Submitted by
Nicky Smith
The Queen's Guards (1960)
From an unidentified publication, dated October 13th 1961.
Mr Michael Powell's Latest Film
Mr Michael Powell is a brilliant technician who is apt to give pyrotechnic
displays in the cinema, more, it would seem for the sake of the general flare-up than for the illumination they throw on the particular subject that was the
film's inspiration. Ever since The Edge of the World, which was made in 1937, he
has been unpredictable, and that is by no means necessarily a bad thing. To
have an individualist running riot in an art/industry inclined to imitation
conformity is, indeed, refreshing, but Mr Powell has never quite fulfilled
his tantalizing promise.
His latest film, The Queen's Guards, which he produces and directs and which is
now to be seen at the Carlton cinema, sound straightforward enough. It would
have been more successful had it been more so and had Mr Powell not
sometimes given the impression that he was attempting to fit together pieces
that did not belong to the same jigsaw puzzle. The beginning is outstanding;
here the camera, tracing the preliminaries to the Trooping of the Colour, turns
out picture after picture that has the snap, jungle and authority of Kipling's
rhymes plus a sense of discipline that is part of the Guards' tradition.
As the clock draws near to the hour of 11 on the Queen's birthday it is
apparent that Mr Powell is going to make a liberal use of the device of the
flashback and also what his purpose is. He is concerned first to take one or
two young officers, John Fellowes (Mr Daniel Massey) and Mr Henry Wynne-Walton
(Mr Robert Stephens), for instance, strip them of their uniforms [is this
literal ?] and show them as individual human beings, and then substitute khaki
for scarlet and illustrate a unit in action somewhere in the desert.
In both fields of activity the film falters. Poor John Fellowes is shown as
perpetually hangdog in the presence of his crippled father (Mr Raymon Massey),
who cannot forgive him for being too young to be killed in the war in place of
the adored eldest son David, while the desert sequences are conceived in the
spirit of the old Boy's Own Paper - the photography, however, which is splendid
and adventurous throughout, does much to redeem them.
The Queen's Guards is, at any rate, a bold and vidid film, charged to the brim
with colour and spirit when it is working even on a broad canvas, even it is uncertain when it descends from the general to the particular. Miss Ursula
Jeans miraculously turns a tiny sketch into a full-length portrait; Miss Judith
Stott is pleasantly sympathetic and Mr Ian Hunter is bold enough to take up a
resolutely anti-Guards attitude.
