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Gor blimey, King Kong
I mean it more in interest than in condemnation when I say that of the quota quickies directed by Michael Powell which have so far come my haphazard way, The Phantom Light (1935) is the first to feel like journeyman work. For coastwise thrills and chills, it gets a ten out of fog-blind ten. For everything else, I wish Emeric Pressburger could have been in on the script.
By his own admission in A Life In Movies: An Autobiography (1986), Powell did not fret unduly over the plot of his last assignment for Gaumont-British and if so, it shows. The set-up is sterling: called out on short notice from his native London to the remote coast of north Wales, veteran lightkeeper Sam Higgins (Gordon Harker) slings his kit bag off the train to discover his new post awash in rumors of suicides and false lights, wrecks led spectrally astray like the all-hands disaster that claimed the sister to the locally crewed Mary Fern. "It was the North Stack Light that drowned them all." Everyone from the chatty porter to the crabbed harbormaster has an ominous word to impart to him, replacing as he is the principal keeper vanished with one of his assistants à la Flannan Isles. Of the two locals tapped as relief, the craggy Claff Owen (Herbert Lomas) seems more superstitiously rattled with his somber brooding on the drowned, but even fresh-faced Bob Peters (Mickey Brantford) witnessed the wet marks of bare feet all through the lighthouse as if visited by a damp but duty-minded revenant. Just to ease the tension, all three men are sharing the close quarters of the rock station with Tom Evans (Reginald Tate), the stark-eyed survivor of the disappearance medically decreed unfit to be moved in his semi-sane state. The beyond last thing Sam needs as he settles in for a masterfully jittery night is the arrival of further complications from the mainland in the castaway persons of Alice Bright (Binnie Hale) who tried to wangle herself a berth in the lighthouse for purposes of psychical research and Jim Pearce (Ian Hunter) whom Sam clocked as a reporter the second the younger man flashed a wad of notes for more material reasons, but their slap-kiss bickering completes the full spook house of mysterious mischiefs, ulterior motives, and uncertain loyalties. Ashore, Sam fatefully waved off all warnings with the belligerent assurance of a man carefully not sounding the depth he may be out of: "It ain't going to spoil my sheet. I've been in the service now for twenty-five year come Michaelmas and I've never had me light go out yet." As the dirty weather thickens around the Mary Fern and the dirty tricks inside the North Stack Light, whether through the interference of wreckers, ghosts, or Bolsheviks, even the staunchest defender of Trinity House may have to admit that the odds of that record standing are off.
Unless you hate lighthouses, this picture should be foolproof. Especially since its treatment is more spookily adventurous light thriller than serious supernatural suspense, it should clip along with as much twinkle as shiver as the absurdity of its haul of red herrings ironizes the danger of a real conspiracy afoot at the light and after about half an hour it does, which would be less of an issue if the film ran more than 76 minutes tops. I like a slow burn as much as the next viewer and the dilatory opening almost sinks the story before it even gets to the harbor. The location shooting of the Ffestiniog Railway is fun as far as heritage trainspotting goes—especially if you don't mind that Tan-y-Bwlch is not a seaside stop—but the humor of the culture clash between Cockney cynicism and Welsh clannishness wears off faster than a Celtic twilight and while it may be fair to point to the preoccupation with outsiders and communities as a future Archers trademark, I feel I can guarantee that emigré Imre would have written a more nuanced take than jokes about everybody within earshot being named Owen. Sam does need to encounter enough local foreboding to justify the sympathetic greeting from Dr. Carey (Milton Rosmer), "I suppose they've been chilling your blood to begin with, eh?" along with the well-attested snafu of the phantom light, but the lighthouse itself is so atmospherically as well as structurally central to the film that until the cast is fully assembled inside its vertiginously stacked shadows and blaze, even the most charming visual anecdotes of witchy stationmistresses and musical fishermen can't help but feel like marking time. It feels a little, perhaps unfairly, as though the director got distracted by the documentary pleasure of hanging out in his own setting. Save it for Hirta or Chillingbourne, Micky. Fortunately, once the action stabilizes offshore, so does the tone of the film: its characters may crack wise about their scares, but they still jump. "Don't be silly. How could you vanish if you're invisible? If you're invisible, you vanish before you've started. Ridiculous." Or they don't seem fazed at all by the uncanny goings-on at the North Stack Light, which is part of what troubles Sam about Alice and Jim. She rattles off two or three explanations for her interest in the light, the rising melodrama levels finally prompting him to ask meaningfully if she last acted in East Lynne. It improves nothing when she turns a gam-flashing pair of short-shorts out of his Sunday trousers. "A ruddy girl in a respectable lighthouse!" For his part, the assumed reporter offers no explanations, only a coolly amused sense of biding his time that doesn't square with his unsettled situation or the nautical clumsiness that fetched him up to the stack, apologetically out of petrol, a straight man with a joke up his sleeve. "I'm going down to the storeroom to fetch my box of tricks." Stumbled on behind the curtain of his bunk, Tom Evans begs in apparent sound mind to be untied. Claff Owen, normally confined to the kind of poetic doomsaying on which folk horror thrives, serves an unexpected reality check with his quiet rebuke to his nervily bumptious superior: "You are always saying you are chief here, Sam Higgins. No one is disputing it." All throughout, a tetchy, sarky, worried little man with the tenaciously creased face of many a comic hero, Sam hangs on to his skepticism for his sanity and gradually edges out of archetype, ruefully shaking off a well-meant attempt at consolation with none of his usual bluster. "If a man's worth his salt, he ought to help it. And here's me with twenty-five years' service come Michaelmas, sitting here while a gang of wreckers plays tig in me own lamp room!"
Where the film shines, appropriately, is the lighthouse itself. Practically it may have been a composite of the Hartland Point Lighthouse, the Eddystone Light, and Islington Studios, but the salt-soaked art direction of Alex Vetchinsky, the dark lantern photography of Roy Kellino, and the dreamily logical editing of Derek Twist work it up into a world of its own, at once a kaleidoscopic maze of discontinuous stages as fragmented as the flash through a third-order Fresnel lens and a normally inhabited environment where oil lamps are still used to read by and sausages can be fried to a perfect split. We get our first sight of it not in establishing long shot, but from within the luminous glass hive of the lantern room, the camera revolving like an orrery within the tick of the mechanism that rotates its own brass-banded shadow across the words etched around the stone ring of the wall, Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. Only after we have seen Claff and Bob about their duties, Tom restlessly tossing in his bunk, the human and optic workings of the light, do we refer back to the lighthouse as it appears to the approaching boats, a stark tunnel of stone self-illuminated against the night sky and sea in their webs of cloud and foam. Once inside, the camera will maintain a depth of field realistically commensurate with the tight curved fit of the tower—it does not affect the elegantly low-key set-ups—as its characters move, some easily, some gingerly, through its partitioned spiral of spaces, but it will return time and again to these icons of the light, the slow morse of its flare at a distance, the gear-train heartbeat of the lantern, the white strings of waves pouring over the ship-tearing rocks. When the light is put out, it's as sudden as a murder, the phantom light springing up on the cliffs like fool's fire while the faceted eye of the lighthouse remains hollowly dark. "God! It's out! My light's out!" Restoring it really feels like an elemental act, not only because of the ship in shattering danger out in the coal-thick fog. It's the steady sum of all its flickering, stubborn, foolish inhabitants, whose overlapping efforts are in defiance not just of the wreckers, quite modern ones, by the way, in it for the insurance fraud rather than the salvage, but of their own misgivings and mistakes. "Here, don't worry about him, miss. He won't be found drowned." No wonder the stops-out pyrotechnics are kept in reserve for the breath-catching wresting of the Mary Fern from the North Stack Rocks, an adrenaline shock of a montage cut as fast as pistons and timed to the blaze of the light, the churn of the screw, the desperate ringing of the telegraph full astern. Claff Owen put it most vividly, back when the film was just starting to get under way:
"Sometimes I think of the ships passing to and fro in the storm, and I listen to the gulls beating against the glass and breaking their little wings. It's then I realize the lives that are in my hands. Suppose I let that light go out? I'd have all those drowned souls on my conscience, beating their wings against my window like the birds."
And we're off to Mother Carey! It promises a ghostlier narrative than the one which actually unfolds, but underneath the credits a ragged figure, storm-lit, blank-eyed, dripping, emerges into the doorway of the lighthouse and with a strange fixed unstoppability begins to climb the stairs, exactly like the supposed return of the last chief keeper from the sea that drowned him. "Poor Jack Davies, back from the dead with the water streaming from his hair!" If the film had only been set rather than partly shot in Cornwall, I'd blame the Wild Magic.
Since Pressburger wouldn't leave Paris for London until the fall of 1935 and even then wouldn't be introduced to Powell until a fateful story conference in 1938, The Phantom Light was adapted by Ralph Smart, Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, and Austin Melford from Evadne Price and Joan Roy Byford's 1928 stage play The Haunted Light and while it winds up to a gripping and humane finale, it does kind of faff around getting there. Its quirkiness comes out in welcome details like a handshake instead of a kiss underneath the lighthouse's beam, but its assemblage from stock components sets a limit on its overall peculiarity. Its most consistently three-dimensional character is the North Stack Light. Powell himself had a disappointment in the picture: he had wanted Roger Livesey for the part of Jim. On the one hand, knowing the actor's magnetism and the tidal quality of his voice as showcased in I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), I can agree that Michael Balcon missed the boat. On the other, since I have liked—and associated with the sea—Ian Hunter ever since The Long Voyage Home (1940), I wouldn't swap him even without the equal-opportunity scenes of him stripping to the waist to swim for shore. I can rent the Livesey version from the hell of a good video store next door and imagine for good measure that Pressburger did work on it, in which case it would have been as thoroughly turned inside out and reinvented as their first collaboration. Over in this universe, it's a curate's egg of a quota quickie with a visible descendant in Robert Eggers; I got it with a slight crunch in the runtime from the Internet Archive, but it might look better on BFI Player if your location permits. "They think there's something romantic about lighthouses. Romantic!" Sam sighs with professional disillusion, making ready for an unexciting stay. Alas that his film was directed by a self-confessed sucker for lighthouses. This conscience brought to you by my chief backers at Patreon.
By his own admission in A Life In Movies: An Autobiography (1986), Powell did not fret unduly over the plot of his last assignment for Gaumont-British and if so, it shows. The set-up is sterling: called out on short notice from his native London to the remote coast of north Wales, veteran lightkeeper Sam Higgins (Gordon Harker) slings his kit bag off the train to discover his new post awash in rumors of suicides and false lights, wrecks led spectrally astray like the all-hands disaster that claimed the sister to the locally crewed Mary Fern. "It was the North Stack Light that drowned them all." Everyone from the chatty porter to the crabbed harbormaster has an ominous word to impart to him, replacing as he is the principal keeper vanished with one of his assistants à la Flannan Isles. Of the two locals tapped as relief, the craggy Claff Owen (Herbert Lomas) seems more superstitiously rattled with his somber brooding on the drowned, but even fresh-faced Bob Peters (Mickey Brantford) witnessed the wet marks of bare feet all through the lighthouse as if visited by a damp but duty-minded revenant. Just to ease the tension, all three men are sharing the close quarters of the rock station with Tom Evans (Reginald Tate), the stark-eyed survivor of the disappearance medically decreed unfit to be moved in his semi-sane state. The beyond last thing Sam needs as he settles in for a masterfully jittery night is the arrival of further complications from the mainland in the castaway persons of Alice Bright (Binnie Hale) who tried to wangle herself a berth in the lighthouse for purposes of psychical research and Jim Pearce (Ian Hunter) whom Sam clocked as a reporter the second the younger man flashed a wad of notes for more material reasons, but their slap-kiss bickering completes the full spook house of mysterious mischiefs, ulterior motives, and uncertain loyalties. Ashore, Sam fatefully waved off all warnings with the belligerent assurance of a man carefully not sounding the depth he may be out of: "It ain't going to spoil my sheet. I've been in the service now for twenty-five year come Michaelmas and I've never had me light go out yet." As the dirty weather thickens around the Mary Fern and the dirty tricks inside the North Stack Light, whether through the interference of wreckers, ghosts, or Bolsheviks, even the staunchest defender of Trinity House may have to admit that the odds of that record standing are off.
Unless you hate lighthouses, this picture should be foolproof. Especially since its treatment is more spookily adventurous light thriller than serious supernatural suspense, it should clip along with as much twinkle as shiver as the absurdity of its haul of red herrings ironizes the danger of a real conspiracy afoot at the light and after about half an hour it does, which would be less of an issue if the film ran more than 76 minutes tops. I like a slow burn as much as the next viewer and the dilatory opening almost sinks the story before it even gets to the harbor. The location shooting of the Ffestiniog Railway is fun as far as heritage trainspotting goes—especially if you don't mind that Tan-y-Bwlch is not a seaside stop—but the humor of the culture clash between Cockney cynicism and Welsh clannishness wears off faster than a Celtic twilight and while it may be fair to point to the preoccupation with outsiders and communities as a future Archers trademark, I feel I can guarantee that emigré Imre would have written a more nuanced take than jokes about everybody within earshot being named Owen. Sam does need to encounter enough local foreboding to justify the sympathetic greeting from Dr. Carey (Milton Rosmer), "I suppose they've been chilling your blood to begin with, eh?" along with the well-attested snafu of the phantom light, but the lighthouse itself is so atmospherically as well as structurally central to the film that until the cast is fully assembled inside its vertiginously stacked shadows and blaze, even the most charming visual anecdotes of witchy stationmistresses and musical fishermen can't help but feel like marking time. It feels a little, perhaps unfairly, as though the director got distracted by the documentary pleasure of hanging out in his own setting. Save it for Hirta or Chillingbourne, Micky. Fortunately, once the action stabilizes offshore, so does the tone of the film: its characters may crack wise about their scares, but they still jump. "Don't be silly. How could you vanish if you're invisible? If you're invisible, you vanish before you've started. Ridiculous." Or they don't seem fazed at all by the uncanny goings-on at the North Stack Light, which is part of what troubles Sam about Alice and Jim. She rattles off two or three explanations for her interest in the light, the rising melodrama levels finally prompting him to ask meaningfully if she last acted in East Lynne. It improves nothing when she turns a gam-flashing pair of short-shorts out of his Sunday trousers. "A ruddy girl in a respectable lighthouse!" For his part, the assumed reporter offers no explanations, only a coolly amused sense of biding his time that doesn't square with his unsettled situation or the nautical clumsiness that fetched him up to the stack, apologetically out of petrol, a straight man with a joke up his sleeve. "I'm going down to the storeroom to fetch my box of tricks." Stumbled on behind the curtain of his bunk, Tom Evans begs in apparent sound mind to be untied. Claff Owen, normally confined to the kind of poetic doomsaying on which folk horror thrives, serves an unexpected reality check with his quiet rebuke to his nervily bumptious superior: "You are always saying you are chief here, Sam Higgins. No one is disputing it." All throughout, a tetchy, sarky, worried little man with the tenaciously creased face of many a comic hero, Sam hangs on to his skepticism for his sanity and gradually edges out of archetype, ruefully shaking off a well-meant attempt at consolation with none of his usual bluster. "If a man's worth his salt, he ought to help it. And here's me with twenty-five years' service come Michaelmas, sitting here while a gang of wreckers plays tig in me own lamp room!"
Where the film shines, appropriately, is the lighthouse itself. Practically it may have been a composite of the Hartland Point Lighthouse, the Eddystone Light, and Islington Studios, but the salt-soaked art direction of Alex Vetchinsky, the dark lantern photography of Roy Kellino, and the dreamily logical editing of Derek Twist work it up into a world of its own, at once a kaleidoscopic maze of discontinuous stages as fragmented as the flash through a third-order Fresnel lens and a normally inhabited environment where oil lamps are still used to read by and sausages can be fried to a perfect split. We get our first sight of it not in establishing long shot, but from within the luminous glass hive of the lantern room, the camera revolving like an orrery within the tick of the mechanism that rotates its own brass-banded shadow across the words etched around the stone ring of the wall, Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. Only after we have seen Claff and Bob about their duties, Tom restlessly tossing in his bunk, the human and optic workings of the light, do we refer back to the lighthouse as it appears to the approaching boats, a stark tunnel of stone self-illuminated against the night sky and sea in their webs of cloud and foam. Once inside, the camera will maintain a depth of field realistically commensurate with the tight curved fit of the tower—it does not affect the elegantly low-key set-ups—as its characters move, some easily, some gingerly, through its partitioned spiral of spaces, but it will return time and again to these icons of the light, the slow morse of its flare at a distance, the gear-train heartbeat of the lantern, the white strings of waves pouring over the ship-tearing rocks. When the light is put out, it's as sudden as a murder, the phantom light springing up on the cliffs like fool's fire while the faceted eye of the lighthouse remains hollowly dark. "God! It's out! My light's out!" Restoring it really feels like an elemental act, not only because of the ship in shattering danger out in the coal-thick fog. It's the steady sum of all its flickering, stubborn, foolish inhabitants, whose overlapping efforts are in defiance not just of the wreckers, quite modern ones, by the way, in it for the insurance fraud rather than the salvage, but of their own misgivings and mistakes. "Here, don't worry about him, miss. He won't be found drowned." No wonder the stops-out pyrotechnics are kept in reserve for the breath-catching wresting of the Mary Fern from the North Stack Rocks, an adrenaline shock of a montage cut as fast as pistons and timed to the blaze of the light, the churn of the screw, the desperate ringing of the telegraph full astern. Claff Owen put it most vividly, back when the film was just starting to get under way:
"Sometimes I think of the ships passing to and fro in the storm, and I listen to the gulls beating against the glass and breaking their little wings. It's then I realize the lives that are in my hands. Suppose I let that light go out? I'd have all those drowned souls on my conscience, beating their wings against my window like the birds."
And we're off to Mother Carey! It promises a ghostlier narrative than the one which actually unfolds, but underneath the credits a ragged figure, storm-lit, blank-eyed, dripping, emerges into the doorway of the lighthouse and with a strange fixed unstoppability begins to climb the stairs, exactly like the supposed return of the last chief keeper from the sea that drowned him. "Poor Jack Davies, back from the dead with the water streaming from his hair!" If the film had only been set rather than partly shot in Cornwall, I'd blame the Wild Magic.
Since Pressburger wouldn't leave Paris for London until the fall of 1935 and even then wouldn't be introduced to Powell until a fateful story conference in 1938, The Phantom Light was adapted by Ralph Smart, Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, and Austin Melford from Evadne Price and Joan Roy Byford's 1928 stage play The Haunted Light and while it winds up to a gripping and humane finale, it does kind of faff around getting there. Its quirkiness comes out in welcome details like a handshake instead of a kiss underneath the lighthouse's beam, but its assemblage from stock components sets a limit on its overall peculiarity. Its most consistently three-dimensional character is the North Stack Light. Powell himself had a disappointment in the picture: he had wanted Roger Livesey for the part of Jim. On the one hand, knowing the actor's magnetism and the tidal quality of his voice as showcased in I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), I can agree that Michael Balcon missed the boat. On the other, since I have liked—and associated with the sea—Ian Hunter ever since The Long Voyage Home (1940), I wouldn't swap him even without the equal-opportunity scenes of him stripping to the waist to swim for shore. I can rent the Livesey version from the hell of a good video store next door and imagine for good measure that Pressburger did work on it, in which case it would have been as thoroughly turned inside out and reinvented as their first collaboration. Over in this universe, it's a curate's egg of a quota quickie with a visible descendant in Robert Eggers; I got it with a slight crunch in the runtime from the Internet Archive, but it might look better on BFI Player if your location permits. "They think there's something romantic about lighthouses. Romantic!" Sam sighs with professional disillusion, making ready for an unexciting stay. Alas that his film was directed by a self-confessed sucker for lighthouses. This conscience brought to you by my chief backers at Patreon.
no subject
Would you watch it again knowing what you know now about its failings?
no subject
Sam is briefly convinced that Jim and Alice must be Bolshevik saboteurs, preparing to blow up the light. In his defense, it would make slightly more sense than anything either of them has said about themselves to that point, but in their defense, he's pretty spooked at the time.
Would you watch it again knowing what you know now about its failings?
Yes. It has great sea-sense; it allows even its crankiest or flightiest characters to pitch in at the climax and be real; and I'd love to see its lighthouse photography on film. I might just read through most of the first half-hour if it came around on TCM.
[edit] I forgot the actually important reason, which is that since I am interested in Powell and Pressburger as filmmakers, anything of theirs is of interest to me even if it only half works. I will catch up eventually on the Pressburger side of this equation. I keep forgetting he co-wrote Wanted for Murder (1946), one of the canonical Eric Portman noirs. I continue to wish someone would rediscover a print of Squadron Leader X (1943).
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Thank you. It helped that the Hartland Point Lighthouse had a uniquely distinctive lantern. Powell did claim to have used it for the North Stack Light, but he also claimed to have used other, unspecified lighthouses in his picture, and the amount of screen time devoted to its lantern room made the nature of his claim easy to double-check.
no subject
(voice at the back of the cinema): Oh damn it, not lighthouses AGAIN!
no subject
There's always someone!
(Ian Hunter actually had been in at least one other lighthouse film previously, an early sound romantic melodrama called Cape Forlorn (1931). Of course I want to see it and of course its availability seems to be "dead out of print DVD that wasn't in your region to begin with.")
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The location shooting of the Ffestiniog Railway is fun as far as heritage trainspotting goes—especially if you don't mind that Tan-y-Bwlch is not a seaside stop --that also made me laugh.
We get our first sight of it not in establishing long shot, but from within the luminous glass hive of the lantern room, the camera revolving like an orrery within the tick of the mechanism that rotates its own brass-banded shadow across the words etched around the stone ring of the wall, Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. --This is gorgeous; I got a shiver thinking about how beautiful and otherworldly it must look.
no subject
Thank you!
--that also made me laugh.
I enjoyed the heritage trainspotting! And I understand that location shooting need not be contiguous! But the station is identified by name and just around the corner is the sea and there are such things as maps!
--This is gorgeous; I got a shiver thinking about how beautiful and otherworldly it must look.
All of the shots of the light are incredible. I really would like to see the film in a theater just for them. The BFI and MoMA have both done major recent retrospectives of Powell and Pressburger; the HFA can get with the program any day now.