stevie boy

The thing that I love about the Powell & pressburger films is the locations and the feeling of being English. What is the nearest film of P&P to say a Cantebury Tale in terms of scenery and story or is that an imposibility??. Any thoughts please share, many many thanks in advance

ChristineCB

For the past few months, I've tried to divorce myself from their scenery because of COL BLIMP.

It's credits roll across a tapestry and I've applied that allusion to all of their films - I think they're presenting tapestries to me, and sets and scenery become one more weave. The constance of stormy weather or isolated mountain vistas fuel all of my "focus on scenery" thoughts, but the stories and characters keep weaving my attention to all the other film elements.

CANTERBURY is like a love-letter to scenery, but I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING has the outside weather an even stronger 'character', in its way.

Great topic...thanks.

stevie boy

NO THANK YOU

Steve Crook

As the Lady Christine says, IKWIG has scenery in spades, and it has plenty of weather as well.

The other P&P film that's big on scenery, and is very English, is Gone to Earth (1950) with Jennifer Jones, David Farrar, Cyril Cusack & Esmond Knight getting over-wrought up and down the Shropshire hills.

It is based on a Mary Webb romance, it's not an original Pressburger story like their best films were. The landscape plays a big part in this one and is very well used.

For other films that make the best use of locations and scenery we have to look to Powell working apart from Pressburger and we have to look abroad at things like Age of Consent (1969) where Helen Mirren first got naked on film. That has Dame Helen and James Mason in Australia.

Or at Luna de miel (1959) which follows Ludmilla Tcherina & some (very good) Spanish dancers around Spain before the tourist resorts covered it all in concrete. The most commonly available version was cut for TV and they cut a lot of the linking story and the dances, leaving it as little more than a travelogue. The restored (but not commercially available) version restores all the back story and the dances and is much better balanced. It's not a hidden masterpiece though. It fits in a set with The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffmann and Oh... Rosalinda!! as they are all dance & music films - but it comes 3rd or 4th in that list

There's also one of Powell's very early films, The Phantom Light (1935) which makes good use of its North Wales locations.

And of course there's also The Edge of the World (1937), made on a small Hebridean island. That's a major landscape and scenery film

A lot of the others got out of the studio briefly to good effect. Like the beach scenes in A Matter of Life and Death and The Thief of Bagdad or the drive along the Corniche in The Red Shoes.

Steve

stevie boy

cheers Steve, much appreciated

stevie boy

A Matter of Life & Death

Got this off IMDB, Steve you were probably aware, but it is new to me


Here's a weird little bit of trivia about this movie. Raymond Massey plays
Abraham Farlan, the "prosecutor" who argues against David Niven's character
staying on Earth, wanting to bring him instead to the "other" world, the world
of the dead. In real life, Massey and Niven died on the very same day. I guess
the case went to retrial?

Steve Crook

Who do you think put it on the IMDb?
Ray & David also both appeared in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

Luis Buñuel, another film-maker that powell admired, died on the same day (July 29, 1983).

Steve

stevie boy

I should have known, you cheeky chappie, thanks

stevie boy

the Edge of the World sounds interesting apart from the scenery is it any good???

Steve Crook

Very, especially given that it was made in 1936/37 when there weren't many films that went on location. It's a good drama well written and well performed.

The DVDs (both of them) have a good commentary track by Thelma Schoonmaker & Prof Ian Christie. They both have Daniel Day-Lewis reading extracts from 200,000 Feet on Foula (see below) and the "bookends" documentary Return to the Edge of the World when Powell and some surviving cast & crew went back to Foula in 1978.

The American DVD includes Powell's propaganda film An Airman's Letter to his Mother (1941) and the BFI DVD includes the travelogue St. Kilda - Britain's Loneliest Isle (1928).
You pays your money and takes your choice. I of course had to get both of them

Powell wrote a book (which I'm just re-reading) all about their adventure. How the film came to be made and the struggles they had getting to and living on Foula. Bear in mind this was before the air service which is available today. When the weather blew up a storm they were stuck on the island until the weather subsided.

200,000 Feet on Foula
By: Michael Powell
London: Faber & Faber, 1938
US Title "200,000 Feet - The Edge of the World"
New York: E.P. Dutton & co., 1938
London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1990. (Paperback)
The story of the cast & crew's stay on the island while they made The Edge of the World (1937).
The title is a reference to the amount of film used, not the height of the cliffs

Steve

stevie boy

Thanks so much, Steve

burnttoast

Does anyone know what where the locations for Canterbury Tale?

IIRC St Albans Abbey doubled for interiors to the Cathedral.

Having spent most of the 90s in Canterbury it was strange to come back to that film again recently and see chunks of the town levelled by bombing and also to see so much of it still there relatively unchanged. Even if the shop beside the Cathedral gate is now a Starbucks!

I often hoped during my student days there to find the field on the approach to Canterbury that the 'pilgrims' first see the Cathedral.

Nick Dando

Cue, Steve Crook.

Nick

Steve Crook

They used the organ from St. Alban's because the one at Canterbury had been dismantled due to the bombing. But no scenes were filmed in St. Alban's (as far as we know)

They were denied permission to film inside Canterbury Cathedral and in any case all the stained glass windows had been taken out and the aisles were filled with earth & sand. Partly for fire-fighting and partly to act as a soft landing for any masonry that fell from on high.

There is one piece in the film that was a shot of the vaulted ceiling of the cathedral. That was sneakily taken with a hand held camera when the Dean wasn't looking

But all the other interiors of the Cathedral are what they re-created at Denham studio. That's typical of Powell & Pressburger and The Archers. "We can't film in the cathedral? No problem, we'll build one of our own". The interiors are so good that they have fooled quite a few cathedral guides who have been most insistent that they were filmed in the cathedral - until we point out the very small differences that give it away.

The top end of the town has been redeveloped quite a few times but if you look hard there are still a few things that are recognisable. Marlowe's clock tower (St. George's clock tower) being the most obvious. The church itself was bombed but the tower and the clock still survive.



If you want to explore any or all of the locations further then I can highly recommend Paul Tritton's book on the subject. It is full of "then and now" photos and has the exact location (including grid reference) identified for just about every shot in the film.

The field where Alison says the pilgrims got their first view of the cathedral as they rounded the bend is identified in the book. But it's just a field, and you can't see the cathedral from there (that's the magic of film-making) - although Paul does identify various other places like where they had their "roll in the grass" and where it is most likely that the pilgrims' would have first seen Canterbury.

And don't forget, we do an annual location walk every August bank holiday Sunday. All are welcome.

We're not quite sure where we'll be for this year's walk, but Fordwich is looking most likely. That will let you see:
* Fordwich Town Hall - a rare opportunity to compare reality with Powell's replica! (another thing they re-created in the studio)
* St Mary's parish church, where Chillingbourne's parishioners were filmed arriving for matins
* The entrance to the Colpeper Institute, and nearby streets and cottages that represented Chillingbourne village
* The George and Dragon - where Michael Powell stayed while making the film, and whose exterior was, momentarily, The Hand of Glory
* Hollywood in Kent, where many of the boys from the river battle lived
and much more

Steve

Steve Crook

PaPAS

burnttoast

Thank you for an informative post! I might try and come along to that in August! I remember being really annoyed to find out that my College had Jack Cardiff in to do a talk a year after I left! I know Canterbury well and must have passed through Fordwich dozens of times, but never put it together as being the site of Chillingbourne! I'd made the connection in my mind that they'd merged Sittingbourne and Chilham to create the name and sort of assumed it was somewhere out that way. About 10 years ago, IIRC it was in Chilham I found a pub that didn't have glass in its windows just wooden covers - so some of that old world survives..