Michael Powell (1961)

BFI’s current Powell and Pressburger retrospective includes as well as their collaborations the films they made independently.  The Queen’s Guards, a Powell-without-Pressburger, was screened under a double heading:  it was also this month’s ‘Projecting the Archive’ offering, introduced, as usual, by curator Jo Botting.  Not as usual, she had a special guest with whom to share the introduction – Jess Conrad, one of the few surviving cast members from The Queen’s Guards and eighty-seven now.  If Jo Botting has ever seen The Very Strange Story of the Legendary Joe Meek, Alan Lewens’ wonderful 1991 documentary for BBC Arena, in which Conrad was among the talking heads, she might have guessed what she and the NFT3 audience were in for.  It was clear from his small contribution to Lewens’ film that Conrad was a boring braggart; unlike the TV programme-makers, Botting wasn’t in a position to edit him.  He went on and on, as tedious as ever, now short-term forgetful too – although, alas (and contrary to BFI speaker tradition), Conrad still knows how to use a mic.  He kept repeating how he graduated from actor in rep to pop star; his stuck-record spiel, replete with jokey sexism, was received in stony but also embarrassed silence.  The handout for the screening indicated presciently that the film would be introduced by Conrad and Botting, in that order.  It’s to be hoped the latter said all she wanted to say in her Sight & Sound (November 2023) piece, reproduced in the handout, because she could barely get a word in edgeways with her special guest.  Well done to Jo Botting, though, for keeping her cool and her temper before she finally managed to get Jess Conrad off the stage.

Michael Powell is on record as calling The Queen’s Guards ’the most inept piece of filmmaking that I have ever produced or directed.  I didn’t write the story (weak) or the screenplay (abysmal) but I take all the flak’.  The story is credited to Simon Harcourt-Smith, a friend of Powell’s, and the screenplay to Roger Milner (whose stage comedy ‘How’s the World Treating You?’ would, a few years later, give Patricia Routledge her first role in the West End and on Broadway).  According to Jo Botting’s S&S piece, Harcourt-Smith ‘[f]inding himself outside Buckingham Palace one day, … mused on what secrets the guards’ poker-faces might conceal’, which sounds a promising enough idea.  The film’s scope and potential for surprise are somewhat limited by the decision to make these secrets those of an established military family but this evidently appealed to Powell, a self-confessed ‘sucker for stories about the services’.  He was clearly stimulated, too, by the challenge of blending dramatised reconstruction of Trooping the Colour on the sovereign’s official birthday with the real thing; he sought and received the Queen’s permission to film the parade in June 1960.  With a team including cinematographer Gerry Turpin and editor Noreen Ackland, Powell achieves seamless colour and texture matching between the actual and created material for the ceremony on Horse Guards Parade.  Beyond that, it’s not too hard to understand his damning judgment of The Queen’s Guards.

Voiceover narration comes from the protagonist, John Fellowes (Daniel Massey), an officer in the Grenadier Guards, whose battalion is ‘to have the honour of trooping its colour before the Queen’, with Fellowes ‘lieutenant of the escort’.  Powell switches between the preparations of John and other characters on the morning of the parade; and longer flashbacks describing their lives and interactions before the big day itself.  John is the younger son of retired guardsman Captain Fellowes (Raymond Massey) and his wife (Ursula Jeans), whose house overlooks Horse Guards Parade.  Fellowes Sr can no longer move from his chair, except by hooking canes into loops on an overhead rail, and hauling himself along.  The contraption was designed by David, John’s elder brother, whose death in the North African campaign of World War II casts a long shadow over the family.  For generations past, the firstborn Fellowes son has always been a guards officer.  John has pursued his own military career acutely conscious of being second best to David, especially in the eyes of his father, who treats John with contempt.  For her part, Mrs Fellowes still insists that David is missing in action rather than dead.

We see John progress from clueless cadet to respected guards officer; the animosity between him and another young guardsman, Henry Wynne-Walton (Robert Stephens), that turns to friendship; John’s romance with flirty Susan (Elizabeth Shepherd) and, when she switches her attentions to Henry, with Susan’s more demure flatmate, Ruth Dobbie (Judith Stott).  Ruth and her father (Ian Hunter), a rank-and-file soldier in WWII and now a haulage contractor, are among the spectators at the Horse Guards ceremony although George Dobbie is there on sufferance.  When Ruth asks why ‘you keep pretending you hate John’, George replies, ‘I don’t hate him:  I just hope he falls flat on his face’.  It’s soon clear, from what a senior officer (Frank Lawton) tells John, that David Fellowes’ death in action wasn’t the noble self-sacrifice his younger brother has always assumed it to be.  The details of what really happened in the Western Desert are, unsurprisingly, revealed much later – in the light of John’s own, more honourable conduct in a combat operation in an unnamed desert country.  Powell is impatient to get this underway.   He gives perfunctory and rhythmless treatment to some of the other flashback episodes.  Despite some striking images (blue, white and yellow parachutes descending in a blue sky), the desert combat accounts for too much of the film’s total running time (a quarter of the 110 minutes).  Powell obviously wanted to craft some military action scenes but the attention he gives them is disproportionate to their importance in the overall story.

Some of the cast are better than Powell’s low opinion of The Queen’s Guards would have you believe.  Ursula Jeans and Jack Watson (as an army sergeant) do good work in their supporting roles.  In his first film lead, Daniel Massey gives John a distinctively sensitive masculinity.  Robert Stephens, with his easy wit and insolence, complements him well:  a bedroom conversation between John and Henry, when the latter stays overnight at the Fellowes’ home, makes for one of the best scenes.  Massey and Stephens get across – here and elsewhere but never too emphatically – that these two men care for each other.  Stephens’ appearance in this film in the same year as A Taste of Honey is a reminder of his versatility.  Massey is also particularly good on the plane flight en route to the desert operation:  he was, like his sister Anna, a much better actor than their father, despite Raymond’s higher-profile filmography (his pompous tones are a drag in A Matter of Life and Death (1946), even in East of Eden (1955)).  The Queen’s Guards is notable as the only time father and son appeared together on screen; it’s not Massey junior’s fault that they don’t spark.

Michael Powell’s film-making priority was telling stories that offered opportunities to realise his visual flair and imagination.  His relative lack of interest in actors may explain why he condemned The Queen’s Guards so unequivocally; it’s also reflected in one of its most glaring defects.  It’s true that at the time the film was made it was still unusual in British cinema for regional or non-RP accents to be done convincingly; but when social class and military status are such significant themes, why cast people who can’t get the vocals right?  Fellowes Sr seems meant to be typically English old school; Raymond Massey conceals his native Canadian accent erratically.  Ruth’s father has a decidedly pleb name, a line of business to match, and a vehement prejudice against the officer class; every so often, Ian Hunter suddenly remembers to drop his aitches.  Jess Conrad?  His acting is pretty good, as it also was in Nick Moran’s Telstar: The Joe Meek Story (2008), where he played Larry Parnes (and Nigel Harman played Conrad).  As Dankworth, a junior guardsman, Conrad is pleasingly natural.  Unfortunately, he also sings – something called ‘Oh Susanna’, in an idiotic pub sequence:  a barmaid drools over how marvellous Dankworth is (‘He’s going to be in the guards!’)  You understand Powell’s indifference to this particular scene if not how he got landed with it.

Once John Fellowes returns from dealing with the natives in the desert (Roger Milner’s dialogue is often jarringly imperialistic), Michael Powell seems in a hurry to get things over with, happily resolved.  It makes sense that Captain Fellowes, struggling on his ‘trolley bus’ contraption to get a good view from an upstairs window of the Trooping of the Colour, eventually recognises John as the son to be proud of.  It’s a mystery as to how watching the ceremony seems to persuade George Dobbie, judging from the look on his face, that Grenadier Guards officers aren’t so bad after all.  In one of her few chances to speak before the screening, Jo Botting stressed that The Queen’s Guards, despite its imperfections, was well worth seeing in a theatre in all its Technicolor/CinemaScope glory, worth avoiding in the ‘appalling’ version of the film available on YouTube.  I’m afraid I ignored her advice.  I left the screening a bit before the end and finished the job at home.  The visual quality on YouTube certainly is dire but I wasn’t having Jess Conrad make me miss my train.

2 November 2023