Kathleen Byron – Movie Musings

A pilot is stranded between Earth and…somewhere else in this brilliant romantic fantasy

Director: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Cast: David Niven (Peter David Carter), Roger Livesey (Dr Frank Reeves), Raymond Massey (Abraham Farlan), Kim Hunter (June), Marius Goring (Conductor 71), Robert Coote (Bob Trubshaw), Kathleen Byron (Officer Angel), Joan Maude (Chief Recorder), Abraham Sofaer (Judge/Surgeon), Richard Attenborough (Pilot)

In the final days of World War II, a plane glides across the Channel in flames. The crew has bailed out, leaving only their skipper behind. Unknown to them, he’s not got a parachute – and is facing a choice between jumping or crashing to certain death. With only moments left to live, when is there a better time to fall in love? Quoting poetry and embracing what life he can in his final moments, Peter Carter (David Niven) falls in love with American radio operator June (Kim Hunter), the last person he expects to talk to. It’s stirring, sweeping, hugely romantic – and then Peter jumps at 50,000 feet.

So that’s it, right? Wrong. Peter washes up on the shores of Britain, not dead and practically on June’s doorstep. Happy ending? Perhaps not: at the end of a huge escalator linking our world to another (maybe the next?) Peter was expected. His “conductor” (Marius Goring), a French fop executed during the Revolution, whose job it was to take his soul “up” lost him in the fog. Now a man who isn’t supposed to be alive is walking around on Earth falling in love. Can it be allowed? Or will Peter need to head up that staircase? Or is all of this in fact in Peter’s head, a product of a head injury diagnosed by Dr Frank Reeves (Roger Livesey)? Either way, Peter faces two trials: life-saving surgery on Earth and a tribunal in that other place to decide whether he stays on Earth or not.

When released in America, AMOLAD was renamed Stairway to Heaven – a title rightly hated by Michael Powell. Part of the magic – and there is a lot of magic realism here in the most beloved of all British filmic fables – is the film’s carefully measured ambiguity. The film superbly doesn’t give any answers. The two worlds are clearly, visually distinguished and when Goring’s Conductor and others descend to Earth to freeze time and converse with Peter, their appearance is always foreshadowed with the same symptoms (smells and headaches) Frank diagnoses as part of Peter’s condition.

The beauty of AMOLAD is how wonderfully gently it explores the struggle of two nations – here represented by Peter and June – to emerge from the trauma of war and return to everyday life. From a world where death lies around every corner – where your plane can plummet to fiery doom in moments – they must readjust to one of romantic picnics, amateur theatricals and games of table tennis. Peter’s struggle to survive his surgery is a beautiful metaphor for returning to a life full of hope, possibility and looking forward rather than backward.

It’s why the visual impact of the film is so important. “Heaven” is shot in crisp black-and-white. As the Conductor says when travelling down to Earth, “one is starved of Technicolor up there”. This Heaven is a place of peace, but also of bureaucratic efficiency. Arrival lounges are staffed with decent but practical Angels (Kathleen Bryon is marvellous as the first of these we meet – and there is a fabulous shot from Powell that frames her in front of a clock, making the edges of its face appear like a halo around her head). There are rules and paperwork – in fact a whole city of clerks and arrival lounges. What it doesn’t have is the warmth and passion – the colour – of Earth. Down here, everything is in luscious, gorgeous Technicolor. Up there life is restful, but monochrome.

Jack Cardiff’s photography of AMOLAD – combined with Powell’s astute visual eye – crafts one of the most ravishing films you’ll ever see. Blues, oranges and reds practically pour off the screen into your eyes. Filters add a golden hue to much of what we see. The ramshackle details of locations – Frank’s cluttered library with its piles of books, June’s country-house-base – see every single detail captured in painterly beauty, colours popping out. Only Peter’s surgery room feels like a bridge between ”Heaven” and Earth, cooler filters stressing their blues and cool icey whites.

This is what Peter is fighting to stay in. A world of colour, of joy and poetry. Perhaps “Heaven” is just his imagination of what the afterlife could be like. It resembles the military operations he has spent the last few years emersed in. It’s filled with the historical generations he taught at university. Familiar faces up there fight his corner and represent him at the great trial to decide his fate. His surgeon on Earth shares the face of his judge in “Heaven”. Powell and Pressburger don’t lean too far either way – it’s all gloriously left open to our imagination.

And who, in 1946, wouldn’t want to believe in a heaven as reassuringly welcoming as this. (On a side note it’s refreshing to see a film from the 40s that depicts such a racially diverse after life). One where all are equal and questions of colour and creed are left aside. “Heaven” is packed with soldiers from all across the world – and the sheer volume of uniforms up there reminds us of the trauma down here.

AMOLAD is all about the world we might decide to live in after the trauma of war. It’s also about forging lasting bonds between two nations bought together to fight. No one feels more English than David Niven: and AMOLAD is, arguably, his finest performance. He makes Peter a man of casual wit and lightly worn intelligence, but with hints of the burdens he has carried across years of war. He’s the best of us Brits – and now he has fallen in love with the best of America. June, wonderfully played by Kim Hunter, is practical, brave and grounded. Their love (and the life they could spend together) becomes the battleground at the heavenly trial.

On the one side: a prejudiced revolutionary American (played with gusto by Raymond Massey) – on the other the perfect embodiment of English decency. There could have been no better choice of actor for this than the glorious Roger Livesey. Livesey’s Frank Reeves becomes a mix of English eccentric, master surgeon and Prospero-like magus. It’s no coincidence that among his hobbies is a large camera obscura with which he observes events on his village streets with a protective, grandfatherly care. His study is lined with books, his knowledge is infinite and he is always open to Peter’s tales of heavenly staircases and visitations from mysterious conductors. Then as his advocate in “Heaven” it is he who has the clear sight and judgement to focus the jury not on what divides us, but what unites us – what makes us all human, not what drives us apart.

AMOLAD is about what brings us together. It’s open about the flaws of Britain – the first trial jury is awash with Boers, Indians and other victims of Empire – but also a celebration of its virtues. It celebrates the melting pot of America – the second trial jury is made-up of an incredibly diverse selection of American citizens – and is a hymn to personal freedoms. Farlan picks up on what divides Britain and America – cricket vs American dynamism – but what unites us is our desire for life. So what does it matter if Brits can be austere or Americans so brash they raid a coke dispenser on arrival in “Heaven”. We’re still cousins.

All this helps capture the film as a universal fable, of love being discovered in the magical boundaries between worlds (its no coincidence we see Midsummer Night’s Dream being rehearsed by an American cast under a British vicar). This is a quiet, decent struggle about emerging from the horrors of war into the chance of a new world of love. It’s a struggle for Peter and June that is both very personal and hugely universal. Powell and Pressburger’s film captures this perfectly in a film that’s sublimely directed and never-endingly rich in dialogue and visuals. It perfectly offers up a universal fable that speaks to the heart. It’s perhaps why this is their most beloved – and finest – hour.

Deborah Kerr leads a community of nuns struggling with temptations in the classic Black Narcissus

Director: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Cast: Deborah Kerr (Sister Clodagh), Sabu (Young General), David Farrar (Mr Dean), Kathleen Byron (Sister Ruth), Flora Robson (Sister Philippa), Jenny Laird (Sister Honey), Judith Furse (Sister Briony), Esmond Knight (Old General), Jean Simmons (Kanchi), May Hallatt (Angu Ayah)

In 1947, people hadn’t seen anything like Black Narcissus. Its triumphant technicolour was like nothing that had been made before – and watching it now on a brand new, shiny restoration, it’s still overwhelmingly impressive. Alongside this beautifully shot action, we have a storyline surprisingly modern in its acute psychology and questioning of the strengths and weaknesses of human nature.

Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) is given leadership of a group of nuns in a remote Himalayan harem building converted into a nunnery. But the isolation of the mountains and the strange atmosphere of the harem bring out weaknesses in the characters of the nuns, leading to profound challenges to their spiritual and mental well-being – not least Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron), who becomes increasingly pre-occupied with local land captain Mr Dean (David Farrar).

Powell and Pressburger’s film is a brilliant, slightly hard to interpret, psychological gothic drama, a du Maurier-style sexually charged drama set in an exotic Indian location which the nuns struggle to understand. It’s a curious melange of scenes, often moving swiftly, sometimes only with narrow bridge scenes, meaning you soon get as lost in how much time has passed as the nuns themselves. Several key events take place off screen, and the native Indians are curious, unknowable and strangely intimidating in their distance and coolness.

All this is to help build the audience into feeling as unsettled as the characters themselves. It’s a film about the struggles between expression and repression. The two principal nuns – Sisters Clodagh and Ruth – both show elements of this. Both are drawn towards the earthy, manly but still patrician Dean, but both handle these emotions in very different ways – one by denying those feelings, another by trying to embrace them. All of this takes place in a distancing and intoxicating environment, where the convention rules of life seem suspended.

For Sister Clodagh, Dean serves as a bridge back to her own frustrated romantic feelings for an old flame – whose failure to propose guided her towards taking the veil – and elements of her warmer persona (witnessed by us in flashback). But Clodagh resolves never to make herself a slave to these feelings, and these moments of remembrance seem to make her cling all the more to her order – even while the film suggests that it is a strange mixture of pride, insecurity and fear as well as faith that motivates her.

By contrast, Sister Ruth – already acknowledged by the Mother Superior as not an obvious choice for the sisterhood – increasingly loses her grip first on her faith, then sanity, as she struggles with the feelings she clearly has for Dean. This quiet obsession has built up in her mind into representing all the desires for freedom and independence she feels while in the order. Where Clodagh resolves to cling closer to the repression of her feelings, Ruth rejects this very idea and determines to express herself – even as it costs her everything.

This heated growing madness is powers the film – and Kathleen Byron provides most of the drama with a stunningly unhinged performance, which builds so quietly (almost in the background of the film) that it never becomes wearing and also surprises with the extent of her unhinged delusion. One particular night-time encounter with Clodagh sizzles with rival agendas – one woman using a lipstick, the other using a Bible.

Powell (and it was Powell who largely directed these Archers pictures) uses a variety of techniques to develop this unease. Several shots are direct POV shots, with the audience becoming one of the characters, giving us the slightly unsettling feeling of being addressed by the actors. Quick tableaux editing gives us economic storytelling and a sense of events building swiftly towards a head (several sequences use a series of quick cuts of characters reacting to events). The camera uses a series of close-ups of sweaty foreheads or dizzying, vertigo inducing shots of the Himalayas to increase the unease. A later shot shows Sister Ruth moving through a shimmeringly filmed jungle, bringing a sense of confused eroticism to the picture.

Sexuality is a major theme of the film – and the characters have a series of acknowledged or unacknowledged sexual interests in each other. The music and camera work develop a sense of heated intensity on the mountain that suggests a simmering heat that unnerves the mind and throws open the temptations of physicality. Old wall paintings from the harem of bare-breasted women seem to be a constant presence – no wonder feelings are running high.

Jack Cardiff’s photography is simply extraordinary – it’s hard to believe none of this was filmed on location and most of it was shot in a studio – and this is still a film today that is hugely beautiful. The production by Alfred Junge is hugely impressive, with the nunnery a triumph of mismatched themes.

It’s not perfect. It’s a bit awkward to see actors blacking up. Some of the acting is quite OTT or stagy – in particular May Hallatt at points – and the film’s occasional delight in its visual appeal means its themes don’t always get the exploration that they deserve. One of the disadvantages of its deliberately vague timeline is that sometimes events happen too soon – or we don’t get enough sense of why they are happening. But these are blemishes.

This is a masterfully made picture, still beautiful to look at with impressive performances from Kerr, Byron, Farrar and many of the rest of the cast. It’s a surprisingly gothic melodrama by the end, with reds splashed across the screen with an imposing sense of threat. Still one that needs to be seen: and the end is so melodramatically gothic considering where the film started that the fact it doesn’t seem hugely jarring is an enormous tribute to the talents of those involved.