Michael Powell: an auteur who loved to work with others

Christopher Silvester

IN THE PANTHEON OF GREAT British film directors, Michael Powell is somewhere at the top, along with Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean. All three found different ways of escaping the straitjacket of parochialism and Britishness: Hitch by “becoming” American in the late 1930s, Lean by branding international historical epics in the 1960s, and Powell by embracing artifice to convey emotion, by exploring foreignness, and by actively seeking to make films that would appeal to international audiences. Powell’s films, while in so many ways having a quintessentially English flavour and containing so many English types, often give a sense of the world beyond Britain and are part of what film historian Charles Barr has called the “open” tradition in British cinema. At the end of the silent era, Powell worked as…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2023

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