Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

This is one of those quirky small scale films that Powell and Pressburger seemed to excel in.  . It’s 1943 and we’re among an odd collection of scientist types who are beavering away somewhere in the bowels of Whitehall, working on weapons research or who knows what, one of whom is Sammy, the main protagonist.     He's in constant pain from an artificial foot, which makes him prone to grumpiness and to self-pity.  It also means he is often tempted to resort to alcohol. It's not a film that is overly full of dramatic incident, but there are two story arcs to follow. One concerns a dastardly new German weapon dropped from the sky: a small cylinder which contains a booby-trap bomb which goes off if anyone is foolish enough to handle it clumsily. The climax of the film is an eerie and suspenseful sequence on Chesil Beach where Sammy has the unenviable task of defusing one of these bombs.   The other, more interesting, story arc concerns Sammy and Susa...

This 1939 film is the first collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, so  I was quite prepared for it to be a bit odd, but I didn't expect the first half of it to be quite as disorientating as it was. The year is 1917, and the two main characters are a German U-boat commander, Hardt (played by Conrad Veidt) and Fräulein Tiel (Valerie Hobson), his contact in an espionage plot to destroy a significant proportion of the British Fleet at Scapa Flow. She is pretending to be a schoolteacher,  Miss Burnett, on the Orkney Islands, and her home forms a base for a few days for her and Hardt, plus a disillusioned Royal Navy officer, Ashington, who is prepared to betray his country. As I was watching this I was thinking, wow, am I really supposed to be rooting for them to succeed?  Surely not, especially since there is a sinister bit of business early on where German agents drug the real Miss Burnett and then throw her off a cliff. Admittedly Hardt seems a de...

This 1957 film set in wartime Crete, made by the eminent partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is very much a lightweight affair. The plot is simple: some British officers, led by Dirk Bogarde, kidnap the top German general on the island, and then they have to get him onto a ship to take him to Cairo.  This mission comes across more as an escapade since it has no military value, and seems to have been dreamt up by Bogarde simply to embarrass the Germans. The Brits in this film come across as ex-public schoolboys on a jolly jape. Maybe because I have a very low tolerance for this sort of thing, the film totally failed to charm me. Bogarde’s air of nonchalance throughout irritated me like hell. I would imagine that life under German rule wasn’t much fun for the Cretans but you wouldn’t get that impression from this film. All the locals we see seem to be having a great time of it. At one point the Germans circulate leaflets threatening reprisals on the locals unless th...