Polaroids from Michael Powell’s unmade Kensington romance
The Loving Eye was to be a voyeuristic romance starring Paul Scofield and Moira Shearer. These bittersweet pre-production images ”make me laugh and weep at one and the same time,” wrote Powell.
These Polaroids give us our only tantalising glimpses of a film that was never to be: a genteel Kensington romance directed by Michael Powell. As Powell wrote in his autobiography Million-Dollar Movie, it was to be “a comedy about love and the confusion of identities, and it was acted out […] in those back gardens of brick walls and high fences where cats prowl at night and where I lived: an intimate confusing world when you get lost in it.”
The Loving Eye was a 1956 novel by William Sansom about an accountant who spies on two sisters over his garden wall. Both workers at the same nightclub, “the two sisters had very different characters and experience,” wrote Powell, “but they looked alike and could very easily be confused by an observer”.
These themes of voyeurism, doubling and identity were catnip for the director, and in the late 1950s, after his long-term creative partnership with Emeric Pressburger had dissolved, he launched into adapting Sansom’s novel for the screen.
Unusually, he cast theatre actor Paul Scofield in the role of the shy accountant, long before his subsequent big-screen breakthroughs in The Train (1964) and A Man for All Seasons (1966). He’d wanted Natasha Parry for the dual role of the sisters, but claimed her husband, theatre director Peter Brook, became jealous and “whisked her away with him to America”. In her place, he’d reunite with his flame–haired The Red Shoes (1948) star, Moira Shearer.
Scofield, Shearer and Powell would meet in Powell’s Kensington home at 8 Melbury Road to discuss the project over “constant cups of tea”. He took these photos of Scofield and Shearer in the garden there and on the corner of Addison Road and Holland Park Road. “I have some stills of this period that make me laugh and weep at one and the same time,” Powell wrote.
Yet Powell struggled to get financiers interested. “[Shearer and I] both thought that we could make something unusual and exciting and entertaining out of William Sansom’s The Loving Eye. Our names were known all over the world, but do you think we could raise £150,000 in our own country, England, to make this comedy of love and identity? Not on your life!”
Out of the ashes of The Loving Eye project, however, came one of Powell’s most brilliant but most fateful releases – a very different London story: the scandalous Peeping Tom (1960). Instead of cups of tea and back-garden romance, “we settled for Pop Art”, wrote Powell, and “for a spine-chilling film about murder and sexual deviation and scoptophilia”.
It “was only by making Peeping Tom in the following year that I was able to immortalize the London world in which I lived, at number 8 Melbury Road, and the red-brick, stone-stepped house opposite it where Mark [Peeping Tom’s cameraman protagonist] developed his pictures.”
The critical fury around this infamous serial killer drama would derail Powell’s career within the industry, but through the fallout The Loving Eye remained a project he was passionate about. “Some years later,” he recalled, “Julie Andrews and her husband at the time, Tony Walton, read the script and loved it and wanted to do a musical of it.”
Vision, Dreams and Magic: The Unmade Films of Michael Powell is a new documentary exploring Powell’s unrealised visions and passion projects, available to watch on BFI Player.
Explore Powell and Pressburger films on BFI Player.