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Michael Powell: Before the Archers

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square

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MICHAEL POWELL: BEFORE THE ARCHERS

RYNOX and HOTEL SPLENDIDE

15 November, 2024 18:00 to 20:00

Programme:

RYNOX (1931, 48 min)

HOTEL SPLENDIDE (1932, 53 min)

Michael Powell used to say wryly that his reputation couldn’t survive the discovery of any more of the twenty-three films he made between 1931-36, before Edge of the World and the start of his partnership with Emeric Pressburger. Only a handful were available to show in the British Film Institute’s major 1978 retrospective that started his rediscovery. Today, it’s clear that he needn’t have worried, for as more films have been found, they shed valuable light, not only on an ambitious young director’s rapid progress, but also on the decade when British cinema was being reconstructed. With six newly released on blu-ray as a BFI box-set, here’s a chance to see two of the very first on the cinema screen.

Rynox, Powell’s third directorial effort and now the earliest extant, shows that he was well aware of contemporary thriller style elsewhere, and determined to make a splash even on a limited budget. The story came from an early detective novel by Philip MacDonald, about to move to Hollywood, and concerns a wealthy businessman (Stewart Rome), who has been receiving threats from a mysterious stranger. When he’s finally murdered, the hunt to find his killer takes some surprising twists.

Hotel Splendide, Powell's second earliest surviving feature, was only discovered in 2000, and revealed a gift for off-beat comedy. When Jerry Verno’s clerk inherits a seaside hotel, he finds it far from palatial and containing some decidedly rum characters, all with something to hide, or seek. Already a seasoned music-hall performer, Verno would appear in five more Powell films, including a vivid cameo in The Red Shoes, and he helps ground the film’s everyman appeal. This is another genuine ‘quota quickie’, shot on a shoestring in just two weeks at Cecil Hepworth’s old Walton studio, now renamed Nettlefold. But it encouraged Powell to find ingenious ways of breathing life into otherwise routine material – like using the Gounod ‘March of a Marionette’ that later became the theme music for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, for which Philip MacDonald would also write.

 

 

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