Michael Powell: The Queen's Guards

It’s difficult to exaggerate quite how disappointing Michael Powell’s film The Queen’s Guards is. Made in 1961, it is an ode to the establishment and the class system, which were already crumbling when the 1960s began. It was contrary to the spirit of its time. The script, with its Boy’s Own dialogue, was plodding, banal and without irony.

It told an anachronistic story – reminiscent of The Four Feathers, but not nearly as good – about a young Guards officer determined to redeem the honour of his military family. It was a story that must have had near-zero appeal for a post-war generation that was under-going a cultural and social revolution. What they found exciting now were not the “stiff upper lip” war dramas of the 1950s (which had included Powell and Pressburger’s The Battle of the River Plate and Ill Met by Moonlight), but contemporary films that reflected back their lives: Room at the Top; Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; A Taste of Honey…

Beyond trying to understand a wrong turn in Powell’s career, I can think of few good reasons for watching The Queen’s Guards today. It offers a splendid display of military pageantry in its depiction of the 1960 Trooping the Colour, but there is little else to make it memorable. It was the first fictional film to feature the Queen Elizabeth II, who gave permission for the actual ceremony to be shown. And it is the Queen who is really the star of the picture, as she rides side-saddle in front of hundreds of Guards and an audience of 20,000 guests.

Powell recognized the film as a personal low point. In his memoirs, he wrote: “The Queen’s Guards is the most inept piece of filmmaking that I have ever produced or directed. I didn’t write the story (weak) nor the screenplay (abysmal), but I take all the flak.”

According to the fairytale way of looking at Powell, which continues to distort serious discussion of him, it was the hostile reception of Peeping Tom that destroyed his career, but The Queen’s Guards must have done far more damage. Costing £280,000 (more than twice the budget of Peeping Tom), it was an expensive film that had been financed by Twentieth-Century Fox. As an old-fashioned piece of insular Britishness that Fox could not sell to an international audience, it would have badly compromised Powell’s ability to secure the Hollywood financing that helped to sustain the careers of his contemporaries David Lean and Carol Reed. Both Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and Reed’s Oliver! may have been comparatively conventional in their story-telling, but they were about outsider figures who were in tune with the 1960s Zeitgeist.

The failure of The Queen’s Guards also suggests how reliant Powell was on a good script. He was a brilliant visual stylist who depended on a strong screenwriter for the intellectual backbone that had made his best films exceptional. It would have been impossible for Powell to make a film as good as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp or I Know Where I’m Going or The Red Shoes without Emeric Pressburger, just as Peeping Tom is inconceivable without Leo Marks.

To state this is not to diminish Powell but simply to acknowledge the complex nature of creation in a collaborative medium. Indeed, a key to Powell’s own talent as a film-maker was his readiness to extract the maximum from the collaborative process, seeking out and supporting other talents who could help him push to the limits.

Powell writes poignantly in his memoirs about why The Queen’s Guards had not worked in spite of his own love for British military tradition. In The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp he had “showed astonishing knowledge of the military animal, to match Emeric Pressburger’s intuition and invention. But alas, I had no longer my Pressburger.” He went on to recall how Pressburger had actually telephoned him before the The Queen’s Guards went into production. It was an oppportunity to seek his help, but Powell was just about to set off on a location trip and did not spare the time for more than a hurried conversation. “I regretted it at the time, and I regret it now.”

What if Powell had managed to bring Pressburger into the production as a writer? It’s difficult to feel that The Queen’s Guards would have been transformed into any more of a commercial prospect – Pressburger was no more attuned to the changing times than Powell – but it might at least have resulted in a better, more convincing film.

The lack of a solid partnership with a collaborator who was his equal was obviously hampering for Powell. The disastrous reception of Peeping Tom meant that he hesitated to build on what had been a creatively rewarding relationship with a new writer. Rather than draw confidence from his collaboration with Leo Marks, he now doubted it.

Powell remembered that after Peeping Tom Marks came up with several other ideas and was very keen to continue the partnership: “[H]e had enjoyed working with me very much. Might he suggest a film about the ‘White Rabbit’, otherwise known as Wing Commander Yeo-Thomas, the English superspy and underground agent? Leo had known him intimately, in fact he could almost claim to have been his boss. Then there was another very interesting character, whom he would call ‘Mr Sebastian’. He was a code breaker and was head of a department consisting of two hundred girls, tirelessly working to break the enemy codes. As an idea, it was fascinating, but it seemed to me to lack action. Or else, he suggested, there was an extraordinary creature who was a double agent and spied for both sides, and got away with it. Leo knew them all.”

The two did collaborate together on Mr Sebastian, but not with the unity of vision that they achieved on Peeping Tom. Eventually, Powell took the script away from Marks and gave it to another writer. An indifferent film was eventually made, but not one directed by Michael Powell.

The ideas that Marks was suggesting to Powell in the 1960s were so backward-looking that it’s doubtful that the pair could ever have matched what they had achieved with Peeping Tom, but a Powell–Marks follow-up would surely have been better than the lamentable mish-mash that resulted from Leo Marks’ 1968 collaboration with the Boulting Brothers.

The story of a disturbed young man who kills his stepfather and develops an obsession with a young woman, Twisted Nerve had obvious parallels with Peeping Tom, but it has the feel of a cynical Hitchcock rip-off in treating its principal character as an evil psycho à la Norman Bates. This was surely contrary to the creative instincts of Marks. After all, with Peeping Tom, he had dared to identify with the title character, Mark Lewis, even to the point of giving him a version of his own name.

One suspects that the director Roy Boulting, who shared the writing credit for the film, overrode Marks’ vision as much as Powell had once enabled it. An important reason for the success of Powell’s long partnership with Pressburger had been his understanding and respect for good writing. The creative triumph of Peeping Tom – regardless of its disastrous critical reception – resulted from a similar readiness to catch the essence of an unconventional, original script. Twisted Nerve, on the other hand, seems more a case of twisting whatever had been distinctive about Marks’ original idea to fit into a formula. “Enough to make even Hitchcock jump”, it jumped on to the bandwagon of Hitchcock imitations that was beginning to gather momentum in the 1960s.

Greatly to his credit, Powell never stooped to such crude commercialism, but nor did he find a way to make the most of a decade that did not really suit him. If he became an increasingly marginal figure in the 1960s, it simply reflected the fact that he had become old-fashioned, which was, after all, perhaps only to be expected for a director of his age. His comparative neglect then was no more of a surprise than that the “movie brat” generation – with its admiration for film style – should later rediscover him.