Alfred Junge: The Third Archer

When Black Narcissus was released in 1947, only three members of the creative team who had made the film were named on the poster: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger and production designer Alfred Junge. It was Junge who designed the logo for the Archers, the independent company that Powell and Pressburger formed in 1942 to produce films for distribution through the Rank Organisation.

The famous target made its first public appearance when The Silver Fleet, written and directed by Vernon Sewell and Gordon Wellesley, opened at the Leicester Square Theatre on 26 February 1943. A few months later, on 10 June, Powell and Pressburger’s colour production of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp followed.

A sketch for this first version of the Archers logo can be found in the collection of Junge’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.

A treasure-trove of drawings, letters and photographs, the collection makes it possible to tell the story of the Third Archer.

Junge, who, in Michael Powell’s words, “always took a leading part in any important council of war”, was indispensable to the artistic success of the Archers. Not even the sky had been a limit to what he achieved. For A Matter of Life and Death (1946), he had built heaven itself. Powell thought that “Uncle Alfred” – as he was affectionately known among the Archers – was “probably the greatest art director that films have ever known”.

Born in 1886 in Görtlitz, a small town in Germany, Junge remembered that whenever people asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, “My answer was invariably ‘I’ll be an artist or Kaiser!’ When the time came there was no great future or demand for Kaisers and I had to stick to becoming an artist.” But first he had to survive the First World War, which he recalled was spent mostly sketching the graves of comrades or swallows sitting on telegraph wires. He was pleased never to have fired a shot and therefore to have the “wonderful feeling of never having killed a man”.

Junge had already worked as an art director on 25 films in Germany, when the  producer-director E. A. Dupont – who had come to prominence after the international success of the UFA film Varieté (1925) – brought him to England in 1927 to design the £100,000 super-production Moulin Rouge for British International Pictures.

Junge stayed on to design Dupont’s next BIP film, Piccadilly (1929), starring Hollywood actress Anna May Wong. Then, after a stint in Paris, which included the art direction of Alexander Korda’s production of Marius (1931) for Paramount, he returned to London in 1932 to become head of production design at Gaumont-British. Here his aim was, in his own words, “to build up an art department which would at least equal the American standard”. Over the next five years he worked as an art director of more than 40 films but also trained a generation of other art directors.

When Junge joined MGM-British in 1938, it would be understandable if, now in his fifties, he regarded this appointment by Hollywood’s most prestigious film company as the pinnacle of a long and illustrious career. But the best was yet to come.

After working on The Citadel (1938) and Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), Junge was designing his third production for MGM-British, Busman’s Honeymoon (US title: Haunted Honeymoon), when the beginning of the Second World War caused MGM to suspend its British operation. It meant that he was available in January 1940 to design the second film on which Powell and Pressburger worked together, Contraband, produced by John Corfield for British National. “At last I had got my hands on this Prussian genius,” commented Michael Powell in his memoirs.

It can’t have been the easiest time or place to be a “Prussian genius”. After Contraband, Junge resumed his work on Busman’s Holiday, but MGM closed down production once again in May 1940 following the German invasion of France. Junge himself was then interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien. It would not be until after Powell and Pressburger had launched their own company, The Archers Film Productions, in January 1942, that he was free to work with them again.

A combination of the creative ambition of the Archers and the huge financial resources of the Rank Organisation enabled a series of extraordinary films to be made, which, for Junge, would culminate with the productions of A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus.

At the beginning of 1948, he had to decide which of these two films should be submitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for that year’s Oscars awards. He chose Black Narcissus, explaining in a letter to Jean Hersholt, the president of the Academy that, “I prefer this to my other colour picture Stairway to Heaven as, to my mind, the harmony in colour, costume and sets added to the atmosphere of the picture”.

This idea of a “harmony” between different elements brings to mind Michael Powell’s concept of the “composed film”, in which “music, emotion, image and voices all blended together into a new and splendid whole”. The finale in Black Narcissus, Powell thought, was the first time that the Archers ever managed to achieve it.

A sort of composed Oscar acceptance for the British film industry occurred when, in March 1948, the actress Jean Simmons, who had appeared in Black Narcissus, collected from presenters Agnes Moorehead and Dick Powell the four Oscars that had been awarded to British films that year: black-and-white cinematography and art direction awards to David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), for Guy Green and John Bryan; and colour cinematography and art direction awards to Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus, for Jack Cardiff and Alfred Junge.

It represented the pinnacle of Junge’s five years with the Archers, a period that he regarded as a “pleasure and a privilege”, during which he had been able “to work as freely and imaginatively as ever”. But his own concept of the composed film was rooted in a realist approach at odds with the new direction that Michael Powell would take with the next Archers production, The Red Shoes (1948).

“Everything in Alfred’s Other World had been strictly literal and logical," Michael Powell wrote of A Matter of Life and Death, but The Red Shoes required him to create “a world where nothing was real and everything was fantasy and invention”. This was, as Powell observed, a step too far for the Prussian genius, who would leave the Archers during the production to return to MGM.

In some notes for a lecture, Junge explained his approach to his work: “Every film should be told in a way that people believe in their characters, in their surroundings, in the storm, in the fire or explosion, in the earthquake, flood or other catastrophe, even … when we travel with tremendous speed in a rocket to the moon or mars, or we glide in solemn silence through the endless universe, passing millions of stars, towards the Earth...”

In his quest for the believable, Junge had shown that there was nothing that could not be built on a studio backlot or sound stage: the Flanders battlefields in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a cathedral for A Canterbury Tale (1944), stormy seas and a whirlpool for I Know Where I’m Going (1945), the entire universe for A Matter of Life and Death. When it came to creating a remote convent in the Himalayas for Black Narcissus, he relied on the same rigorous research that had been the foundation of all these earlier films.

His papers at the Harry Ransom Center include the thousands of reference photographs that he had accumulated over his twenty years of working in the British film industry. Like all his previous productions, Black Narcissus was notable for its exhaustive documentary underpinning: Junge and his team were able to take inspiration from numerous pictures that had been taken in Tibet, Bhutan and India of possible props, costumes, buildings and mountain landscapes.

“Tibetan trumpets. As per one sent,” he wrote on the back of the picture below. Another photograph featured the giant twin trumpets that open the film.

“Sun rise. Terrific colours,” he notes on the back of one of several photographs of the Himalayas. “Kanchenjunga just to left. Clouds covering Darjeeling and Teesta valley.”

The inspiration for the old palace of Mopu, which, in the film, Mr. Dean (David Farrar) describes as at “the Back of Beyond” and standing “on a shelf on a mountain”, was the real-life seventeenth-century Paro Taktsang Monastery, which is at an elevation of about 10,000 feet on a cliffside in the Paro District of Bhutan.

In Junge’s transformation of the monastery into Mopu palace, the cliff becomes a dizzyingly sheer drop and the mountains opposite are elevated to breath-taking, snow-peaked heights. Mr. Dean’s comment of Mopu that “there’s something in the atmosphere that makes everything seem exaggerated” was a good way of describing the matte painting department of Walter Percy Day, whose previous work had included The Thief of Baghdad (1940) and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Day’s assistant Peter Ellenshaw would go on to work on several Walt Disney films, including Treasure Island (1950), 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954) and Mary Poppins (1964), for which he won an Oscar. Ellenshaw gives this handy description of how matte paintings work: “Let us suppose we are on location and need a castle on a hill. We have the hill but no castle. On a large glass, about six feet in front of the camera we paint the castle. Through the clear part of the glass, the characters in the scene (or boats, or other objects) go into action and are photographed at the same time as the background scene with castle is recorded. This is matte-painting in its simplest form.”

Jean Simmons is the seventeen-year-old orphan Kanji, who Mr. Dean finds too hot to handle after she begins to sit on his verandah every evening with flowers in her hair. She makes a memorable entrance in the film as she arrives at Mopu palace (optimistically re-purposed to be a convent for the sisters of St Faith) with a suitcase, an umbrella and a slice of melon. 

A source for her look was this photograph in Junge’s library of research pictures:

No matter how exaggerated or stylised the costumes, props or sets may be in Black Narcissus, they all emerged out of something – or someone – that was real.

The caretaker of Mopu palace, Angu Ayah (May Hallatt), was modelled after this photograph from Junge’s library of a Bhutanese woman. The receptacle attached to her necklace – a gau – would have contained amulets, votive figurines and other sacred objects.

Looking through Junge’s research photographs, I wondered whether I would find a model for the bell tower, the backdrop for Sister Ruth’s final act of madness.

One of the photographs, which were all in black-and-white, showed the tenth-century Tyagada Kamba, an open pavilion with an ornately decorated internal pillar that stands to this day on top of a hill in Shravanabelagola, a town in the state of Karnataka, southern India. Although it wasn’t a bell tower, it required only a little bit of imagination to turn it into one...

But when it came to The Red Shoes, there were no research photographs that could help Junge imagine what was going on inside a ballerina’s head. Logic was not enough. It was time to move on.