Volume 34, Number 13 · August 13, 1987
Grand Illusions
By Geoffrey O'Brien
A Life in Movies: An Autobiography
by Michael Powell
Knopf, 705 pp., $24.95
The reassessment of Michael Powell's film career has been one of the archival triumphs of the last decade, revealing Powell not just as the director of a few old favorites (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes) but as a philosopher of the camera whose distinct point of view infuses all his work. Initiated by a British Film Institute retrospective in 1978 and bolstered by the enthusiasm of such admirers as Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese, the Powell revival has done belated justice to a director who even at the height of his career (in the 1940s) experienced more than his share of critical attack, and whose films have been to an unusual degree mangled, abridged, or hidden from sight. Today he looks very much like the visionary filmmaker that England never thought it had, a formalist poet whose gaudy inventiveness was entirely at odds with the cautious traditions of the British film industry.
Review, 3314 words
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