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Posted on 06/21/2025 3:11:26 PM PDT by Twotone
The career of director Michael Powell was a discovery I made later in life, when I was around thirty and decided to check out a retrospective of his films at the local cinematheque. I became an instant convert and agree with Powell acolytes like Martin Scorsese that he's one of the greats, to be spoken of in the same sentence as Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, Wilder, Welles and Kurosawa.
For his part Powell was in love with the movies and regarded working as a director as something like a spiritual calling. "The craft is a mystery," he wrote in Million Dollar Movie, his second autobiography. "Nobody can explain it. Writers on film can list the qualities – supreme confidence, endless patience, excessive energy – but they can't explain how those moving, talking images got onto the screen and excited the audience so. Impressionist painting could not have existed before the nineteenth century. There was no need for it, no demand for it. But when it was recognized, it took over. The twentieth century belongs to film."
Writing about the long, slow fade to Powell's career in his introduction to Million Dollar Movie, Scorsese says that Powell was ill-suited to "the cynical of postwar film production, where the pressure to succeed commercially became almost unbearable. Michael lived film as art, and art as his religion. To abandon his cherished creative freedom was impossible; it was like losing sight of the Grail."
It would be easy to celebrate Powell by talking about his most critically lauded, consistently successful, iconic pictures – like The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. All these films contain the hallmarks of a classic collaboration between Powell and his longtime writing and producing partner, Emeric Pressburger.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
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Steyn is a treasure. That he got kicked off National Review is a travesty.
Last I heard he was ill and had to quit his podcast. He also lost a lawsuit. He ran off to England for a bit before coming back. He was on GBN. But moved the show back to his podcast.
His podcast returned and his site is being updated as I checked it out.
[His podcast returned and his site is being updated as I checked it out.]
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