"Michael Powell: Beauty Unending"

Enormously imaginative and impressively realist, sometimes grubbily down-to-earth while other times swooping into the clouds of fancy, British filmmaker Michael Powell was a tangle of opposing impulses whose films are nonetheless marvelously forthright.

Powell's fertile years span from the early 1930s, when he first emerged as a director of popular thrillers, to the 1960s, when the audacious dysfunction of Peeping Tom prematurely ended his career. The early work, while no match for Powell's remarkable middle period, contains its fair share of gems. These include the adventure yarns The Spy in Black, 49th Parallel and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing. All three are World War II stories-even Spy in Black, putatively set during World War I-and feature tales of soldiers trapped in enemy territory. Uniquely, Spy and 49th Parallel both concern German soldiers, and Powell gives the German characters their fair measure of humanity and decency (before castigating them as beasts). 49th Parallel is enjoyably odd, set as it is in the remotest parts of Canada, and featuring a crew of French Canadians, Christian kibbutzniks and wandering novelists. Powell pits art against German viciousness, and art wins the match. Self-described "unarmed decadent democrat" Philip Armstrong Scott (Leslie Howard) knocks out his German opponent in a fight, dedicating each punch to an artistic icon defiled by the Nazis: "That's for Thomas Mann, that's for Matisse, that's for Picasso, and that's for me!"

Powell's most rewarding films, and the ones destined to create new legions of Powell fans every time they show, came between 1943 and 1948: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I'm Going, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. Owing a debt to Ernst Lubitsch's suave directorial touch and affinity for mixing romance with oddball behavior, Powell explored the subjects closest to his heart: creativity, and the English soul. Colonel Blimp and Life and Death in particular are lovely odes to the Englishman, well-needed balms for the bruised psyches of the country's populace during wartime. Also of note is The Red Shoes, an astoundingly gorgeous film that shows off Powell's ability to paint the screen with color.

Any tribute to Powell would be incomplete without mention of his debt to his screenwriter and collaborator, Emeric Pressburger. The duo worked together on 13 films, and Powell respected their collaboration enough to give Pressburger equal credit as a writer, producer and director. It was their collaboration that brought out the best in Michael Powell, and for that, Pressburger must be remembered too.