One of Our Aircraft is Missing [dirs. Powell and Pressburger]

While not the first collaboration between the great team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, One of Our Aircraft is Missing (OOOAIM) was the first official production of their brainchild The Archers, in which they took a joint writer-producer-director credit. So it is an important element of film history. Lucky then it's an entertaining film too, especially interesting to fans of old-school war dramas (of course, OOOAIM wouldn't have been old-school but quite cutting edge in 1942 when it was released).

The film deals with a British bombing mission over Stuttgart that goes awry when the plane is hit by retaliatory fire and the 6-man crew are forced to bail out in their parachutes. They drift into a neighboring region of The Netherlands. The danger is far from over because this is still Nazi-occupied territory. They must rely on the patriotism of the native Dutch people and their resentment of the Nazi invaders to reach back home. The rest of the film is an episodic narrative where they are passed from one group of locals to another, all coming together to aid the Brits who they hope will ultimately help in eliminating the Nazi tyranny. It is a little piecemeal but the brisk pacing does not leave much time to reflect.

The focus of the screenplay is less on military heroics and more on solidarity between people against Nazi oppression, and cooperation for a common cause. Although OOOAIM primarily deals with the all-male British bomber crew, Michael Powell influenced Pressburger to write strong female parts, and so among the Dutch locals they meet some fierce women who are instrumental in arranging for the help they need; my favorite was Googie Withers' portrayal of the no-nonsense Joe de Vries who fools the Nazis into believing that she is friendly to them, all the while sheltering and aiding stranded allied forces. Powell's. autobiography claims that Googie, who had Dutch roots, was so overcome at being offered the part she broke down.

Technically too, the film is a marvel. Apart from exciting footage of actual planes obtained with help from the British armed forces, art director David Rawnsley designed massive floor-spanning miniatures of the Stuttgart landscape to depict the bombing run. Ronald Neame's cinematography is evocative and the film is skillfully edited by a young David Lean (just prior to his directorial debut with In Which We Serve). Powell also decided to avoid any background score and employ only digetic music, which generated a more realistic tone, while also highlighting the emotion when specific music cues like the Dutch national anthem were used. OOOAIM is old-fashioned in terms of its portrayal of war where soldiers could still be shown to be chivalrous and fair-minded, but it does not appear creaky.

Age of Consent [dir. Michael Powell]

Michael Powell, especially in conjunction with his partner Emeric Pressburger, made films across genres and in a variety of styles, but in each film there was a unified vision, a fidelity to the theme that marked their genius. Even in Powell's solo output, Peeping Tom was a product of that same consistency of design. Which is why I find Age of Consent somewhat puzzling.

There's the central story of a aging jaded painter trying to find himself again and the young (underage, the film repeatedly reminds us) girl who becomes his muse, and in the process discovers her own womanhood. This is done with an admirable delicacy of touch and aided by the involved acting from James Mason and a very brave Helen Mirren in their respective parts (of course the sense of taboo is mitigated by the fact that the frequently naked Helen doesn't look remotely like the underage girl she is supposed to be, or perhaps that was just the gin-soaked tyrant grandmother's attempt to delude the girl and rein her in as a continued source of income).

What jars here is the mixture of the bawdy comedy track, majorly from the scenes with Jack MacGowran as a money and "bird"-fancying moocher. It seems at odds with the central narrative, looking more like an attempt to inject some crowd-pleasing laughs to keep the film from becoming too serious. The film is otherwise fine in its low-key manner (very low-key, I thought the death of a certain character would have more melodramatic consequences, and the film ends all too abruptly, leaving pertinent questions about the equation between the painter and the girl unanswered). There's terrific location and underwater photography capturing the beauty of the Great Barrier Reef, and a hypnotic score by Peter Sculthorpe. And yes, a terrific performance by the dog Lonsdale that plays Mason's companion Godfrey (Powell was apparently miffed that none of the critics at the time mentioned the dog in their reviews).

The credits specify that "Miss Mirren is a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company", probably to establish her respectability and discourage anyone only interested in the naughty bits.

Life and Death of Colonel Blimp [dirs. Powell and Pressburger]

I doubt there's any film made by the duo of Powell & Pressburger that's not at the least very interesting, and Blimp stands among the top of their varied and illustrious filmography. The film is about the old world transitioning into an uneasy new world. The old is represented by Col Blimp (Roger Livesey, marvelous performance) who personifies a Boy Scout fantasy of a soldier that believes in chivalry and fair play on the battleground. Following his career from an honored young officer of the Boer War through the First World War and culminating at the onset of the Second, the film shows how the world around Blimp changes irretrievably from his gentleman's cricket game approach to conflict, to a more sordid "the end justifies the means" approach. While showing the lead character with warmth and admiration (humanizing him mainly through his continued adoration of his first love - played by Deborah Kerr who also plays two other characters in Blimp's life that resemble her), the film also acknowledges that he is a relic in this changing time. It's a touching richly-textured film, if you hold a torch for the old-school values that Blimp stands for. Rarely have 163 min gone by so breezily, with every moment given to economical exposition or solid character development. Many major events of Blimp's life take place offscreen with the film focusing more on the effects of those events on his life. Like many other P&P films, this one is also marvelously designed and executed with panache. The Technicolor photography (Georges Perinal, with Geoffrey Unsworth and Jack Cardiff as camera operators) is breath-taking, and the sentimental music score genuinely moving in conjunction with the visuals.

Criterion's blu-ray gives a wonderful presentation of the film. Based on a restoration conducted by Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation, the image here looks even better than on their other P&P technicolor film Black Narcissus. Apart from scanning of the negatives (which for technicolor means 3 sets of negatives), the restoration has been carried out almost entirely in the digital realm, and the results are astonishing - there is warmth and beauty here. While our eyes are so accustomed to seeing grain in movies that it would still be nice to shoot on film, it is my personal belief that screen size and resolution apart, a good digital screening would have little significant difference from a good 35mm print, and any moaning about this is just *blind* prejudice. The mono sound is clear and rich taking into account the limitations of the period. There's a load of supplements, of which I have seen only the rather nice intro by Scorsese in which he talks about the film and how it influenced crucial scenes in Raging Bull.

Peeping Tom [Michael Powell]

Peeping Tom is one of those movies so ahead of its time (1960), it was bound to be admired passionately or hated to bits. Unfortunately for its makers the latter reaction prevailed and the film brought to a crash the illustrious career of its director Michael Powell. Powell had, in collaboration with Emeric Pressburger, worked in a variety of genres and fashioned some of the most enduring British films of the 40's and 50's.

Like Hitchcock's more famous Psycho (released six months after) Peeping Tom is the story of a psychopathic killer. The titular character Mark is a photography assistant in a movie studio. After a strange childhood in which he has constantly been recorded and documented as the subject of his neurologist father's experiments Mark has developed an obsession for the camera lens and what it captures. Mark is also a killer that stabs his victims and records their dying moments on film.

The story is told mostly from Mark's point of view and one of the most striking aspects of the screenplay is the level of sympathy his character is given, probably also the cause of its initial downfall with the censors and the critics. There is no shying from Mark's more despicable activities. None of his victims, even when they are "two-quid" whores, are shown to be “asking for it”. But Mark is also revealed as a painfully shy loner, a victim of his bizarre upbringing. When Helen the girl-next-door makes a friendly overture, his response is one of almost child-like happiness and gratitude. Carl Boehm in the lead role does a spectacularly convincing job, being simultaneously creepy and pitiable. Even his slight German accent works to underline Mark's distance from his surroundings.

Where the film again succeeds is in the brilliant material for the supporting characters, the best example being Helen's mother, blind and alcoholic but steely-nerved, and ironically the only person to see through Mark's dupe. She also gets some of the film's best lines; to Helen's defense of Mark saying “He's just shy”, she counters royally with “His footsteps aren't. They're stealthy.”

Powell develops a compelling visual style for the film, with deliberately lurid colors (including a prominent red motif) and POV shots that constantly reiterate the film's discomfiting voyeuristic themes. The use of a jazz-flavored dance score to build tension before one of the murder set-pieces is executed with a panache Hitchcock would have envied.

To my mind, this film takes a more difficult line than Psycho did. That it manages to walk without stumbling (that too by a maker who had never before handled a film of this flavor), makes it a more significant achievement than the latter film. Your opinion may well differ, but there is no dispute that Peeping Tom is a film that MUST be seen and savored by fans of the psychological horror genre.