Heaven’s Waiting Room

In​ Peeping Tom (1960), Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now. And it says: “All this filming isn’t healthy.”’ From the opening frame, we’ve been forced to share the point of view of Mark’s camera, which he has turned into a killing machine, stabbing young women with a blade hidden in the tripod and recording their expressions at the moment of death. Mark himself was used by his camera-obsessed father, who particularly enjoyed capturing ‘the reactions of the nervous system to fear’. In a Super 8 home movie of Mark as a child, Powell appears as the tyrant father and his son as Mark. Powell implicates himself – and us – in the fear and voyeurism that keeps us sitting in the darkened cinema.

David Niven and Marius Goring in ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ (1946).

In homage to Powell’s cameo, Martin Scorsese cast himself in a scene in Taxi Driver, playing a voyeur spying on his adulterous wife from Travis Bickle’s cab. ‘You see the woman in the window? Good. I want you to see that woman ’cause that’s my wife. But that’s not my apartment ... I’m gonna kill her with a .44 Magnum pistol ... you think I’m sick? You don’t have to answer that. I’m paying for the ride.’ In his documentary Made in England (2024), Scorsese remembers ‘repeatedly and obsessively’ watching Powell and Pressburger’s movies on TV as a child in the 1950s. They remained a fascination for him as a young director. But Scorsese and his fellow enthusiasts Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma could only watch the movies in ‘degraded versions, bad copies’. It wasn’t until 1983, forty years after its release, that a restored version of Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp was finally screened. The original had been cut by an hour and the extensive flashback structure lost. It was, as the critic Ian Christie wrote, ‘as if the film had been punished for its own revolt against the “mere tyranny” of time by having a strict and false linearity imposed’. Critics greeted the restored version as a lost masterpiece. The film never settles in form, tone or mood, moving from sharp satire and class observation to doomed romanticism. It undercuts its own realism with dazzling cinematic moments (the soaring camera abandoning the duel as soon as it starts), just as it offsets the seriousness of its wartime propagandist purpose with levity and wit. Watch it now and it seems inconceivable that it could have been marginalised for so long. As many of the contributions to The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger, a collection of essays and appreciations, attest, the directors have for too long been regarded as ‘avant-garde filmmakers within the system’, neither mainstream nor radical enough.

Michael Powell first met Emeric Pressburger in 1939, at a script meeting organised by Alexander Korda, the dominant figure in British film during the 1930s and 1940s. Powell had been hired to direct Korda’s fantasy epic The Thief of Bagdad, released in 1940; Pressburger had been a screenwriter at Berlin’s UFA studios until 1933, when Jews were banned from participation in the German film industry. He left for Paris, putting the key in his apartment door ‘to save the Gestapo the trouble of having to break it down’, and then, in 1935, for London. In his memoir, A Life in Movies, Powell recalled being transfixed at the meeting by ‘a short, compact man, with beautiful and observant eyes, and a broad intellectual forehead ... Although small in stature, he looked well-made and strong, both in person and in his convictions. And he obviously feared nobody.’ Powell described Pressburger’s redraft of The Spy in Black, which would be their first collaboration, as ‘a real piece of conjuring. He’d altered the beginning, middle and end. It was a marvellous piece of continuity.’ Powell called Pressburger the ‘wizard’, ‘because of the wonderful things he does’ (The Wizard of Oz came out in 1939); their relationship was, he said, a ‘marriage without sex’. Pressburger also described their collaboration as a great romance: ‘Powell knows what I am going to say even before I say it – maybe even before I have thought it – and that is very rare. You are lucky if you meet someone like that once in your life.’

Powell began his career as a studio hand on silent films at the Victorine studios in Nice. He was ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’, as he put it, to Rex Ingram, a flamboyant Irish director known for making extravagant epics. Ingram’s Mare Nostrum (1926) was ‘a great film to come in on’, Powell wrote, ‘a spectacular film, full of enormous tricks with a great theme and an international cast ... the kind of film that gives you ideas which stay with you all your life’. Pressburger, who understood the expressive potential of German silent film, shared Powell’s vision of cinema as a synthesis of all the arts. He wanted to work with a director who rejected the staid conventions of British cinema.

Their first collaborations, The Spy in Black (1939) and Contraband (1940), seem at first to be standard genre pieces: one is a Buchanesque spy story set during the First World War, the other a comedy thriller in the manner of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. But both are elevated by the light, ironic style of Pressburger’s script and by the hulking presence of Conrad Veidt, another exile from the Nazis, who had appeared in German silent movies. (Veidt wasn’t Jewish but, as Caitlin McDonald writes in The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger, put ‘Jude’ on his exit form in 1933 ‘in solidarity with his wife and Jewish friends’.) In Contraband, Veidt plays a neutral Danish sea captain who finds a Nazi spy hideout in a warehouse containing plaster busts of Neville Chamberlain. Pressburger has the captain navigate the London blackout by using the stars and Powell takes advantage of the blackout’s cinematic potential to convey a suffocating feeling of uncertainty and danger. The outbreak of war gave Powell and Pressburger a purpose as filmmakers. ‘Suddenly I had something in common with everyone I met,’ Pressburger wrote in his diary. ‘It no longer mattered that I was a foreigner, that my English was broken. More than anything else we all wanted to defeat the Nazis.’

Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941), their next film, was intended to convince US audiences of the need to join the war; it also showed the British government that movies could play an important part in the war effort if they also succeeded as entertainment. Thanks to their fondness for allegory, Powell and Pressburger excelled at creating dramatic sequences that could also serve an ideological purpose. Pressburger’s story involved a German U-boat, commanded by a Nazi zealot, which ends up in Canada’s Hudson Bay after sinking a freighter in the North Atlantic. Shooting in the Canadian Rockies brought documentary texture to the thriller, but its most memorable moment is a speech delivered by Anton Walbrook (foreshadowing his role in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp). Playing a decent German Hutterite settler, Walbrook denounces the Nazis, who repaid his community’s hospitality with murder: ‘You and your Hitler are like the microbes of some filthy disease, filled with the longing to multiply yourselves until you destroy everything healthy in the world.’ The Americans loved it.

In 1943, Powell and Pressburger set up their own production company, which they called the Archers, using the image of arrows thudding into a bull’s-eye. As Christie wrote, this combined ‘the age of the English longbow and ... the more topical image of the RAF roundel’. It’s a patriotic emblem, especially when viewed in the red, white and blue of Technicolor, but the Archers was notable for its use of Pressburger’s fellow exiles: the German Alfred Junge, whom Powell called ‘the greatest art director that films have ever known’; the Polish composer Allan Gray (whose real name was Józef Żmigrod); the German art director Hein Heckroth; and the French and German cinematographers Georges Périnal and Erwin Hillier. The company also had the financial backing of J. Arthur Rank, a wealthy Methodist industrialist from Yorkshire: ‘Not since the time of the Renaissance popes has a group of artists found a patron so quick with his wallet, so slow with unsolicited directions and advice,’ according to Time magazine. Thanks to Rank’s purchase of Odeon cinemas, they also had guaranteed mass distribution.

The result was six films in six years: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). Each film departs from its predecessor in style and tone, but they share a sensibility and thematic motifs. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp announced the Archers’ collective vision. It was made against the wishes of Churchill, who wrote to his minister of information, Brendan Bracken: ‘Pray propose to me the measures necessary to stop this foolish production before it gets any further. I am not prepared to allow propaganda detrimental to the morale of the army.’ Churchill didn’t like the portrayal of the friendship between the British army officer Clive Wynne-Candy and the German officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, who first meet in turn-of-the-century Berlin. Clive, prone to rashness and played with immense energy by Roger Livesey, is a version of Powell. Theo, reserved and considered, represents an idealised alter ego of Pressburger, who gave him the eloquence and insight Clive lacks. Taken prisoner in England during the First World War, Theo returns at the outbreak of the next war to seek refuge. But he risks being held as an enemy alien (Pressburger himself had to report regularly to the police and was not permitted to stay on location overnight). When Theo is cross-examined by a sceptical judge about his reasons for returning to Britain, Pressburger shows us England through ‘foreign’ eyes:

The truth about me is that I am a tired old man who came to this country because he is homesick ... My wife was English, she would have loved to come back to England ... When, in summer 1933, we found that we had lost both our children to the Nazi Party, and I was willing to come, she died. None of my sons came to her funeral ... I remembered the English countryside, the gardens, the green lawns where I spent the long months of captivity, the weedy rivers and the trees she loved so much. And a great desire came over me to come back here to my wife’s country. And this, sir, is the truth.

The same concern with national and cultural identity is evident in A Canterbury Tale and I Know Where I’m Going!, both of which draw on myth, music and landscape to explore ideas of home and belonging, tradition and modernity. The jump-cut at the start of A Canterbury Tale moves from a soaring falcon seen by Chaucer’s medieval pilgrims to a war plane patrolling rural Kent. Time is sped up and frozen; the East End land girl Alison drives a horse-drawn cart. Powell grew up amid the ‘hop poles, oasts and orchards’ of the Kent countryside, as Alexandra Harris writes in her contribution to the collection. In A Canterbury Tale, he used the landscape to show an unchanging pastoral England. But since the film was scripted by Pressburger, an exile who knew the unrelenting force of modernity, it becomes ‘an act of continuation that is also a meditation on continuity’, as Peter Conrad put it. Thomas Colpeper, the eccentric magistrate, desperately wants the soldiers stationed nearby to share his sense of historical continuity. But they aren’t interested, and his misogyny alienates potentially sympathetic newcomers such as Alison. The film ends with an attempt to use music to reconcile continuity with change. The British sergeant Peter Gibbs, who played Wurlitzers in suburban cinemas before the war, triumphs when given an unexpected opportunity to play Bach in the cathedral.

A Canterbury Tale’s evocation of English cultural traditions was a response to the need to raise wartime morale, but I Know Where I’m Going! was intended to answer the question ‘What are we fighting for?’ Torquil MacNeil, the laird of Kiloran, is trying to visit his Hebridean island during a brief period of leave from the navy. Stubborn, ambitious Joan, a bank manager’s daughter, is sure she knows where she’s going – to marry a rich industrialist, who has profited from the war and rented the island. But Joan alters course when she realises the values of community and communality, represented by the charming Torquil. Right from its faux-documentary title sequence, the film conspires against Joan, recasting its narrative structure as fate. In a ceilidh scene, Torquil translates the words of a Gaelic song for her: ‘You’re the maid for me,’ he says.

A Matter of Life and Death, another anti-materialist fable, deepens this exploration of Britishness. The film dramatises a debate about the values needed in the postwar world and the nature of Britain’s relationship with the US. In the temporal world, Peter, an RAF pilot, is romantically paired with June, an American radio operator; in heaven, the English Dr Reeves is pitted against an 18th-century American, Abraham Farlan, the first casualty of the Revolutionary War. The film has a dizzying range of influences: The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (the interweaving of supernatural and mortal realms), Elizabethan masques, Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (Reeves’s physician philosopher), Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Neo-Romanticism. Instead of incorporating elements of fantasy into a realist narrative, the film is structured as a series of counterpoints between earth and heaven, fact and hallucination, Technicolor and monochrome. (Sarah Street has a helpful essay in the book on Powell and Pressburger’s use of Technicolor.) Facing death in the cockpit of his burning plane, Peter quotes Marvell: ‘Yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity.’ When Peter next appears, he’s wandering in the dunes, believing he must be dead. The film itself is a metaphysical conceit, seeking poetic resemblances through visual parallels. When we first encounter Reeves, he’s using a camera obscura to view his rural ‘microcosm’. Asked by June whether he is ‘surveying his kingdom’, Reeves says that the camera obscura allows him ‘to see it all clearly and at once, as in a poet’s eye’. His camera obscura resembles the large circular opening in heaven’s waiting room, which allows the dead airmen to look down; a closing eyelid seen from the inside allows us to share Peter’s point of view as he goes under anaesthetic. In his contribution to The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger, Christie calls them ‘metaphors of vision’. They remind us we’re watching a ‘mediated form of seeing’.

The self-referentiality of A Matter of Life and Death anticipates The Red Shoes, with its reflection on the process (and the psychological cost) of making art and cinema. Like its predecessor, the film has two contrasting modes of representation. A fantasy ballet about a girl who is punished for surrendering to the lure of the Red Shoes is mirrored by a realist narrative, the story of an ambitious young dancer, Vicky Page, whose identity merges with the role she creates for the impresario Boris Lermontov, played to perfection by Walbrook. Fantasy and realism permeate each other: Grishcha, Lermontov’s choreographer, becomes the mischievous Shoemaker; Vicky’s arrival at the wind-blown steps of Lermontov’s deserted villa is echoed by her fairy-tale entrance in the ballet. Powell in particular enjoyed collaborating with artists from different disciplines, and the dancers and choreographers in The Red Shoes – Moira Shearer, Léonide Massine and Robert Helpmann – play versions of themselves. Pressburger based the character of Lermontov on Diaghilev, but it also has elements of the imperious Korda, as well as both himself and Powell. ‘I live cinema,’ Powell told the French director Bertrand Tavernier. ‘I chose the cinema when I was very young, sixteen years old, and from this time on, my memories almost coincide with the history of the cinema ... I am cinema. I grew up with and through the cinema.’

The conflict and confusion between life and art in The Red Shoes is made clear in Page and Lermontov’s first exchange. ‘Why do you want to dance?’ he asks her. Her reply fills him with pleasure: ‘Why do you want to live?’ For Lermontov, nothing is more important than total dedication to one’s art. His magus-like status echoes Powell’s view of his directorial role as ‘the high priest of the mysteries’. For both men, art is an obsessive’s pursuit. When asked by Melvyn Bragg why he thought it was important to show someone dying for their art in The Red Shoes, Powell replied: ‘Because I would do it myself.’

After​ The Red Shoes, ‘filmmaking was never the same for Powell,’ according to Scorsese, who sees it as ‘the ultimate, subversive commercial film’ – it was a major US hit, won two Oscars and took $5 million at the box office. This international success emboldened Powell and Pressburger to split from Rank (who found the film too frivolous), but they wouldn’t manage to replicate the combination of creative autonomy, financial freedom and full distribution which had allowed them to produce six classic films in six years. The Hollywood moguls David O. Selznick and Sam Goldwyn were less successful partners: Gone to Earth (1950), a Hardyesque pastoral, became a bizarre vehicle for Selznick’s wife, Jennifer Jones; The Elusive Pimpernel (1950) was recut by Goldwyn, who demanded straight adventure and not the playful, ironic musical Powell and Pressburger had intended. The eclectic clutter of The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) pushed Pressburger’s liking for German morbid fantasy and Powell’s love for the ‘composed film’ to the limit, but it was their last great film together. Afterwards, in Powell’s phrase, ‘a sad creative gap’ opened up between them.

Pressburger turned to fiction, publishing two novels. The second, The Glass Pearls, a thriller which appeared in 1966, seems haunted by his failure to save his mother from Auschwitz (it was reissued by Faber in 2022). There had been a chance on a 1937 trip to Hungary – which Pressburger later denied having made – to bring her to England. The central character in the novel, Karl Braun, is a Nazi hiding in London who uses memories stolen from his Jewish victims to create a false identity. By allowing his German protagonist to borrow his own past, Pressburger splits himself into victim and perpetrator. The lonely Braun, like Mark, the cameraman in Powell’s Peeping Tom, is a serial killer driven to suicide by the ghosts inside his head. Scorsese describes the self-destructive way in which Powell ‘dared to do what no one else had dared before him; to show how close movie making could come to madness; how it could devour you if you let it’. When Peeping Tom came out in 1960, Powell was denounced as a moral degenerate. He never made another full-length feature in the UK and his work with Pressburger was effectively erased. He could barely ‘afford to heat his own house’ when Scorsese tracked him down in 1975 and took him to the US, where he worked as ‘senior director-in-residence’ at Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. In 1984, he married Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s film editor (he had lived for years with the actress Pamela Brown, who died in 1975). Pressburger remained in England. In a BBC interview in 1981, Powell and Pressburger were asked if they felt embittered by the years of misunderstanding and neglect. Powell replied that great men were never appreciated in their own country; Pressburger looked at him, raised his eyes to the ceiling, smiled and said: ‘I hope this will be cut.’