his life. Jones says Mason wanted the romantic ending and that Powell might have done it differ- ently on his own.
Australia is supposedly looser than the US, or so we’ve some- times heard, but on this side of the Pacific almost 40 years later, even the non-sexual relationship in the film would be problematic in our cinema and under our mores of the appropriate. (This is mitigated by the fact that we never learn what the age of con- sent is in that time or place, or how old is Cora, and that Mirren is in her 20s.) This may mean that the film’s liberated vision is either out of date or still ahead of its time.
That vision, though translated by Powell and writer Peter Yeld- ham, originated with Australian artist Norman Lindsay, upon whose popular novel this was based and whose authorial credit is trumpeted above the title. Jones describes Lindsay’s cul- tural-artistic position in Australia
as a combination of Norman Rockwell, Alberto Vargas and Maxfield Parrish, which isn’t al- together impossible to imagine after seeing the film.
Cinematographer Hannes Staudinger provides the strong color-sense we associate with Powell’s color cinema, with a natural emphasis here on blues and yellows. Although this color is necessarily of a different qual- ity from the previous film’s Technicolor, the outdoor scenes shimmer and Bradley’s painted objects stand out vividly in this wonderfully sharp restoration. There’s also beautiful underwa- ter photography by Ron & Valerie Taylor.
Co-produced by Columbia, this was a big success Down Under but not in the US, where it was notably altered. At least some nudity was removed, in- cluding the opening credits with their artistic gag on the Columbia logo, and Peter Sculthorpe’s pretty gamelan
music was replaced by a Stanley Myers score. (That alternate ver- sion might have made an instruc- tive extra, but it would have meant another music clearance.) The pairing of these two films is revealing; although superficially unalike, they have similar cur- rents. The heroes of both films are creators at the high-culture end of art (poetry, painting). Both men are drawn to younger women who embody purity and the hopeful future, and both films argue that love takes priority above law. Just as the beached Carter’s first encounter with an- other soul was the mythically naked shepherd-boy, so Morahan encounters a mermaidish girl on a beach, where she will spend much time nude.
Christie points out the link be- tween Dr. Reeves, with his camera obscura, and Prospero with his “mirrors and devices” in THE TEM- PEST, an unmade dream-project of Powell’s that recurs subliminally in his films much as the ghost of
While on Australian holiday, artist James Mason discovers a new Muse in the form of Helen Mirren in Michael Powell’s final feature, AGE OF CONSENT.
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