One of Our Aircraft is Missing

One of Our Aircraft is Missing (The Archers, 1942) As dawn breaks at an RAF base, a squadron of planes comes back from a nighttime bombing run of a Mercedes-Benz plant in Stuttgart. Apparently, the raid has been successful, except for one detail: Wellington bomber "B" for Bertie has not returned. It is presumed lost on the mission, possibly shot down, possibly the crew is lost.

 

One of Our Aircraft is Missing is a British propaganda film with a particular significance. Although it wasn't the first collaboration between director Michael Powell and producer-writer Emeric Pressburger, it is the first of their films that carries their particular partnering label: The Archers. Under that sobriquet, they would go on to produce some of the best British films in the 40's and 50's.

 

But, about that plane. About those pilots.

They were doing alright until they hit the Dutch coast. Leaflets were dropped over Cologne, then they headed to their primary target where they flew through some flak and then got hit, disabling their starboard engine. They navigate for a direct course home, get to Holland, but then the port engine kicks and they decide to bail out, the pilot, Haggard (Hugh Burden), stays with the plane as long as he can to try to guide it to the ground with doing as little damage as possible.

In the morning the crew gather together—the only one missing is Ashley (Emrys Jones) the wireless operator—and decide on their best course of action to get home without being detected by the occupying Germans. They are Haggard, his second pilot Earnshaw (Eric Portman), rear gunner Sir George Corbett (Godfrey Tearle), navigator Shelley (Hugh Williams), and front gunner Hickman (Bernard Miles). Time being of the essence, they do their best to hide their parachutes and set off for the coast following the main rail-line; they hope that they can hook up with Ashley somewhere on the route.

As one of the crew can speak Dutch, an encounter with children (who show off their resistance pins) brings them to the nearest town where the local "schoolmarm" (who can speak English) sequesters them while she gathers the local townspeople to discuss what to do with these "drop-in's." Finally, the teacher named Else Merteens (Pamela Brown) enters the room, suspiciously, and starts to grill them as to their identities and whether they can prove they're an English bomber crew and not some German "plants" trying to test their loyalties.

But, once they've proven their story, the village welcomes with open arms, with a sumptuous meal, offers of civilian clothes, even coordinated efforts to better hide their parachutes and smuggle them to the sea 15 km away. There then begins an elaborate ruse to "blend" the British pilots in with the townspeople to get them closer to the coast and once there, hopefully they can cross the Channel or alert their countrymen to pick them up.

It would seem like a grand spy story if it wasn't filled with quaint touches of the townspeople and their spirit of living under the shadow of the Nazis, feigning obedience with one hand and thumbing their noses with the other. One notable things, besides Powell and Pressburger's work, is the extraordinary cinematography of Ronald Neame (who, himself, would go on to direct such films as The Man Who Never Was, Tunes of Glory, The Horse's Mouth, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Poseidon Adventure), which has a good deal of verve to it, and, in latter stages of the film, turns moody and noirish. Also you should look out for the film debut of a skinny young character actor named Peter Ustinov, playing a Dutch priest. And (as if that weren't enough talent in the credits), the film is quite breezily edited by a young fellow named David Lean (who would go on to direct "some" films, himself).

A Canterbury Tale (1944)

A Canterbury Tale (The Archers, 1944) Directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (known collectively as "The Archers") begin their tale where Chaucer did in his "The Canterbury Tales" (their lines only slightly different in translation than the text):

WHEN APRIL with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein  with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,
Quickened again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun
Into the Ram one half his course has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)—
Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.
And specially from every shire’s end
Of England they to Canterbury wend,
The holy blessed martyr there to seek
Who helped them when they lay so ill and weak.

They're setting place, showing ancient maps, and then—at the appropriate verse—show us the pilgrimage as it was, with ox-carts and donkeys, and peasantry making their ways over the hills, then the close-up of a nobleman who sees a falcon high in flight. And—cut! (24 years before Kubrick did something similar)—the falcon is replaced by a fighter-plane that zooms towards us and over the head—cut!—of a British soldier circa 1944 who watches it (in the same frame composition and is probably the same actor, now in modern military dress) and the narration begins again...with another verse over landscapes not too far afield from what we saw before:

600 years have passed. What would they see, 

Dan Chaucer and his goodly company today? 

The hills and valleys are the same.

Gone are the forests since the enclosures came.

Hedgerows have sprung. The land is under plow, 

and orchards bloom with blossoms on the bow.

Sussex and Kent are like a garden fair,

but sheep still graze upon the ridges there.

The pilgrims still wends above the wield,

through wood and break and many a fertile field.

But, though so little has changed since Chaucer's day.

Another sort of pilgrim walks the way.

 

And a tank heaves into the frame and a line of those mechanized vehicles starts to wend its their own way along the pilgrim's trail on the way to Canterbury. As subtle and artistic as The Archers could be, they could also be brutal in how they juxtaposed for contrast, sometimes uncomfortably so, even for modern audiences thinking that sophistication can only be found in late-model movies. But, with A Canterbury Tale, the filmmakers linked the past and the present, while also acknowledging the omnipresence of change. For no matter whether its war or peace, or what happens to the landscape, the one constant are the pilgrims in need of hope and maybe a miracle.

Three people are in the town of Chillingbourne, Kent, a village on the train-track to Canterbury. Two are soldiers, one a Brit, one a Yank, and a "land-girl" who's taking part in helping farmers while men-folk are away to war. They are all "in-service" but beyond that they have nothing in common...except that they're stuck in Chillingbourne. They meet by happenstance when the Yank, Sgt. Bob Johnson (played by Sgt. John Sweet, chosen for "authenticity" rather than, initially, Burgess Meredith) gets off the train too early being lurched awake by the conductor's announcement of "Next stop...Canterbury." He's a stranger in a strange land at the wrong stop in the middle of the night and he recruits help from the other two, Sgt. Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price) and Alison Smith (Sheila Sim) to find lodgings for the night.

One complication, however: while making their way through town to get their bearings, Alison is attacked from the shadows by a stranger who throws glue in her hair. Evidently, there's a lot of that going around as she's the eleventh victim of such an attack—she'll meet other such girls in her farm duties. While she goes through numerous shampooings to try to rinse out the gunk, Sgt. Johnson reports the attack to the local magistrate Thomas Colpepper (Eric Portman), who is curiously unmoved and suggests that women should not be out at night after a black-out curfew. After all, Canterbury itself has just been bombed by the Germans.

Johnson is convinced to stay the weekend and the three determine to investigate who the mysterious "glueman" in town could be. The town is full of potential suspects, clues abound, and it does help to take the minds off things like the war, one's part in it, and its consequences past and future. A little mystery can distract from things of great import, and yet, there's the countryside and its history and the current residents of that storied real estate, which managed to survive Kings, Queens, technologies and even the German war machine. Instead of being a mere stop-over, their encounters and walkabouts bring out a resonance and maybe even a communion with the past.

Bombed out buildings, but Canterbury remains untouched.

For, despite the distraction, these three are in need. Each is suffering a loss, a regret, a yearning that makes them incomplete, even as an indeterminate future threatens all of them. It may be coincidence that they are all there at that time and at that place, but without seeking it out—hell, they don't even know the history of it—for those acres and shrines to echo what they did in Chaucer's time for those who made their own pilgrimages in their time of need. It is Colpepper who clues them in to the storied land and serves as unofficial chaperone for the trio, and indirectly guides them to the path that they don't know they seek.

The Archers, of course, lean into Chaucer and the romance of the land and its past (and the value and benefit of the pastoral existence—which they would continue in the next year's I Know Where I'm Going!—Powell called these films their "anti-capitalist period"), but there's another influence, cinematically. A Canterbury Tale was made in 1944, 5 years after The Wizard of Oz and the story of strangers, bonded together, off on a heroes' quest traveling to a source for "reward or penance" is shared by both.*   

Of course, Wizard is fantasy, a fairy tale. A Canterbury Tale is fanciful. But, both have rich denouements that strike the heart and do so in quite different ways. Even though all the characters in both stories realize their hearts' desires, they come to them not knowing what they do not know. Oz and Canterbury provide the realization of their dreams, but Canterbury has no definite ending (despite an American-bound re-edit by Powell that has more of a conclusion—fortunately, I saw the original British version), the last act is open-ended, with hope for the future, if an uncertain one.

A Canterbury Tale is one of the best movie experiences I've seen this year. It left me completely enchanted.

 * The story even shares the element that both sets of heroes have already possessed what they lack—they just don't know it yet.

The Red Shoes

The Red Shoes (The Archers, 1948) A film considered by many toilers in the field (including Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese) to be the most beautiful film ever made. It's also one of the most ingenious and ambitious (typical of of the writer-director-producer team of Powell and Pressburger), combining Hans Christian Andersen's story of a compulsively dancing set of ballet slippers (told in dance form) that takes over the soul of a woman, and couching it in a modern re-telling of the story, where magic is replaced by ambition, and the story parallels the real-life story of Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev and his relationship with a British ballet dancer, Diana Gould. Fantasy becomes psychology, and the Fates stay the same; that's a pretty bold statement on the power of myth and myth-making, both in the worlds of fairy-tales and The Arts. And it's the kind of Deep Thought that Powell and Pressburger brought to the conception of their films.  Modern audiences may find them overwrought (and TOO "British?"), but that's missing the forest for the trees. Let's agree to call it hyper-theatricality.  The Archers made exquisite films of subtlety and sophistication, and imaginatively bridged the fine cinematic line between reality and fantasy...and sanity and madness.*

The story is an expansion of Andersen's tale of a woman who loves to dance, is given a pair of magical shoes that fulfills her desires...only too well...finally dancing her to her doom. Here, Vicky Page (the vivid...there's no other way to say it...Moira Shearer) is a dancer of great ambitions, but circumstances bring her into the orbit of ballet impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), who, impressed by her devotion to "The Dance" brings her into his company. 

Given the chance to be a prima ballerina, she is also torn by her love for young composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring), who composes her signature ballet ("The Red Shoes", natch') for her, specifically. The pressures of touring, and the constant strains both physical and emotional, spurred on by the controlling Lermontov, conflict with her love for Julian, but it's a metaphor, as much as The Red Shoes is, she is conflicted between her love of dancing and her love for the man. 

And then, there are the images:

They are startling.  Each frame could be hung on the wall of a gallery. With the deep tones of a black-and-white film, but in eye-popping, arresting Technicolor, composed with equal attention to composition and detail. Each advances the story-line, but moves deeper into the very psychology of the actors on stage.

But, they're moving in three-dimensions, and each edit to another shot is a new revelation that startles and pleases the eye.** This is incredible, sumptuous film-making using the combined skills of art and photo-chemistry. Every time I hear someone extolling the virtues of today's digital bleaching and leeching of color, I know they haven't seen this film and its full-to-dripping palette.

Choices that hurt the brain: In the middle of a performance, reality and fantasy merge in the conflicted heart of dancer Victoria Page (Moira Shearer). The stress in the face is manifested by the dancer's physical exertions by beads of sweat and welling tears.

In one of the most startling images/special effects in The Red Shoes Vicky, in performance, imagines an image of her composer-lover, which she rushes to and falls through, a dream-like nightmarish image of the traps of love.

Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), a dark figure in the shadow of the wings

Helen's conflict in a single image

The body of a dancer must be that of an athlete's. Strong, focused, and tough, as tough as the soles of their feet...as calloused as their toes. But what can come of that pirouetting figure, spinning, when it is in mortal conflict between a romantic heart and an artistic soul for possession of the self? Which ever way the music turns, love conquers all. That is the heart of The Red Shoes, and like the cautionary folk-tale that inspired it, that does not necessarily mean that everything ends "happily ever after."

One of those movies you should see before you kick, balletically or not.

* I can't help but think that Darren Aronofsky's Natalie Portman ballerina psycho-drama Black Swan (which we'll look at tomorrow) has also been massively influenced by this film, as well (although, given the trailer's theme of "You Must Find Your Passion," it sounds a bit more like "Red Shoe Diaries"), but one hopes Aronofsky's dark sensibilities (and dabblings in theory, both mathematical and sociological) will be the dominant underpinnings.

** Yeah, yeah, I know. The previous sentences are as generic as they could be; that is what film-making SHOULD be, after all. Unfortunately, as the better the technology has become, the fundamentals of film-making as ticked off in those sentences seem to be lacking in most product. The Red Shoes is a shining (one might even say, glowing) example of taking the art to a new level.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (The Archers, 1946) Controversial film for the majority of its life, although looking at it now, one wonders what all the fuss was about.

"Colonel Blimp" was a political cartoon created by cartoonist David Low as a blow against pomposity and complacency, but writer/director team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger ("The Archers") took the name and reputation and turned it into another animal altogether—an epic about manners, regimentation and the Rules of Engagement, both intimate and grandiose.

After serving in the Boer War, Clive Wynne-Candy (the criminally forgotten Roger Livesey) is embroiled in a sword-duel with a German officer, Theodor Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), which results in both men being wounded and a substantial recovery time in the same hospital. The two become friends, and while friendships may last, alliances do not, especially in the European history of the 20th Century. Times change, the borders of countries shift like Teutonic plates, but loyalties...what happens to them? It may seem an odd thing to focus on to American audiences (as we've always fought "dirty" in our wars, bending the rules of warfare to our advantage), but the British throughout that century struggled to maintain a decorum to war, which, if it were not so ingrained, must seem like a flight of fancy.*

"The criminally-forgotten Roger Livesey"

Flights of Fancy are what Powell and Pressburger do best. And despite mis-understanding by, primarily, Churchill (who must have thought it was about him), the film has been unfairly maligned, and expectations for it blown out of proportion. Satirical it is. But also a melancholy treatise on long life and outliving one's epoch. One walks in expecting brash and finds it sad and sweet. And cleverly inventive, in technique and story-line. Deborah Kerr (in a daunting screen debut) plays three women in Candy's life: the woman he gave away to a friend, the woman he married, and his driver during WWII—the arc of a love in three acts for women who resemble each other, if only in the mind of one man.

If nothing else, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is amazing in its look--a Technicolor confection that pops off the screen, a mark of "The Archers.

*However...given the film begins with The Boer War, one can't help but use the word "decorum" a bit sarcastically given the British use of "scorched Earth" policies and concentration camps during that conflict.

A Matter of Life and Death

A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven) (The Archers, 1946) A cryptic reference to "The Archers" (and their ability to seamlessly combine reality and fantasy) crept into my review of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and necessitated the completion of a couple reviews I've had in draft stage the last few months, waiting for the creative spark that would ignite them into a full-blown post.

A Matter of Life and Death, coming as it did with the stench of the Second World War still enveloping the planet, is a meditation on, and an impassioned plea for, the value of a single human life at a time when the world had seen so much slaughter. Like it's American counterpart, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, both films begin in the Heavens for a brief prelude contemplating cosmic predetermination. One man is literally, and spiritually, put to trial for his life, on Earth (as it is in Heaven) when he doesn't die in circumstances that should have killed him. The story proper begins with the protagonist's life in the air. A lone RAF pilot, poet Peter Carter (David Niven) is the last man crouching on a doomed bomber hurtling to destruction. The rest of the crew has bailed out, and Carter, without a parachute, has determined to go down with the plane, hoping to bail out at the last second to avoid death. 

He spends his last fleeting moments in tenuous radio communication with June (Kim Hunter), an American radio operator, who listens, horrified, as Carter banters through his stiff upper lip, and a parallel falling occurs, as the two are linked in life, death and love for those precious few minutes. Nothing can come of it, of course. He's a dead man, for sure.

So, the two are both shocked (though delighted) that Carter survives the fall and is washed up on the beach. It's some sort of miracle.

"Every time the factory whistle blows, an angel gets it's wings..."

Heavens Above...

The Earth Below

Actually, no. It is more of a clerical error, as the being-counters in Heaven (we presume, and it's never stated outright) await Carter's arrival with the rest of his crew (none of them made it). A representative (Marius Goring) is dispatched from Powell and Pressburger's amusing depiction of Kingdom Come (as a sort of empyrean General Motors, an Industrial Age Promised Land), to send Carter packing for Paradise...except...he doesn't want to go. And won't, unless, he's forced to. Of course, that he's seeing time-stopping visions of Heavenly Hosts indicates "chronic adhesive arachnoiditis" suffered from an earlier brain injury, and a battle for Carter's life is fought on two fronts, both dependent on the work of one man: Doctor Frank Reeves (Roger Livesey), who diagnoses the ailment and, before he can perform surgery, is killed, where he can conveniently argue Carter's case for life in a celestial court-room—the highest court of all.

The Highest Court of All

Carter's out-of-body experience on the operating table—a comic highlight

But, it is more than that—it always is with the films of Powell and Pressburger. At the end of the European War, there was bitterness on both sides of "the pond:" Americans were grieving their losses and blaming England for "having to be bailed out;" Britons were bitter of the first American Invasion of the war—their own country, and of the havoc "the Yanks" caused creating their launch-point.* The Case for Peter Carter becomes, in a deeper and richer sense, a debate centering on "Whither England," and whether the "special arrangement" between The Kingdom and The Colonies should be continued, unquestioned. This odd and whimsical fantasy** becomes a propaganda piece for the very existence of Britain itself, God (or Whoever) Save the King.

The production values are top-notch and imaginative, including an ecumenical escalator that bridges the two worlds...and two photographic processes.  Reversing The Wizard of Oz schema, it is the worlds under the rainbow that glow with rich eye-dazzling Technicolor, while "the next world" is shown in black and pearly-white. 

And you thought "Led Zeppelin" made it up...

 

It is rich in humor, rich in thought, and it stands right behind Get Carter(...?) in polls of the greatest British-made film.  This is one of those films you should see before you die...if only so you can get directions. And to make the journey until then...that much more enjoyable and precious.

* A fine film, too often overlooked, about this war on the home-front is John Schlesinger's unusually restrained (for him) Yanks.

** This is one of those films that modern critics would sniff "is inconsistent in tone."  Hey, life is inconsistent, pal!