John Baxter's Adventures in the Movie Trade (5) - MICHAEL POWELL and EMERIC PRESSBURGER.

Pressburger (left) & Powell

 Australia was an improbable location for a film-maker like Michael Powell, but when he made They’re a Weird Mob and Age of Consent there in 1966 and 1969 respectively, he had little choice. Although Peeping Tom in 1960 was blamed for ending his career, its distributor pulling it from British cinemas after only five days, Tales of Hoffman in 1952 was really his last film of note. Had James Mason not thrown him a lifeline by helping to finance the two Australian films, it’s hard to see how he would ever have worked in features again.

        

Powell and Walter Chiari on the set of They're a Weird Mob

 We met in Sydney during the making of They’re a Weird Mob when I and my fellow editors devoted an entire edition of our magazine Film Digest to his films. “Aloof” best describes his manner, which reflected the formality of such characters as the impresario Lermontov in The Red Shoes and the patriotic fetishist played by Eric Portman in A Canterbury Tale.

He was more animated when we met next, in London. For a festival devoted to British films – a creditable but finally disastrous decision by its backers, Camden Council – Powell agreed to introduce one of his least distinguished post-Peeping Tom films, a German-produced version of Bartok’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle. Except for some decorative echoes of The Red Shoes, the film showed little of Powell’s flair, and a lacklustre audience reaction made me hesitant to approach him again for an interview in connection with The Hollywood Exiles, a book I was writing about the foreign communities in Hollywood. 

         

Bluebeard's Castle

As it turned out, he was quite amenable – perhaps he appreciated that Film Digest tribute more than I thought. However, the meeting took some arranging, as he no longer owned a house, but preferred to live in a caravan, parking it in various beauty spots around Britain. Personal encounters took place in the headquarters of the Society of Authors in Albemarle Street, around the corner from the Royal Academy. Even allowing for his customary outfit of beige corduroy trousers, desert boots and fisherman's sweater, the Regency elegance of the locale made it easier to see him as an artist of international significance.

         He never worked in Hollywood but visited there in the nineteen-forties with his partner Emeric Pressburger. Many Europeans were bored by the long train trip - Twentieth Century Limited from New York to Chicago, then three days on the Super Chief to Los Angeles - but Powell was enthusiastic. 

The Twentieth Century Limited leaves Chicago

"Fritz Lang was on the train. We had never met him but he came along and introduced himself. We had a drawing room, so we spent most of the three days telling stories and cracking jokes with Lang, who was a lovely person. We were going through marvelous places like Albuquerque and Santa Fe. No, my dear fellow - it's the only way to travel." 

(There is probably an essay to be written on the uses to which cinema people put the four-hour stop-over in Chicago between the arrival of the Twentieth Century Limited and the departure of the Super Chief. Some were interviewed for the radio program Who’s On the Chief? Edgar Wallace spent the time schmoozing with local newsmen, from which he gathered enough gossip to write his hit gangster play On the Spot. Josef von Sternberg visited an art gallery and bought a George Grosz painting. One person gave me a you-must-be-kidding look. “We got drunk. What else?”)

         Powell was more impressed with the train journey than by what lay at the end of it. 

"California is a hell of a place to live. Miles from anywhere. In those days it was much further than it is today. We were Europeans. We liked to be near theatres and opera and ballet and galleries and people. There weren't any of those things in California. The reason why these highly intelligent people who went to Hollywood immersed themselves in their work and just made film after film after film was, I think, because....Well, what could they do in California? No theatre, no opera - until radio and television came in, it must have been the end of the earth. And people too....Europeans love people. It's talk as much as anything that keeps things going in Europe, particularly central Europe, where most of these people came from. Where was the café life in California?"

          

Emeric Pressburger

One could scarcely find a better example of the talk-loving European than Powell's long-time collaborator, Emeric Pressburger. Born in Rumania, he found himself a Hungarian after the redrawing of borders following World War I. After making his name in Budapest, he gravitated to Berlin, then Paris, where he met Powell. In 1974, however, his address was almost archetypally English; Shoemaker's Cottage, on the outskirts of a village in Suffolk, the county in which, as it happens, I also lived at the time.

         White-painted and sitting on a slight hill outside the village, his cottage looked oddly austere, even forbidding. There were bars on the windows, and the living room where we spoke was almost bare; just a card table, a couple of chairs, and, on the wall, a ceramic plaque by Picasso. I later learned that his most recent companion had decamped not long before, taking most of the furniture. 

         Initially Pressburger had little to say about his days as an itinerant screenwriter in nineteen-thirties Europe, but a casual reference to the New York Cafe, a favourite Budapest theatre hangout, turned some mental key, and the stories gushed out; tales of Molnar, Lengyel, Biro, Bus-Fekete and of a world that ceased to exist with the rise of Nazism.

         He was particularly voluble about his days in Paris, where he arrived, broke and stateless, in March 1933, one of the numerous Jewish artists ejected by the Nazis.  "France was entirely different to Germany. Haphazard. A contract didn't mean anything. I worked first for a small film producer who also owned a racing stable. Friends of mine said 'You know, he will never pay you,' But they told me to learn the names of some horses he owned, and look in the paper to see when they were running. I would go to the race-course and when his horse won I, with one or two other people, would go up to him and say 'Look, I need the money very badly and it is sixteen months I am waiting for it.' And he would put his large hand - he was a very large man - into his pocket, which was full of banknotes, take out a handful and say 'Count that.' " 

         

Pressburger, incidentally, was able to authenticate a story about Ferenc Molnar (right) that appears in S.N. Behrman’s essay about the great playwright. When MGM lured Molnar from Hungary, they put him up at the Plaza in New York. Shortly after, an equerry arrived with a draft contract. So great was the esteem in which he was held, said the Metro man, that they had not even indicated his remuneration, but rather filled that space with a dash. Molnar examined the dash and shook his head. 

“Too short.”

         For all the apparent English-ness of A Canterbury Tale and I Know Where I'm Going, Powell's European roots were never far from the surface. A sense of alienation permeates his work, evident in his collaboration with Pressburger and his use of such Continental performers as Anton Walbrook, Albert Bassermann and Conrad Veidt, as well as the inclusion in his creative team of designers Alfred Junge and Hein Heckroth, and cinematographers Erwin Hillier and Georges Perinal. There is a certain appropriateness in Powell ending his professional career as an ornament to the court of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola – an honoured outsider, but an outsider nevertheless.