A familiar theme in the various stories about Michael Powell is how unfairly forgotten he was before he was “rediscovered” in the 1970s. But much more striking today is the comparative neglect of his partner, Emeric Pressburger. He was a quiet, modest man who did not hunger for the limelight. In an age that romanticised the director as auteur, it was always a risk that he was going to fall into Powell’s shadow.
In his memoirs Powell describes how a key moment in his return to critical fashion occurred at just the point when his life and career were bumping along the bottom: “And then one day I saw somebody reading a bulky book called A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema and out of tired curiosity I looked to see if I was in it, and what they said about me.” He was so pleased by David Thomson’s “percipient” praise of him that he reproduced the entire entry.
But this entry did not mention Pressburger once. Nor did Thomson give Pressburger a separate entry. If Powell had turned a few pages past his own name, he would have found Elvis Presley and Vincent Price, but no Emeric Pressburger in-between. It was only in a new edition of his dictionary, in 1994, that Thomson amended the Powell entry to include a passing reference to his “vital partnership with the writer Emeric Pressburger”, but he still did not consider it necessary to add an entry for Pressburger, which might have explored what that famous joint credit “Written, produced and directed by …” actually meant.
The general tendency to disregard Pressburger has continued ever since.
Nor was Pressburger the only Archer to fall into Powell’s shadow. I recently found some photocopied letters and documents that the lighting cameraman Erwin Hillier gave me about thirty years ago when I interviewed him for a book I was writing on the British cinema of the 1940s. Reading through this material now has encouraged me to explore the shadow of Michael Powell a little further.
Although Erwin Hillier was a British cititzen, he was born in Berlin in 1911. His great passion as a young man was painting. He had wanted to go to art school, but his family could not afford to support his studies after losing its savings in the hyperinflation that afflicted the Weimar Republic in the early 1920s. Instead, Hillier got a job at UFA studios through a family friend who was impressed by his artistic talent. After working as a camera assistant on Fritz Lang’s M (1931), Hillier managed with the help of the film star Peter Lorre to get a job in the British film industry working on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934).
In 1942 the Archers hired Hillier to be lighting cameraman on their second production The Silver Fleet, directed by Vernon Sewell. He then went on to light A Canterbury Tale (1944).
Although the film was a box-office disappointment, it won widespread praise for Hillier’s photography, which employed the German style of lighting that he had learned at UFA. To quote only one of the many cuttings that Hillier photocopied for me, The Daily Sketch praised the film’s “sheer visual poetry”, writing that “the cameraman Erwin Hillier is the star of the picture”. Hillier went on, with similar acclaim, to light I Know Where I’m Going (1945). But then, very abruptly, he ceased to be an Archer after Powell asked that he work with Jack Cardiff as a joint director of photography on A Matter of Life and Death (1946). It was a slight to his status that a justifiably proud man was not prepared to accept.
Leaving the Archers, he worked instead as the lighting cameraman on a film that is forgotten today but was an even bigger production than A Matter of Life and Death: the first Technicolor musical to be made in Britain, London Town (1946). His long career as a cinematographer that followed was perhaps most notable for a regular partnership with the director Michael Anderson, which included Private Angelo (1949), The Dam Busters (1954), The Quiller Memorandum (1966) and The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968).
In spite of his hurt pride, Hillier was among the few people who reached out to Michael Powell in his “wilderness years”. In the 1970s he gave up lighting features to become a producer, with the ambition of making a biopic about the ballet dancer Anna Pavlova. He hired a young writer, Anthony Masters, to write a script, and set up a co-production deal between Mosfilm in the Soviet Union and Paramount. But before Paramount could commit to the project, they needed to approve a director. Given the subject matter, Hillier thought, who better to approach than the director of The Red Shoes?
Meanwhile the reputation of both men received a welcome fillip from the growing appreciation for the old Powell and Pressburger films. Among the letters that Hillier photocopied for me was one that Powell wrote to him in July 1977. It was scribbled in his distinctive handwriting on headed paper featuring the famous Archers target – although of course Pressburger’s name was no longer there:
Dear Erwin – On Friday the N.F.T. showed a good copy of A Canterbury Tale and I wish you had been there to hear the reactions. It was our first film together and it shows what a mistake it was to break up such a partnership as you, “Uncle Alfred”, Emeric and myself. Looking back, it seems incredible that the film failed to please – it certainly does now! – but I can see why. The mixture of detective story and lyric didn’t work: there are some didactic and moralising scenes, which are excellent now when the countryside and our ideals and our morals are in danger, but which were not welcome in 1944 at the height of the struggle towards victory. But in spite of script faults the technical geniuses (not too strong a word) who created the film succeeded in welding the elements into a masterpiece. When it is shown on T.V. (as it will be after this triumphant showing), it will be loved and admired, as it deserves to be, and your wonderful use of light will thrill millions of people. I particularly admired the handling of two- and three-shots, where each actor stood solid in his own identity and was still part of the whole control; and the more spectacular shots were flawless. The Cathedral…! All my boyhood at Canterbury was in my eyes! The audience were deeply moved and loudly appreciative. A young American (young America loves our films) was almost speechless from emotion after the first showing and was going to sit it round again. He did!
My love & admiration,
Micky
It was a warm, generous letter that captured the enthusiasm with which Powell had once inspired his fellow Archers. “Uncle Alfred” was Alfred Junge, the Archers’ great production designer, who had, like Hillier – and indeed Pressburger – worked at UFA studios. But there was a discordant note in the letter’s criticism of the film’s “script faults”. In spite of his comments about the mistake of breaking up the old team, Hillier found Powell resistant to the idea that Pressburger might work on the Pavlova film. “I wanted Emeric to be joined in,” he recalled in a long interview that he recorded for the film union the ACTT, “but Mick, he said no. He said ‘he’s too old now and he’s not feeling too good.’ All this business. I said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that because I thought after Red Shoes and all that he would be ideal to be your partner. And personally I think we can sell him to the Americans.’ Anyway, he refused that.”
When Hillier put forward Powell’s name to Paramount, the studio rejected him. Hillier later recognised with hindsight, that at this point – with the very valuable bird of Paramount almost in the hand – he should probably have looked for another director, but Powell was an old friend. So instead, he walked away from the Paramount deal and approached the other Hollywood studios only to find that “Michael’s name unfortunately was taboo as far as all the major companies were concerned”. They told Hillier that it had been too long since Powell had last directed a picture and that, in any case, they didn’t like the last few films he had made. The general feeling was that his best films had been the ones that he had made with Pressburger.
But Hillier still stuck by Powell. He managed to find some independent, US-based financiers who agreed to fund a research trip to Moscow so that Powell could write a new script. When he produced what Hillier described as an “absolutely unusable” draft that no one liked, Hillier persuaded the financiers to support a second trip to Moscow so that the script could be rewritten. Although the second draft was much better, the financiers now told Hillier that, having learned more about Powell, they would have to pull out of the project if he was still going to be Hillier’s choice for director.
When Hillier told Powell what had happened, Powell recommended that they approach a Greek Cypriot producer he had worked with called Frixos Constantine. On the understanding that Constantine’s company, Poseidon Films, would secure the financing, a deal was signed under which Constantine would be the executive producer, Hillier the producer, and Powell the director. Constantine then asked that Hillier set up a meeting with his Soviet partners. “I said no problem, so long as you have the money.”
A meeting took place in Moscow, but Hillier was furious on his return to London to discover that Poseidon had not secured any financing. “It was all lies. And I was very angry with Michael Powell too. I thought to let me down like this in view of the fact of what I’d been through, and [that I had] got him twice to Moscow… Now what I didn’t know was that behind my back they were in constant touch with Moscow.” The upshot was that Hillier was pushed out of a project that he had initiated and laboured over for many years.
The Soviets turned out to be no more happy to have Powell directing the film than the Hollywood studios had been. When the film was eventually shot in 1982, it was directed by the Moldovan film-maker Emil Loteaunu. Although Powell wrote in his memoirs that he was “to codirect it, and make sure the picture would go in the English market”, it is reasonable to speculate that he would have been as reluctant to codirect the picture as Hillier had been to work as a co-cameraman on A Matter of Life and Death. Instead, with his new-found status as the movie brats’ favourite old maestro, he took up an offer to become “senior director in residence” at Francis Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. But he continued to be involved in the film as the “Western Version Supervisor”: what this meant in practice was shortening a film that, uncut, was nearly three hours long.
When the Western version had its premiere in London at the Dominion Theatre in 1985, under the title Pavlova: A Woman for All Time, Loteaunu complained, in an interview with The Times, that Poseidon Films denied him his contractual right to be involved in its editing: It was, he commented, “bitter to see the ruins of one’s own creation”. But he could hardly have been more bitter than Hillier, who had seen a project he had set up snatched away from him by one of his oldest friends. It brings to mind that scene in The Red Shoes where the young Craster discovers that his own teacher, Professor Palmer, has stolen his music. Hillier could have taken little solace from Lermontov’s observation that “it is much more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from”.
No doubt Hillier’s anger coloured his dismissal of Pavlova: A Woman for All Time as a “disaster”: the film quickly disappeared after its opening at the Dominion. But far worse was his verdict on Powell himself. Of his behaviour, he commented, “It’s not only sad, it’s just sheer evil.” Powell had, he thought, “these moments of being quite like Jekyll and Hyde, nasty, unpleasant”. His view of Powell as a film-maker was little more flattering: “Without the help of other people, he is a shadow. He’s just a shadow floating around. He just lives off his reputation, built up I know at times through the work he did. But other people were there, don’t forget. Other people made him. Jack Cardiff helped him. Alfred Junge helped him. Hein Heckroth… Many other very clever people.”
Of all these clever people, it was, in Hillier’s view, Pressburger who most mattered. Hillier recorded the interview in which he made his comments about Powell in 1988, the same year that Pressburger died. It upset him to see “a man who was such a great genius completely ignored”. Describing his impressions of Powell and Pressburger together, he observed, “They were two great contrasts, they were like plus and minus electricity: when they were together, they were outstanding. When they separated eventually, they were not the same force.” Michael Powell was always taking the limelight as “the man in front with the sword going into battle”, but Hillier thought it was Emeric Pressburger who was “the heart, the creative mind” of the partnership.
The one great film that Powell made without Pressburger is Peeping Tom (1960). He had found a subject that was a perfect fit for him. So much of its brilliance lies in Powell’s identification with the title character’s determination “to photograph the impossible”. Going into battle – this time with a tripod that had a swordstick in one leg – he dared to confront his own sometimes monstrous ego, of which Hillier was one of the victims. But otherwise, I think Hillier was right: Powell was a much diminished force without Pressburger – as Pressburger was without Powell.
A challenge for those of us who love their films is to consider how they worked together in an equal light.
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