Rent Michael Powell: Early Works (1936)

More than a Quickie - Michael Powell: Early Works review by CH

Before and after the twenty-three years of films between Edge of the World and Peeping Tom, Michael Powell made a fair number which are undoubtedly lesser ranking - but full of interest. These discs find him at work on films of about an hour apiece (many extras about him include some silent films in which he appeared). These include some comedy, a hint of thriller and mystery. If not all of these cohere, if none of them make the best of some ingenious plotting which invariably hurtles to a conclusion, they do point the way to The Spy in Black and Contraband where he was in a more realistic mode than, say, A Canterbury Tale. He has sport with a decaying inherited hotel, a company atop a tower, a Surrey inn - and, in all of them, an array of players, as they were known at the time, who were very much of their time with evident experience in repertory theatre.

Perhaps the best of these films is Her Last Affaire (1935). This has the unusual, somewhat French plot of a young man (Hugh Williams) who works for a pompous politician (Francis Sullivan) and has fallen for his daughter (Sophie Stewart) but marriage is forbidden as Williams is the son of a traitor, something which Sullivan’s delicate but lascivious wife (Viola Keats) is in a strong position to refute. To this end, Williams accompanies her on a jaunt to a Surrey inn (proprietor, a particularly censorious, Bible-reading John Laurie). The mutual implication is that Williams will satisfy her desires (there is a charged bed-making scene). All of which - a situation redolent of Mrs. Robinson's - brings a smirk to chambermaid Googie Withers who, in a continually entertaining performance, suggests, while turning on the wireless, that she too would not be averse to his favours.

There is adroit cinematography in the contrasting Westminster home (a footman in attendance) and the inn, along with fine footage of an aeroplane landing at Croydon. All of this ranks it higher than many of the stagebound films which went by the title of quota quickies (it began as a play SOS by Walter Ellis, and it would be curious to see the 1928 film version of that).

The title suggests something of this turn to Viola Keats’s amatory endeavours. As for her daughter and Williams, there is perhaps a happier ending than the last minute or so make plain.

Here is something which comes closest to Powell’s later work - and one hopes that more of the quickies will emerge. All of these he chronicles, not at all favourably, in two huge volumes of memoirs which are well worth browsing.