firebombed German city as well as the potential of “the uranium atom,” and Massey castigates England for its empirical war- mongering past and present. “Think of India!” he intones. Powell and Pressburger even en- dorse his vision of America as a multi-cultural beacon of freedom and the world’s hope. And, if you really take the film seriously, it’s about how the stiff-upper-lip au- thorities make mistakes and why justice shouldn’t be confused with law. No wonder Churchill was annoyed by these guys; their wartime propaganda had been too intelligent for the term, and they didn’t let up even during escapist fantasy. Still, this film matched the tenor of its times, enjoyed great success, and re- mains beautiful and thoughtful today.
Are the fantasy parts “true”? The film opens with this notice, to which I’ve added punctuation: “This is a story of two Worlds, the one we know and another which exists only in the mind of a young airman whose life & imagination have been violently shaped by war. Any resemblance to any other world known or unknown is purely coincidental.”
This declares authoritatively that we should accept Reeves’ medical rationalizations. Se- quences are carefully planned to support the notion that a cre- ative and well-read Carter is hal- lucinating from what he knows, including his knowledge of Reeves’ death. Heaven’s mono- chrome may be the convention, sometimes used in later films, that people dream in black-and- white—although this reverses the convention of Technicolor dream-fantasies such as THE WIZARD OF OZ, and when Carter dreams of angelic encounters on Earth, these are still in color. When he rings the bell after his second encounter with 71, he’s
54
still sitting down instead of stand- ing, as though just awakened. June’s ambiguous remarks in the final scene don’t indicate any knowledge of her part in the trial. A book borrowed by 71 could have been in Carter’s jacket all along. Indeed, there’s at least one detail—the identity of the chief surgeon—that supports the “realism” theory.
How then did Carter survive his fall? Reeves says even that may be explained, although it never quite is. However, accord- ing to Christie, the film was partly inspired by a real-life case of just such a survival. More signifi- cantly, given the fantastic ele- ments of the film’s “reality” (miracle survival, shepherd faun, camera obscura), it’s possible that the entire narrative before the closing scene with June has been one long hallucination of the comatose or medicated pilot and that we’ve never known the actual situation.
Ironically, a mark of the film’s sophistication and subtlety is how easy it is to ignore all that and take its fantasy at face value, which surely many viewers have done and will do. Despite its opening statement, and unlike THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI or THE WIZARD OF OZ, which firmly commit themselves to be- ing All A Dream, this is an early example of a cinematic fantasy that keeps its ambiguities se- renely balanced. That’s partly because they happen concur- rently and support each other instead of one interrupting the other.
Meanwhile, as with many Powell and Pressburgers, we wit- ness an exuberant, almost Wellesian delight in cinema, in its plastic possibilities of vision, and in color and effects which may serve a narrative purpose or which may intend merely to give us pleasure as they revel in their
own joy. A making-of would have been a welcome supplement to cover all this. Christie points out some things, such as cinematog- rapher Jack Cardiff’s unusually graceful camera movements for a Technicolor film of this era, and which surely got Cardiff the job on Alfred Hitchcock’s amazing and underrated UNDER CAP- RICORN. Geoffrey Unsworth (2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY) was Cardiff’s camera operator, and Michael Chorlton provided the thrilling motorbike photogra- phy, a technique we take for granted today but which remains beautiful here. Douglas Woolsey and Henry Harris are credited with special effects, with unspeci- fied additional effects by Percy Day. There’s a remarkably good walking-through-the-window mo- ment, and a startling freeze-frame which might make the modern DVD viewer think a layer-change is occurring. I would like to know if the camera obscura sequence uses the genuine device, and if not, how that footage was taken; apparently it’s matted in. (Some facts and speculation on this topic appear on the website
Powell-Pressburger.org.) Production designer Alfred Junge, costume designer Hein Heckroth and editor Reginald Rose also contribute incalculably to the visual beauties, underlined by Allan Gray’s score. Amid this technical feast is the intellectual appeal of the film’s literary and cultural references, such as po- etry quotations, rehearsals of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (with Mendelssohn’s music thereto), and a cameo by John Bunyan, whose PILGRIM’S PROGRESS is one of the film’s inspirations. This is all part of the movie’s abun- dant wit, which includes such self-conscious deflations as the “starved for Technicolor” quote and the opening portentous nar- ration about the universe (“Big,
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84
