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A Life in Movies

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This is a good read written by and about the life of one of the truly great movie directors. Along with Emeric Pressberger, Michael Powell created The Archers, whose movie productions were and are breathtaking in their daring cinematography and scoring. If you're not familiar with Powell's movies, you're in for a treat. I urge you to design your own Michael Powell film festival: Be sure to include The Thief of Baghdad, Stairway to Heaven (A Matter of Life and Death in Britain), The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and my personal favorite, I Know Where I'm Going. These are stunning works of art. Consider that they were filmed in cash-strapped postwar England, and you come away all the more amazed. Powell lost his career when he filmed Peeping Tom, a Hitchcockian thriller that upset critics with its psychosexual theme; his reputation was only rehabilitated by the intercession of such luminaries as Michael Scorsese during the 1980s. Powell lived a brash, full and vigorous life spiced with affairs with the likes of Deborah Kerr and the fascinating Pamela Brown. He dared the new, often endured hardship and even danger to catch what he wanted on film. He envisioned original and groundbreaking ideas, and then assembled teams that made them happen: A Himalayan garden in Kent for Black Narcissus, awesome outer space animation and the world's largest staircase for Stairway to Heaven, shooting I Know Where I'm Going without the leading man ever being on location. This book has been out of print for some time in hardcover. I've seen copies selling for hundreds of dollars. There is a reason! Now is your chance to enjoy the best words there are about Michael Powell--his own.

No other biography i've read places the man himself before me, so evocative is it. In his films he chased and captured the wonder in all things, but his own writing does this more directly, a wonderful book. The life of the film maker from the 1920's onwards, and one who can fully express himself descriing the life, and equally great on his growing up towards film. The maker of wonders like A Canterbury Tale, Small Back Room, The Spy In Black and Peeping Tom achieved as much in this book.

A beautifully written account of a life dedicated to the making of films by a true Master of the medium. This book together with the other volume of his autobiography, Million Dollar Movie, gives the reader a wonderful insight into a very creative personality. Michael Powell recounts his life with charm, whimsy, wit and voluptuousness: a perfect picture of the man himself.

Meet Michael Powell! The great and iconoclastic film direcotr of such classics as 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp"; "The
49th Parallel"; "The Canterbury Tales: "Black Narcissus": "Peeping Tom" and countless others tells the story of his long,productive and adventurous life (1905-1990).
Powell grew up in bucolic middle class farm life in Canterbury, Kent. His father divorced his mother moving to France following World War I. It was while staying with his father that Powell became involved in moviemaking as he joined the company led by director Rex Ingram on the French Riveria.
Powell later became associated with Alfred Hitchcock, Arthur
Rank, Michael Balcon and J. Arthur Rank . He made his first hit with his eccentric view of life in the Orkney islands in "The
Edge of the World."
Powell knew many of the great actors, directors and technicians who made the movies the folk tales of the 20th
century.
Powell's closest associate was the Hungarian writer Pressburg with whom he organized Archer Film Studios.One classic from this association was "The Red Shoes" which is arguably the finest ballet movie ever made!
Among other things Powell was:
a. A womanizer who wed several times and romanced the likes of actresses Deborah Kerr and Pamela Brown.
b. A novelist and a director who actually read books! His writing style is anecdotal and very readable!
c. Powell's love for film is manifest Even though British film culture turned its back on him following his controversial "Peeping Tom" in 1960 he never gave up his love for film, storytelling and art.
Powell is sadly little known on our side of the pond. He deserves to be better celebrated as one of the best film directors of the 20th century.
With the TCM cable channel's recent festival of his best movies the hope is that Powell will become better known and his
imperishable films enjoyed by a new generation of film fans.
This was a fine book to spend several hours perusing in the company of a grand old man of British and world cinema.

Michael Powell, partnered by Emeric Pressburger, made some of the finest films of the forties. Films like The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, are startlingly original. These two men, known as the Archers, formed one of the great creative teams. His description of this partnership forms the heart of Powell's autobiography A Life in Movies.

Powell's book is long and takes a while to get going. He spends rather too long on his childhood in Kent. It is an interesting description of a long lost world and provides some insight into the development of Powell's character, but eventually one becomes rather impatient for him to get onto his film career. This he does with a brilliant description of his start in silent movies. Powell's story from this point onwards becomes gripping. He is a good writer, clear and readable. This book is full of interesting anecdotes and, on the whole, is very candid. There are times when he is circumspect and he sometimes withholds a name, but normally he is very open and honest. This is especially so in perhaps the most heartbreaking story of the whole book, his affair with Deborah Kerr. Powell's description of this is warm and loving and full of feeling. It is quite clear, even after more than forty years, that he never got over it. Thus Powell comes to resemble Roger Livesey's character in Colonel Blimp, and the film somehow seems all the more poignant.

In any long story there are dull bits. Powell's account of his struggles in the early thirties making obscure films which have been all but forgotten is not especially interesting, although it does contain some fine material regarding his interaction with the young Alfred Hitchcock. Furthermore, he dwells at times overly much on the politics of the British film industry. However, when he discusses his great films starting with The Edge of the World and finishing with The Red Shoes, this book is as good a description of making films as I have read. Fans of the Archers cannot fail to learn something new about their favourite films from this book.

For those interested in British cinema, Michael Powell needs no introduction as one-half of the filmmaking team of "The Archers", with the emigre Hungarian Emeric Pressburger as the other half. This book, the first part of Powell's autobiography, goes up through the initial release of "The Red Shoes", makes for an entertaining journey through the early years of British cinema, from his apprenticeship with Alfred Hitchcock through his "quota quickie" years of honing his craft on British B-films. Powell knows how to tell a story well in rather amazing detail, as he claimed to have total recall.

However, on at least one detail, at the risk of sounding trivial, his memory didn't quite match. Example: about "The Red Shoes", he gives the full name of the conductor Livy (played by Esmond Knight) as "Sir Edmund Livingstone", whereas in one shot of the film, Livy's full name is actually "Mr. Livingstone Montague". On other points, one has to keep in mind his selective memory. For example, he chooses not to mention the name of his first wife from his very short-lived first marriage, basically saying that "Her name was - well, what does it matter?" and that they were young and foolish. (For the record, Powell's first wife was Gloria Mary Rouger.) Likewise, during the filming of "Black Narcissus", Powell didn't mention the name of the actress with whom he was having an affair, simply saying that "my two mistresses, one ex and one current, were both working for me in the same picture". The "ex" was Deborah Kerr, of course, while the "current" was Kathleen Byron, whom Powell more explicitly mentioned in volume two of his autobiography.

More seriously, at the risk of stating the obvious, but necessarily precisely because the book is so well written, one has to keep in mind that this is Powell's own selective point of view, and not the "whole truth". One case is in Powell's tale of working with Albert Bassermann on "The Red Shoes". Powell expresses nothing but admiration for Bassermann, but paints a portrait of Bassermann's wife as a bit of a pill on the movie set. Powell obliquely tells of taking Bassermann's wife down a peg once, which caused Bassermann himself some distress, and for which Bassermann demanded of Powell an apology. If one reads Kevin Brownlow's biography of Emeric Pressburger, the tale is told rather differently, where apparently Powell was rather harsher towards Bassermann and his wife, to the point that Anton Walbrook was repelled by Powell's behavior and broke off working with Powell for a number of years.

Once one keeps in mind the need for several grains of salt in reading the book and checking the facts, however, the book is most definitely a rollicking good read.