Powell and Pressburger were at their most unfashionable in the 1960s. They struggled to adapt to a time that had put youth on a pedestal. None the less, they shared the iconoclastic spirit that shaped the decade. Take the Beatles, for example. After early hits like “Love Me Do”, “She Loves You” or “Can’t Buy Me Love”, most rock bands would have continued the proven formula of catchy sub-three-minute love songs, but the Beatles used their commercial success to be ever more daring in their artistic experimentation, vastly expanding the range and sophistication of mainstream taste. As soon as they could, they took off their boy band suits and began to make music for grown-ups.
The creative journey of Powell and Pressburger was similar. They started out working within clearly defined rules: The Spy in Black (1939), Contraband (1940, US title: Blackout) and The 49th Parallel (1941) were, albeit with a wartime propaganda twist, all variations of the thriller genre. But they used the box-office success of these films to challenge the boundaries of the conventional cinema.
Movies in the 1940s saw the world in black and white, just as they were mostly made in black and white. It was a cinema that, in the words of a hugely popular song of the time, sought to “ac-cent-chu-ate the positive”. Powell and Pressburger’s films, by contrast, were remarkable for their readiness – defying accepted wisdom – to “mess with Mister In-Between”.
One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942) was the first film that they made for their own production company, the Archers, an important landmark in their career that can be thought of as a little bit like the Beatles moving from Parlophone to Apple. When the bomber B for Bertie sets out on its mission to bomb a factory in Germany, it is Michael Powell himself, in the role of “Chief of Operations”, who sends the aircraft on its way. With hindsight it seems like an early statement of intent that the Archers were now going to make films that went their own way.
About two minutes later, B for Bertie crosses the English channel. In a film that does not have an original score, the documentary realism of the sequence is striking. The only music is the sound of the bomber’s engines. The newly formed Archers are leaving the conventional cinema behind. The brief interlude between the two coasts – of a free Britain and a Nazi-occupied Europe – provides an occasion for a conversation between the aircrew that, were Powell and Pressburger not now their own producers, could easily have been cut out for making no obvious contribution to the story.
This is how Pressburger describes the sequence in his treatment for the film: “The six men talked about the town they had set out to raid: Stuttgart … Three of the six knew something about Stuttgart. They knew of it from three entirely different angles.”
John, the pilot, “knew it from his father’s stories – he had started his diplomatic career there. That was before the 1914 war at a time when Stuttgart was the capital of the Kingdom of Wurttemberg.”
Bob, the wireless operator, had been a professional footballer in peacetime, and had been there once to play a match. “He couldn’t remember much about it as he rather mixed up these continental places. One place was just like another if you saw it from the soccer point of view. You arrived usually on Saturday, you played on Sunday, and Monday you were sitting in the train again.”
And Geoff, the front gunner, once had a girlfriend who was from Stuttgart. “She was a German maid at a doctor’s house near Geoff’s home town. She was quite a nice girl and Geoff went out with her every Saturday in 1939 till Hitler ordered her back to the Fatherland with hundreds of other German maids. She used to sing funny German songs and she told Geoff of the mountains around Stuttgart and of the townsfolk going out with their sledges in winter after nightfall.”
In the subsequent screenplay Pressburger turns the maid into a nurse, and he imagines her singing the title tune of a 1929 German film starring Marlene Dietrich, which had been an international hit before the Nazis had come to power: “I Kiss Your Little Hand, Madame”.
“Of course,” says Geoff in the film, “she used to sing it in German, you know. ‘Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame...’ She was always singing ‘Ich küsse…’ because she wasn’t allowed to sing it in Germany. The composer was a Jew, I believe.” (It’s a song that perhaps Pressburger himself was always singing in German – he would mention it again when he wrote the script for A Canterbury Tale.)
The crew’s conversation suggests the alternative ways that they might have got to know better a town that now they are about to bomb. Rather than demonise Germany, Pressburger’s script has the humanity to be curious about its people – a people that has fallen victim to the cancer of ultranationalism, but is a mix, like people anywhere, of the good, the decent and, just occasionally, the awful. In place of heroes and villains, Powell and Pressburger made films about the complexity of human beings.
This sequence between two coasts is a breakthrough in philosophical approach rather than film technique, which I think owes more to Pressburger than Powell. But none the less the film technique was considerable. In the screenplay the crew don’t talk about Stuttgart until B for Bertie reaches Germany. It is John the pilot, seeing a railway line that before the war he had once travelled on, who occasions the conversation. And very soon afterwards, the aircraft reaches the target.
In the finished film the conversation has been shifted back earlier to the no man’s land of the Channel crossing. The effect is to take the sequence out of normal narrative time. As the crew reflects on their past relationships with a city they’re about to encounter in a brutally destructive new way, their strange, over-the-sea contemplation recalls the famous Great War poem, “Strange Meeting” by Wilfred Owen, in which the poet escapes “out of battle … down some profound dull tunnel”, where he meets the enemy he killed the day before.
Whether it was due to Michael Powell or the editor of the film, David Lean, it is an inspired transposition that creates a mind-space of the kind that the Archers would construct several times again in their films to come – Clive Wynne-Candy’s reminiscences of the past in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943); the otherworld of A Matter of Life and Death (1946), “which exists only in the mind of a young airman whose life & imagination have been violently shaped by war”; the India of the mind in Black Narcissus (1947) … And so on.
Why Powell and Pressburger flourished in the 1940s, but struggled twenty years later, is because that conflict-ridden decade was a unique time in the history of the cinema when a large, mainstream audience was responsive to serious films that dealt with matters of life and death. For a few years it was no longer enough just to fill the world with silly love songs.
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