Letters home to mum: Michael Powell’s first months in the film industry

In the spring of 1925, Michael Powell, then aged 19, was as usual spending a holiday at his father’s hotel, the Voile d’Or, in St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, a seaside resort in the south of France. He was restless and unhappy, trying not to think of his life back in Bournemouth and his sensible but uninspiring job as a clerk with the National and Provincial Bank. “I was eating my heart out,” he once commented on that phase of his life. 

However in the course of a whirlwind few months everything was about to change. Powell records events in a charmingly detailed series of letters home to his mother Mabel, his ‘Mummy Mouse’ as he fondly called her. The letters form part of Michael Powell’s extensive paper archive held in BFI Special Collections. 

The Hotel Voile d’Or was a quirky establishment, busy in the winter when the well-to-do escaped cold and dreary cities for the bright blue skies and shimmering water of the Riviera. The blistering summer heat made it unfashionable for the idle rich, but the abundance of sunlight transformed the region into a hive of activity for armies of filmmakers. Based in the Victorine Studios in nearby Nice, they scoured the area for locations by day and shot interiors at night when it was cooler.

That year the dashing actor/director Rex Ingram was shooting Mare Nostrum (1926), a film that was part war drama, part nautical fantasy. It starred Ingram’s beautiful wife Alice Terry and Spanish-American actor Antonio Moreno.

Powell hugely admired Ingram’s previous films, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and Scaramouche (1923), and was excited to be so tantalisingly close to the great man, while totally consumed with thoughts of a career behind the camera himself. His father sympathised and had attempted to utilise his network of contacts through the hotel to help Powell break into the industry. They had already tried once. The previous year, when staying in Cap-Ferrat, Powell wrote home to Mabel that he had been bought new clothes and sent for a screen test. 

The screen test did not go well, but Powell remained undeterred. He had no real desire to be an actor anyway.

Things really started to happen when Powell’s father obligingly hosted a rather expensive party for film people at Maxim’s in Nice in the hope of getting his son useful introductions. There, Powell struck up a conversation with Harry Lachman, a well-regarded American landscape painter-turned- stills photographer who was working with Ingram at the Victorine. He suggested Powell join the crew as a production runner for $5 a week – roughly a fifth of what he had been earning at the bank. Powell knew this was the chance of a lifetime and grabbed the opportunity. But how to break the news to his mother, eagerly expecting him home after the holiday?

With Thomas Powell escaped to his summer house in Chantilly and the hotel closed, Michael Powell took lodgings at a house called Maryland in Cap Ferrat where he is looked after by a kind family called the Bussells, who keep him fed and laundered.

He writes that his working day is regularly 12 hours, sometimes even 15, but he does not care and is happy. He describes himself as ‘assistant-deputy-property-man’ involved in anything from painting picture frames to sewing curtains as well as learning the technicalities of stills photography and when given chance – a little editing.

Powell is fascinated by Ingram, a charismatic Irishman, observing him on set closely, and is beguiled too, by the delightfully unaffected Alice Terry, who charms all the crew with her kindness.

Often working through the night to avoid the intense heat, life at the studio falls into an exhausting but agreeable pattern. He does however find time to attend parties, visit local theatres and cinemas, take girls out to dinner and enjoy the riotous camaraderie of the film crew. He rides a motorbike, giving him independence and speed as he travels back and forth along the coast between Cap-Ferrat and the Victorine. A minor accident on a powerful borrowed motorbike one day causes a leg wound. His unusual treatment by a local doctor who applies leeches to the injured area is described to his mother with great relish:

No sooner is the leg incident fully noted than Powell shares another concern – his receding hair-line:

The studio work is relentless, but Powell is sometimes allowed to assist on location and watches the filming of a chase scene on the streets of Villefranche.

Powell paints a vivid picture of the exhausting effort to complete Mare Nostrum with its demanding aquatic scenes and exquisite miniature work carried out by Walter Pallman. The crew often work through the night and with inevitable tiredness comes danger. In the final days of shooting, a terrible accident occurs on set while filming a storm sequence 

As Mare Nostrum begins to wrap up, thoughts turn to Ingram’s next film, The Magician. Luckily for Powell, he is re-hired to carry out a similarly eclectic range of work on this, including a brief appearance on screen. And so the production cycle begins again. Powell is learning all aspects of filmmaking with astonishing speed. And under Lachman’s tutoring he becomes an accomplished stills photographer. But it is the ultimately the role of director he has his heart set on.

Powell continues to write entertainingly and in detail to his ‘Mummy Mouse’  throughout the rest of the 1920s and 30s, although the letters become more sporadic as the hectic era of The Archers begins. But Mabel is always kept informed as her son charts his steady upward trajectory through the film business – constantly apologetic that he does not write more often. But his funny, newsy letters also convey a sense of calm and maturity, revealing the innate self-assurance that Michael Powell always possessed – a certainty that as far as film was concerned, he was simply following his own destiny.

Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell + Pressburger runs from 16 October to 31 December on the big screen at venues across the country, on BFI Player and with the free, major exhibition The Red Shoes: Behind the Mirror (from 10 November, BFI Southbank).

The Magician screens on 29 October.