Pen-Ultima Thule – The Edge of the World (1937 cut), Birkbeck College

“Edge of the World was entirely saved for me by the editor (Derek Twist) … I mean, Flaherty with no story – at least I had the semblance of a story – took about six months to cut Man of Aran, and then it wasn’t any good…”

Michael Powell, Powell, Pressburger and Others (1978) BFI

The last few decades have seen a bonanza of different mixes, demos and alternate cuts of the output of the most familiar musicians from The Beatles and The Stones to even JS Bach, Erik Satie and Taylor Swift (not together…). Each new variation fascinates and paints a picture of the artists on route to their eventual well-known statements, the elements of Strawberry Fields Forever are interesting because they sound so different to the magical mix created by George Martin and his “Boys” and they show how decisions were reached in search of the perfected final version.

So it is with film, with a boom in “Limited Editions” featuring different cuts of even the most esoteric of films. Getting to see a different version of a classic film some of us have seen dozens of times is pretty rare though and to see Michael Powell’s first major “personal” cinematic statement in a form not seen since its original release in 1937 is not only rare it’s almost certainly unique and it happened again on screen right here on 8^th July 2025 in Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image Cinema a lifetime after it was last seen in this form.

How there came to be a copy of this Mark I release of the film is a story of its own and owes everything to conversations between passionate cineastes one of whom, Bob Geoghegan, Director of the Archive Film Agency and a man of many parts, knew he had a copy of the film safely stored on 35mm nitrate but not the exact age. SO it was that investigation revealed it to be a print from the year of release and one that was different from that we know in significant ways. He duly created a digital transfer from these materials for projection at this event.

Inspired by the evacuation of the Island of St Kilda a few years before, The Edge of the World has been recently restored by the BFI and I’d last seen this at Bologna in 2023 but this was something else entirely as Christopher Bird explained in his introduction to a room full of the very people you’d usually find in Il Cinema Ritrovato, some who’d come a long way for this rarity. Chris had scrupulously prepared a shot-by-shot comparison video for four key moments from the films, showing us three before revealing the fourth a very important moment from the ending shot which I won’t spoil.

Technically, Michael Powell is a much better filmmaker than Robert J Flaherty...

The video ran the two versions side by side and it was easy to see the gaps in the restored version against the fuller shots on this 1937 version. For whatever reason – and this is where the historians come in and dig deeper than the primary evidence – Powell re-edited the film in the 1940s no doubt when he had more success and clout behind him so that the version we have been watching all of lives is what he wanted us to watch some eight (?) years after it was first released. As he said in the quote at the top, Derek Twist brought this production home with Powell struggling with a limited budget and, after St Kilda’s owner refused, a last-minute change of location to the island of Foula across the North Sea to Shetland.

In general, the newly-revealed film showed more of the reaction shots to discussions between the main characters filling out the narrative and engaging us with more of the wonderful locals who we would see again when Master of Ceremonies, Professor Ian Christie, screened Return to the Edge of the World a BBC-funded documentary returning Powell, John Laurie and Grant Sutherland back to the remains of the society they filmed amongst. It’s a wonderful film and Laurie is full of mischief with a mystical twinkle greeting every islander who’s name he feigns to have remembered. A special time for both.

I’ve written about this film a number of times before on here but every viewing only makes it more impressive – not least because of the three or so “new” minutes but also the achievement of Powell’s team in making of the film was an epic adventure in itself. "200,000 feet on Foula" was Powell's original title for his book on the making of the film and references the immense amount of footage shot… thanks be to Mr Twist again!

Powell and drama-documentarist Robert Flaherty did not get on and their methods were so different with the Englishman choosing to use actual actors for his depiction of disappearing cultures. In the end the skill of the story making as well as the players and crew win the day for Foula. EOTW is about as political as Powell gets as he highlights the failure of government to support the islanders as they drown their dogs and cut their losses in the saddest of circumstances. I wonder what happened to the folk of St Kilda, Rachel Johnson, the last of the native St Kildans, died in April 2016 at the age of 93, having been evacuated at the age of eight… what stories did she and other tell of their traumatic changes? Powell caught the dramatic truth better than his rival over on the Irish Aran.

Christie and co also presented us with some fabulous extras including Smith (1939) a public information film promoting a charity helping ex-servicemen, The Embankment Fellowship Centre, which was once lost not just to film archives but also film history. This was introduced by the remarkable Mark Fuller who’d actually found the only remaining copy by tracking down the charity - now called The Ex-Service Fellowship Centres - who revealed that they not only have materials about the project but also a copy of the film! They are now called Veterans Aid and the film is available to view on their website.

We also saw the poignant, An Airman's Letter to His Mother (1941) which is so revealing of the times in which Powell made films and the nature of lived experience during wartime.

My thanks to the following:

• Christopher Bird
• Ian Christie
• Mark Fuller
• Bob Geoghegan

And also the audience of some of the most cinematically curious people in the country and, indeed, in the town!

The next event at the BIMI is Voices from the Chorus presented by Ian and Robert Denning. Full details are available on the Birkbeck website.

Invaders of the heart… 49th Parallel (1941), BFI Cinema Unbound

You think we hate you, but we don't. It is against our faith to hate. We only hate the power of evil which is spreading over the world. You and your Hitlerism are like the microbes of some filthy disease -- filled with the longing to multiply yourselves until you destroy everything healthy in the world.

 

No, we are not your brothers.

 

Screening on the BFI’s 35mm copy, 49^th Parallel featured a host of stars lining up for their party piece propagandist soliloquy. It’s the skill of The Archers, and especially Emeric Pressburger, who won an Oscar for his script, that none of this felt undeserved or preachy. Sure, Laurence Olivier’s French-Canadian accent made Dick van Dyke’s cockney sound as authentic as Ray Winston in Sexy Beast, but he certainly took one for the team. This was the duo’s third film and it did the job in terms of impressing North America going on to become the most successful British film to date in cinemas.

 

Of all the big hitters it is the Austrian Anton Walbrook who hits the hardest, the words of one enforced migrant expressed through the acting skill of another with such passion that I only realised I was holding my breath halfway through as his character, the leader of a group of Hutterite Christians explained how, though German, they had only found peace and freedom in Canada, with Europe and the fatherland only offering suppression. His speech is in response to one from Eric Portman’s Lieutenant Hirth, a late-comer and true believer in the Nazi cause, who assumes his own rhetoric, mimicking Adolf, will lead to a roomful of “Heil Hitlers” only to completely misjudge the mood.

 

Walbrook’s Peter is a man of peace and strength who forgives the Nazi’s as he condemns the hatred of their ideology in words that again ring true as the World slips towards extremism. I considered just quoting the entire speech… just a few days away from remembrance Sunday and will slaughter ongoing across the world and democracy never more under threat than in the US and even the UK. We never learn.

 

Eric Portman and his men react to Peter's speech

Portman does make for a deliciously evil Nazi though and is central to the film’s treatment of the German’s who escape the sinking of U Boat 37 which gets trapped in Hudson Bay after sinking a Canadian cargo ship. His commander is killed and his superior officer, Lieutenant Kuhnecke (Raymond Lovell), more intelligent and less dogmatic takes charge of a group of six, including Vogel (Niall MacGinnis) the most sympathetic character, and other more typical Nazis.

 

Pressburger fills out even the Germans with personalities but they gradually leave a trail of death and destruction along Canada’s 49^th Parallel as they try to fight, steal and lie their way to Vancouver and from there a rescue in a Japanese ship. On route they first encounter Olivier as Johnnie, le trapper and the excellent Finlay Currie as the factor at the Hudson Bay trading post. There’s “Nick, the Eskimo” played by Ley On and, as with native Canadians elsewhere in the film, he and his tribe are treated as a real characters with agency and who influence the narrative. Pressburger was keen to include all Canadians in his tale and, accent aside, Olivier plays his part well, humorously dismantling Hirth’s earnest belief in his Fuhrer.

 

The Germans steal a plane, brutally killing two Canadian airmen and a number of Inuit, but one of the tribe manages to shoot one of them before the take off. And then there were five. Crashlanding after running out of fuel, Kuhnecke is also killed leaving just four men to trudge on and find the German Hutterite farming community, being greeted by a young girl called Anna (Glynis Johns) before gaining some acceptance with the help of Vogel’s baking skills. After the failure of Hirth’s oratory the group decide to leave and Vogel is invited to stay… and he is executed for desertion and just not being Nazi enough. And then there were three.

Laurence Olivier and Finlay Currie

The group loses a further member during a well-worked scene at an “Indian Rally” in Winnipeg, when, the Mounties take to the loud hailer, knowing the men are about and describing them as the crowd of native Canadians and to look hard at the person next to them. One of the German crew panics and s caught. Every such scene serves the polemic and shows, in this case the power of a united people against “invaders”.

 

Perhaps the strangest encounter is when Hirst and his last surviving colleague encounter and English writer in the wilds, Philip Armstrong Scott (Leslie Howard) who with his relaxed almost whimsical observations on the war being so far away and the importance of art, which will transcend history. All of this is anathema to Hirth, who can only see weakness, decadence and cowardice. After the camp is asleep the German’s jump Scott, tie him up and force him to watch his books, his own papers and his Picasso being burned. Their escape does not go to plan though, and Scott proves he does indeed have the steel they think he lacks appreciation for the arts does not make an Englishman weak.

 

Events conclude at Niagara Falls when Hirth, so close to freedom in neutral USA, meets his match in a Canadian soldier played with relish by Raymond Massey – an actual Canute! It’s another high-octane cameo and a stirring conclusion to this passionate and well-constructed propaganda. As usual with their war films, Powell and Pressburger allowed more depth to their characters than the brief probably required and yet this is exactly what makes them so watchable all these years later and which made them more powerful at the time.

 

Leslie Howard

After all, even Hirth admits that it’s governments and systems that are to blame for the way people are forced to act although as both Peter and Raymond Massey’s Andy Brock explain, it is their freedom to do something about this that defines society. There is no such choice under fascism.

 

Apart from editing from one David Lean there is fine cinematography from Frederick Young, F.R.P.S. which makes the most of stunning locations from the north-west coast to the mountains inland and Niagara’s mesmerising falls. It’s a travelogue of “one of the three great democracies” and as if our souls could not be stirred any more, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ debut score completes the task. 49^th Parallel works on a grand scale to perform miniature operations on the heart.

 

Interestingly American censors cut 19 minutes from the film, including Hirth’s speech when he claims that "Eskimos are like Negros" and "semi-apes, only one degree above the Jews", which had to be taken out to avoid offending segregationists in the American South... some of the views on race were too close to their own. Remarkable. The film was entitled The Invaders for the US, which is apt as the Archers smuggled in a lot of deeper meaning of their own.

 

Raymond Massey

Twice Upon a Time (1953)

 

Andrew Macdonald joined the BFI's James Bell in introducing his grandfather Emeric’s only solo directed film and in reminding us that The Parent Trap was a big film in his family, also pointed out that he never saw his forebear as a directorial sort; as someone who would enjoy the final say. Twice Upon a Time written and directed by Pressburger in 1953, has rarely been screened and the BFI’s transfer of a positive was one of the first screenings since the fifties which hadn’t been included in previous retrospectives.

 

It is, as Andrew says, a children’s film but one filled with his grandad’s wit and character wisdom and which takes an unlikely scenario and makes us smile.

 

Actual twins, Yolande and Charmian Larthe play two children separated when young and split between two divorcing parents played by Elizabeth Allan as Carol-Anne Bailey and Hugh Williams as James Turner. Charmain plays Anne, daughter if Carol-Anne and Yolande is Carol, daughter of ballet composer James. The story is told in flashback by the family doctor, Dr Mathews (Jack Hawkins) as the two discover each other on a skiing holiday with their schools. They soon get close, realise what’s happened and decide to trick their parents by playing each other… it’s a lovely film and Emeric, with the aid of several Archer’s regulars, succeeds in crafting a decent film.

 

Not an experience he ever wanted to repeat though and it’s the mark of maturity that you stick to what you do best and he was a writer of great force and imagination. Again, thanks to this sprawling season, we are all getting more familiar with what Emeric and Michael did best.