michael Powell, one of the most visually creative of all film directors, chose to film Jacques Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann with little attempt at realism. What he did instead was to use the full range of cinematic effects—and his mastery of those effects was astounding—to turn the opera into a highly stylized example of pure cinema. One reason the movie succeeds so well is that the opera itself is ideally suited to such an approach. For one thing, it is divided into three discrete episodes, which immediately solves the problem of lagging pace. The movie is nearly 2 hours 20 minutes long yet certainly doesn't feel like it. And the three episodes, each based on a bizarre tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann of a supernatural encounter with an otherwordly woman by the poet himself, seem to call for a non-realistic approach to emphasize their eerie nature.

Moira Shearer as the automaton Olympia

In the three tales, Hoffmann first falls in love with a life-sized mechanical doll named Olympia (brilliantly danced and played by Moira Shearer of The Red Shoes) in Paris. Next he travels to Venice, where he is bewitched by Giulietta, minion of the demonic Dapertutto and collector of souls for him. Finally he sails to an isolated Greek island where Antonia, a gifted singer who loves him, lives under a deadly curse that she is hypnotized into fulfilling by the sinister Dr. Miracle. Appearing to great effect as the villain in all three episodes is Robert Helpmann, who makes a strong impression in all four of his guises. (He also appears as Hoffmann's nemesis Lindorf in the framing episodes at the beginning and end of the film.)

The movie combines ballet and singing; there is no spoken dialogue, and the libretto is in English. The physical action within the frame may at times be stately, but Powell has a firm grasp of the purposeful use of stillness as a counterpoint to motion. On the visual level he never allows the film to stop moving, continuously engaging the viewer's eye with his hypnotic and constantly shifting images, created through the inventive use of his entire cinematic bag of tricks—set decoration, costumes, makeup, camera placement and movement, editing, color, and special effects. At the same time, he uses these elements to emphasize and enhance the dream-like quality of the tales. The result is an eye-popping, almost hallucinatory phantasmagoria that makes Fellini's most extravagant exercises, like those in Juliet of the Spirits, seem restrained.

The only real complaint I have is that the third tale is dramatically and cinematically a bit less compelling than the first two, although it does make up for this by leading into a dazzling finale. In the Powell-Pressburger canon, The Tales of Hoffmann is not as well known as their masterpieces of the 1940s. This is unfair. It is one of their strongest, most daring, and most memorable movies and a must not only for fans of the great Powell-Pressburger team, but also for anyone interested in ballet, opera, or cinema as an art form.

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946) ****
As I write this I've just finished watching A Matter of Life and Death (original US title: Stairway to Heaven), and I just can't praise this movie enough. Powell's greatest movies, of which this is one, show his astonishing skill and creativity in presenting the story in the most strikingly visual terms possible. His command of the language of film easily equals, and possibly even exceeds, Alfred Hitchcock's. Like Hitchcock, he was fascinated by the technical challenges of expressing moments of heightened sensation through filmic means and habitually punctuated his movies with mind-bogglingly original and glorious set pieces that linger with the viewer as eidetic memories long after the movie has ended.

Powell's amazing visual creativity is on full display in his movies with the most unconventional subjects—movies like The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffmann, Peeping Tom, and this one, the first to showcase the real extent of his cinematic imagination. A Matter of Life and Death, released in late 1946, the year after the end of World War II, is saturated with a sense of the collective and personal loss caused by that war. The movie's response to that melancholy is an almost desperately mystical optimism that with the aid of the transcendent power of the cinema, Britain can somehow exorcise the grief of the war and heal its wounded national psyche.

This hope is expressed through the story of Peter Carter (David Niven, who has never been better), an airman who miraculously survives a suicidal jump into the sea without a parachute from a flaming Lancaster bomber off the coast of England on May 2, 1945, just days before the war in Europe ended. Before he bails out, Carter has a brief conversation on his radio with a stranger, a young American woman named June (Kim Hunter) working as a radio operator at an air base in England. After washing up on shore and finding he is alive, he wanders toward the base and immediately meets June riding home on her bicycle that morning after her shift has ended. The two instantly fall in love. The only problem is that his survival is the result of a heavenly error, and an emissary is sent to retrieve him. But Peter refuses to go, insisting on an appeal in a heavenly court of justice, where he will argue that because his love for June has negated the heavenly edict that he must die, he must be returned to life.

The plot is constructed in a fascinatingly ambiguous way: Are all these supernatural events really happening, or are they actually elaborate visual and auditory hallucinations caused by a head injury Peter received two years earlier? Is the climactic sequence of the movie really a trial in heaven to determine if Peter will live or die, or is this a hallucination occurring under anaesthesia while Peter is undergoing neurosurgery that will determine if he lives or dies? As in the best fantasy movies predicated on ambiguity, and specifically on the ambiguity between the subjective and the objective interpretation of events, the plot functions simultaneously on both levels without any apparent contradiction. Near the end of the movie, when the neurosurgeon removes his surgical mask and his true identity is revealed, it is a stunning revelation that underscores vividly this fundamental ambiguity between the real and the imaginary and the film's seamless blending of the two.

Is it all just a dream? The heavenly court observes the operation

The exceedingly clever plot (I have only hinted at its many twists and turns) is only part of the movie's fascination, though. What really makes the film so memorable is the inspired visual ideas Powell devises to show us these events. From the moment the film opens, with a view of the cosmos ("This is the universe," the narrator says as the film begins. "Big, isn't it?") that gradually reduces itself to Niven in the cockpit of that flaming bomber, we know we are in for a unique experience. And when Peter comes to on the beach and encounters a naked young goatherd playing a flute, we know this is a movie where something unexpectedly weird and mythic might happen at any moment. The film is crammed with similarly imaginative sequences based on the creative use of sets (that stairway to heaven is unforgettable, as indeed are all the sets for the afterlife), lighting, photography, and editing. The sequence in the camera obscura of the village doctor, played by Powell stalwart Roger Livesy (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I'm Going), is especially noteworthy. Powell and cinematographer Jack Cardiff's use of tricks like stop-motion, slow motion, double exposure, reverse motion, back projection, matted images, and alternation between black-and-white and Technicolor constitutes a virtual catalogue of pre-CGI special effects.

Peter encounters the goatherd on the beach

Powell and his collaborator Emeric Pressburger wrote the original screenplay, which seems influenced by three notable fantasy movies of the early 1940s. It resembles Here Comes Mr. Jordan in its use of a heavenly error to drive the fantasy elements of the plot. But here the situation is reversed and instead of being taken before his time like Robert Montgomery in that movie, Peter is inadvertently left behind. Powell's film is also reminiscent of both The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), which I wrote about recently, and Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait (1943) in its idea of the protagonist pleading his case in a supernatural hearing that will determine his fate. The details of the fantastic plot of A Matter of Life and Death and their visualization on the screen are so conceptually intertwined that to watch the movie is to journey into the mind and imagination of one of the greatest geniuses of cinema.

In the end, all I can really say about this movie is watch it and marvel at the way it suggests simultaneously the ineffable, vast, and timeless mysteries of existence and a specific story about a small group of people experiencing very human emotions in a situation clearly delimited in time and space. A Matter of Life and Death is more than merely worthwhile: It is an essential masterpiece that will kindle the ardor of anyone who loves movies.

A Small Dark Masterwork: Michael Powell's The Small Back Room

The British film director Michael Powell (1905-1990)—who not only directed but also wrote and produced many of his films, often in collaboration with his professional partner, Emeric Pressburger—was one of the giants of British cinema. His best known, and arguably greatest, works were produced in the 1940's and constitute a truly impressive list, including The Thief of Baghdad, The 49th Parallel, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I'm Going, Stairway to Heaven, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes. At the end of the decade, Powell and Pressburger made a less well-known movie, The Small Back Room (1949), released last year in a newly restored Criterion edition, that is a fitting companion piece to those earlier masterpieces.

The Small Back Room is very different from the best-known films that immediately preceded it, which are often thought to represent the typical Michael Powell movie. With the exception of I Know Where I'm Going, these are elaborately mounted, technically dazzling, large-scale Technicolor productions that pushed the artistic limits of studio film making of the time. The Small Back Room is none of these things. Filmed in black-and-white and without major stars, it concentrates not on large themes and visual spectacle like its immediate predecessors but on characters, character psychology, and personal relationships.

Set in London in 1943, the movie is based on a novel by Nigel Balchin, a British author who wrote seventeen novels published between 1934-1967, as well as more than a dozen screenplays. The main character is Sammy Rice (David Farrar), whose prosthetic foot has kept him from active military service. He works instead as a researcher in an obscure government munitions laboratory situated in the small back room of the title. Sammy also has a problem with alcohol—he is a recovered alcoholic—and a huge problem with his attitude toward life. He is a frustrated and embittered man whose personality is dominated by negativity and self-pity. a brooding, self-destructive person whom others tolerate out of a combination of sympathy for his very real problems and admiration for his professional ability.

Sammy is conducting a clandestine affair with the secretary of his research unit, Susan (Kathleen Byron, who gave a memorable if a trifle overwrought performance as the mad nun in Powell's Black Narcissus), who lives in the flat across the hall from his own. Susan genuinely seems to love Sammy, tolerating his negativity and moodiness with equanimity. Besides Susan, the one thing that keeps Sammy going is a real interest in his research work. But even that is fraught with problems, mostly the result of bureaucratic regulations, inter-departmental in-fighting, and the ignorance of those in charge about the nature and value of the work his unit is doing.

In a very funny sequence, a fatuous government minister (Robert Morley, in an uncredited cameo) who clearly has no grasp of the work being done by Sammy and his colleagues pays a flying visit to the lab. Knowing the minister's lack of any real knowledge of, or even interest in, their work, the group devise a flashy demonstration that is almost like a magic show, with fire and smoke to dazzle him. The demonstration fizzles, but the minister is so uninterested that it doesn't even faze him. Instead he sits down at a calculating machine—to him a real novelty—and proceeds to perform simple arithmetic problems, like a child playing with a toy, before flitting on his way. In another, more serious sequence, Sammy attends a meeting to evaluate a new artillery gun and is caught in a conflict between the military, who don't like the new weapon based on their tests of it, and the accountants, who do favor it based strictly on a statistical analysis of its design specifications. He sympathizes with the military's practical objections to the gun but realizes he can't afford to alienate the bureaucrats if he wants them to continue funding his research unit.

Sammy does find one assignment that intrigues him, when an army Captain, Dick Stewart (Michael Gough), consults him about a new type of bomb being dropped by the Germans. Innocuous-looking, like a Thermos flask, it has been killing children who pick it up not realizing what it is. Sammy arranges for the Captain to contact him the next time one is found so he can examine it and analyze its detonating mechanism. This element of the story is used as a device to provide continuity. It opens the movie, recurs at a couple of key points in the middle, and provides the movie with its masterly concluding sequence.

The movie has an episodic structure, moving back and forth between Sammy's work, his love life, the problem of the new type of bomb, and his struggles with alcoholism and what today would be recognized as clinical depression. If the film has a weakness, it is this episodic structure. which tends to fragment the movie's momentum by giving its plot a rather fluctuating rhythm. But at the same time, this structure also provides opportunities for Powell to create several brilliant set pieces that clearly show what a cinematic genius he was.

Actually, this sense of disconnection between bravura moments and the more low-key sections that link them is to some degree characteristic of most of Powell's movies; it's just that in this one it's especially apparent. As the film moves from one spectacular sequence to another, the lulls in-between are just a little more obvious than in most of Powell's movies. And these sequences of heightened artistry seem on occasion a bit overdone, just a little more fancy than absolutely necessary. For example, when Sammy attends the test of that new artillery gun "on the Salisbury Plain," Powell uses Stonehenge as a backdrop for the tests, as though he felt constrained to increase the visual drama in a sequence that might have been just as effective without the distraction of unneeded embellishment. (IMDb claims that these scenes were actually filmed at Stonehenge. I may be wrong, but to me it has a slightly unreal look to it, the stones a bit too smoothly worn and the color a bit too even, and the stones seem to lack substance, as though they're made of something lighter than rock, like those fiberglass boulders you see at Disneyland.)

Taken separately, however, several sequences in the movie achieve genuine tour-de-force status. Two sequences set in a night club (night clubs seemed to be a staple of movies of the 1940's, especially ones with noirish overtones, as this one sometimes has) that Sammy and Susan go to are impressive for their elaborate set decoration, jazz music, staging, and photography. In the second one especially the elegant setting and frenetic jazz music provide a superb counterpoint to the heated quarrel that Sammy and Susan are having. In another great sequence, Sammy falls off the wagon and gets drunk in a pub filled with soldiers of all nations. His drunken row with the bartender, who refuses to serve him any more, and his aggressive behavior toward the other people in the pub are dramatic indeed and show just how hostile and obnoxious Sammy can be at his worst.

In another sequence—visually, the most striking of the movie—Sammy has an attack of severe anxiety when Susan fails to show up at his flat for a planned rendezvous and again ends up getting drunk. The sequence begins with what seems a nod to The Lost Weekend, with Sammy attempting to resist the temptation to drink, then becoming more and more agitated, and finally giving in and getting so drunk that he smashes up the flat and begins hallucinating.

Powell goes all out to portray the nightmarish, surrealistic qualities of this hallucinatory state, using bizarre camera angles and arranging objects in the frame to produce extreme foreshortening of perspective and distortion of scale. At one point the camera is placed quite low, looking up at a huge bottle of whiskey that appears about three times the size of Sammy and looms over him as if it is about to crush him. The background detail in the frame is stylized, the whole illuminated by what Powell calls "Caligari lighting" (a reference to the 1920 German film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). In the commentary that accompanies the DVD, the cinematographer, Christopher Challis, explains that the scene, which ostensibly takes place in Sammy's flat, was actually done on a different set, with Sammy and the bottle filmed separately then joined in a matte composition to get them in the frame together. Challis praises Powell for his "visual sense" and for having such a thorough knowledge of lighting and photography that he could describe in detail what he needed his cinematographer to do to get the exact visual effects he wanted.

The film's conclusion, a more than 15-minute long sequence, is another thrilling tour-de-force. Two of the mysterious German bombs have been found on Chesil Beach on the south coast, where Sammy is summoned. When he arrives, he finds that Capt. Stewart has been killed trying to defuse the first bomb, and that he will have to work alone to figure out the detonating mechanism on the remaining bomb. Chesil Beach is an eight-mile long stretch of what the British call shingle, large pieces of unstable gravel, and a worse site for trying to work on something as dangerously sensitive to movement as an unexploded bomb cannot be imagined. Powell has said that it was this scene in the book and the prospect of filming it on Chesil Beach (his own idea—in the book, the setting is an ordinary sandy beach) that first attracted him to the project.

Powell uses all of his considerable narrative and visual resources to create a lengthy nail-biter of a sequence so tense that it had me squirming the whole time. The stark beachfront setting—reduced to its essential elements of shoreline, sea, and sky—with Sammy separated in space from his colleagues, with whom he communicates via a radio microphone as he describes to them his actions, isolates and emphasizes the element of danger until it is the only thing in the movie. After Sammy reaches the bomb and drops to his hands and knees, much of the scene is filmed in tight close-up—his face, his hands, the bomb looming in the foreground almost like the whiskey bottle did earlier.

The mechanism turns out to be more complicated than Sammy anticipated. Just when he thinks he has disarmed the bomb, he discovers it has a second detonator, and the sequence is extended even longer. Knowing that Sammy cares so little for his life, that he is more interested in the engineering of the weapon than in his own safety, only emphasizes the risks he is taking, creating a sequence of nearly unbearable suspense.

This and the other sequences I have described constitute the highlights of the movie. But what really holds the movie together more than anything else is the character of Sammy and his portrayal by David Farrar. Sammy is a very modern character for the time, a self-centered and essentially unsympathetic (although not exactly unlikable) person, the kind of tortured character more often associated with the most bitter American films noirs of the era. Farrar conveys with absolute conviction and realism Sammy's self-loathing, his dissatisfaction with life, and his inability to relate on any intimate level to other human beings.

On the DVD, Powell comments almost regretfully that when he saw The Small Back Room years later at a retrospective of his movies, he found it a "cold" film. Given its subject matter and its main character, I don't see how the movie could have been otherwise and still have maintained its honesty. From today's perspective, the picture seems ahead of its time in its attitudes. That coldness that Powell spoke of—the resistance to using easy sentimentality to lighten the grimness of the movie that so often tempted his film-making contemporaries—is to me what makes the movie seem so fresh and still comprehensible in psychological terms to our more cynical modern sensibility.

This is a movie that despite falling just a bit short of Powell's very best work, nonetheless has many parts that are as good as anything he ever did, as well as a main character as original and compelling as any to be found in his canon. With such qualities, The Small Back Room deserves to be admired and enjoyed alongside Powell's other masterworks.

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Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have a website devoted to their work, powell-pressburger.org . Powell's widow and tireless advocate of his films is the three-time Oscar-winning film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited nearly all the films of Martin Scorsese since Raging Bull. If you've never seen a Michael Powell movie, I would recommend starting with I Know Where I'm Going or The Red Shoes, which along with Peeping Tom (which I have also written about at The Movie Projector), are my favorite Michael Powell movies of the ones I've seen. Kathleen Byron died last January at the age of 88. Her final appearance was in the award-winning BBC mini-series Perfect Strangers (2001).

Psycho Killer Night on Turner Classic Movies

Is there anybody who hasn't seen Psycho (1960), the landmark shocker directed by Alfred Hitchcock? If not, it is being shown on the Turner Classic Movie channel on Saturday, October 25, at 5:00 p.m. (PDT). This is the movie that created a new genre, the slasher film, the movie that in one brilliant sequence—the infamous shower sequence that lasts less than three minutes and is composed of more than fifty different shots (the exact number is still being debated)—opened the door for filmmakers to depict violence more graphically and blurred the distinction between art and sensationalism. And in the conclusion, when the origins of Norman Bates's psychosis are explained by a pompous psychiatrist, erotic perversion became an acceptable subject for titillating escapist entertainment.

But whether you watch Psycho again or not, be sure to catch two other movies being shown that same night that are essential complements to the Hitchcock film. At 12;45 a.m. (PDT), technically on October 26, TCM is showing schlockmeister William Castle's Homicidal (1961). Many believe that this film is a rip-off of Psycho made solely to capitalize on the success and notoriety of Hitchcock's film. In truth, Homicidal bears fewer resemblances to Psycho than some of Brian de Palma's later Hitchcock pastiches and is an immensely entertaining movie well worth watching in its own right.

The similarities to Psycho are clear, although in reality few of the elements that Homicidal emulates were completely innovative when Hitchcock used them, although admittedly he did so in more imaginative and more visually artful ways. Homicidal opens with an enigmatic sequence in which a mysterious young woman checks into a hotel and pays the bellman, a complete stranger, to marry her. At the end of the wedding ceremony, without warning or apparent motive she pulls out a knife, brutally stabs to death the justice of the peace who has just married her, and flees. She drives to the small town of Solvang, where she lives in a creepy, isolated mansion with an elderly woman who is wheelchair-bound and mute. She is in reality Emily, already the wife of a young man named Warren, who after many years in Denmark has just returned to his childhood home to claim the fortune he will shortly inherit. The paralyzed woman is Helga, Warren's childhood nurse who had accompanied him abroad and returned with him and his new wife.

The viewer is given to understand that Emily is a mentally disturbed homicidal maniac. While Warren is absent on business, she terrorizes and threatens the helpless Helga. Also menaced by her are Warren's half-sister Miriam and Miriam's pharmacist boyfriend. Before the movie's end the plot also includes the wanton vandalizing of Miriam's florist shop, her false implication in the murder of the justice of the peace, and a gruesome decapitation. At the end of the movie Warren and Miriam drive to the mansion. Warren goes into the house to confront his deranged wife while Miriam stays in the car. When he doesn't return, she decides to enter the house to look for him.

When Miriam hesitates at the door, Castle reveals his obligatory gimmick, in this case a "fright break," a short pause in which the audience is given time to reflect on the significance of what has happened in the movie and predict what will happen when she finally opens that door and enters. I will not disclose what happens when she goes inside except to say that the ending of the movie makes plain that nothing is what it seemed and leaves the viewer with a final ambiguity: Is the villain really a psychopath or just a greedy schemer trying to gain control of the fortune through an elaborate and clever conspiracy?

Homicidal has many things to recommend it. The movie makes excellent location use of Solvang, California, in its pre-Sideways days before it became a yuppie destination for wine tourists. In those days it was a kitschy, Disneylandish Danish-themed tourist village known for its ornamental windmill, Danish bakery, and Andersen's Pea Soup restaurant. The photography by the masterful Burnett Guffey (with two Oscars to his credit, for From Here to Eternity and Bonnie and Clyde) is first-rate. The performances by Jean Arless and Eugenie Leontovitch are outstanding, and television stalwarts Glenn Corbett and Patricia Breslin are well cast as the "normal" young couple drawn into the perverse situation. This is the best William Castle movie I've seen, successful both as sheer entertainment and as a comparison to the better-known Psycho.

If Homicidal predictably cannot match the level of artistry of Hitchcock's Psycho, it does come close to matching its hyped-up element of shock. In comparison, the great British director Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), which is being shown on TCM directly after Psycho at 7:00 p.m. (PDT), easily equals and possibly exceeds Psycho in both of these areas. This is the notorious film that when released so alienated critics with its perverse and sensational subject matter—child abuse, voyeurism, sexual fetishism, and serial murder—that it essentially ended the commercial career of a great film artist. The movie was rediscovered in the late 1970's when a group of admirers led by Martin Scorsese arranged for it to be shown at the 1979 New York Film Festival. Peeping Tom is, to put it briefly, a bona fide masterpiece and nothing like Powell's earlier, more dignified films such as A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes.

In the movie, Carl Boehm plays Mark Lewis, a studio cameraman who carries a home movie camera around with him and obsessively films aspects of his daily life. But he takes his activities much further than that, secretly filming not only the quotidian but also the unsavory and hidden aspects of life. At one point early in the movie he hires and films an attractive young woman who slowly turns her head to reveal a hideous disfigurement on one side of her face. But Mark's worst obsessions are even more shocking.

He gets his biggest kicks from compulsively repeating the same murderous scenario, from luring or hiring a woman to be filmed and then performing the same perverted ritual again and again. His camera mounted on a tripod, he moves in to film a tight close-up of his victim's face. As he approaches, he slowly raises the front leg of the tripod to an upright position. As the model realizes that she is about to be impaled on its deadly-sharp tip, her expression becomes one of terror. It is the capturing on film of this expression of the model's fear at the realization of her impending death, as well as the exact moment of her death, that is the object of Mark's prurient fetish. In a room in his childhood home, where he still lives, he archives these snuff films and rewatches them repeatedly. The phallic and erotic implications of the erect leg of the tripod and its penetration of the model are unmistakable, and critics and audiences of 1960 must have found these implications quite unsettling.

Unlike Hitchcock or Castle, Powell withholds none of this from the viewer. His object may be to shock, but after the first killing he is not interested in surprising or mystifying the viewer. Peeping Tom is from the beginning more of a case history than either Psycho or Homicidal. Later in the movie the origins of Mark's psychopathology are revealed. From childhood, Mark was the object of his twisted father's behavioral experiments, in which he clinically and dispassionately documented on film Mark's entire childhood and the psychological effects on the boy of this continuous surveillance.

Mark, the victim of incessant voyeurism, has as an adult become a filmic voyeur himself. He displays many symptoms of autism—ritualistic or compulsive behavior and problems both with social skills and with communication. (At this time, autism was commonly believed to be the result of lack of affection in childhood, a theory since completely abandoned. Today autism is thought to have a genetic component, and Mark's father's treatment of him as an object rather than a person might be interpreted as an indication of autistic tendencies in the father as well.) His cinematic activities have become a substitute for life, for social interaction and sexuality. And he uses his camera to explore his own particular obsessions, fear and death.

The screenplay of Peeping Tom is much richer thematically than that of Psycho. In Psycho Norman Bates is clearly The Other, a scary freak to be feared by the viewer, not identified with. Peeping Tom, by contrast, forces the viewer to become complicit in Mark's activities: It requires that the viewer reconsider the implications of the act of moviewatching, for Mark's behavior is by extension the activity of the moviegoer carried to its furthest imaginable extreme. Mark's snuff films are both an escape from life and an attempt to explore some of its most incomprehensible mysteries, and isn't this exactly what the best movies do? To add another layer of complexity, Powell refuses to exempt the filmmaker from this self-examination. In the sequences that show home movies of Mark's father filming the young boy, the father is played by Powell himself.

At one point in Peeping Tom Mark and another employee of the film studio are sitting next to each other, waiting to be interviewed by the police in another room. Mark actually has his camera with him and tells his friend that he plans to film the interview. "Are you mad?" the colleague asks. "Yes," Mark answers, giggling nervously. "Do you think they'll notice?" The police might not notice right away. Mark is, after all, a boyish, reserved, and polite young man who seems eccentric but harmless. By this point the audience know differently but have likely developed an ambivalent attitude toward him, for Mark is himself a childhood victim of extreme psychological abuse and is driven by uncontrollable compulsions. Peeping Tom does what few movies have ever succeeded in doing, creating a sympathetic monster.

Be sure to catch the psycho killer triple feature—Psycho, Peeping Tom, and Homicidal—on Turner Classic Movies this Saturday. Psycho is a keeper, a movie to rewatch and savor, to marvel at its unforgettable set pieces that transcend the movie's rather lurid plot, to admire how skillfully Hitchcock manipulates audience response and stealthily insinuates his bizarre sense of humor into a basically grim situation. Homicidal is a movie that aspires to do nothing more than thrill and entertain while being viewed, and it does this quite successfully. Peeping Tom is a movie to ponder during and after watching, a work satisfyingly rich in thematic resonance, a self-referential exploration of the deeper meanings of the art of making movies and the act of watching them.