Beauty comes in many forms, some lyrical, some terrifying. One of the most stunning visions in any film we’ll see this year is the late Michael Powell’s view of the storm-lashed Scottish island Foula: a great gloomy place of green hills and stony mountainsides that is the setting for Powell’s elemental, passionate 1937 tale of man and nature, “The Edge of the World.”
Foula, renamed “Hirta” (or “Death”) in the film, lies off the Scottish coast, a forbidding area of the world given recent cinematic luster in Lars von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves.” But Foula/Hirta seems more grand and dangerous here, and is shot far more lovingly, than anything in von Trier’s film. It’s a harsh and isolated stretch of grassy hills mantled with flocks of sheep, ancient dwellings and churches rising like gravestones out of the earth, with monumental cliffs rising toward the heavens and dropping down to the wave-crashed shore. The shots of those cliffs, strikingly composed by Powell, take your breath away. And the scene where two young men race up the cliffs, climbing with no aids in an ancient man-to-man contest ritual, is scarier than any comparable sequence in a modern thriller — because the pictures and the danger are so real.
That reality, poeticized by Powell’s wondrous film eye, is what makes “The Edge of the World” a major rediscovery. The story is simple. Two families, the Mansons and the Grays, united by friendship, are divided by tragedy after the cliff race, when Robbie Manson (Eric Berry) falls and chum Andrew Gray (Niall MacGinnis) survives — an incident that also shatters the romance between Andrew and Robbie’s fiery sister Ruth (Belle Chrystall). It’s Robbie’s father, Peter (played by John Laurie, the Scottish farmer of Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps”), who splits up the clans, despite his own long friendship with patriarch James Gray (played by Finlay Currie, the unforgettable Magwitch of David Lean’s “Great Expectations”). As human ties dissolve, crisis and storm loom.
Powell tells this tale of love and death against the backdrop of the increasing hardships of life on Hirta: the collapsing economy, the modern fishing trawlers looting its waters, all the travails that will drive the islanders to abandon their homeland. And he makes it both superb melodrama and superb ethnography, as well as one of the most beautiful black-and-white British films of the 1930s. Shot when Powell was 32, this legendary film was little seen in its day (because of distribution problems) and unavailable for years. But now it’s been beautifully restored and released by Milestone Films, under the aegis of director-historian (and close Powell friend) Martin Scorsese.
The phrase “labor of love” is often abused. But it applies here. If Powell, while shooting his film, grew to love the inhabitants and landscapes of Foula — and the hardy cast and crew he brought there — his film’s saviors are people who grew to love him and his work. “The Edge of the World” is crucial to understanding Powell, because it’s so different from most of his famous work, the Technicolor magic of films like “The Red Shoes,” “Black Narcissus,” “A Matter of Life and Death” and “Peeping Tom.” Powell was still fresh from five years of shooting low-budget “quota quickies” — and two years away from the partnership that would bring him world fame, with Hungarian screenwriter Emeric Pressburger — when producer Joe Rock decided to back Powell’s project about a dying Scottish island. And it was “The Edge of the World” that gave him an early name with critics and that tested his mettle more than any other movie. Indeed, at one point, when the “Edge” company was rumored to be stranded on Foula, the shooting became a national news story.
The troubles were so extreme, and the friendships so fast, that Powell revisited Foula some 40 years later, with then-survivors of the project, to make the documentary that became his last film, 1978’s “Return to the Edge of the World.” (Can this be rereleased soon as well?) Seen today, “The Edge of the World” has as much music and wonder as Powell’s later Scottish-set classic, “I Know Where I’m Going.” Working with three cinematographers — most notably the gifted studio veteran Ernest Palmer (who shot Frank Borzage’s shimmering romance “Seventh Heaven”) — Powell captured images awesome in their clarity, sweep and visual grandeur. Powell was consciously trying to top Robert Flaherty’s natural poetry in his classic island saga “Man of Aran,” and for many, he does.
The actors — especially Laurie and Currie, as the divided patriarchs — play with a stimulating mix of theatricality and naturalness. But, always behind them, the images dominate. The ocean breaks the shore. The winds breathe in the grasses. The ancient ways wither before our eyes — at church services, communal meetings and funerals. And in the most awesome, terrifying scenes of all, tiny humans scale the cliffs, looking from afar like flies on a wall, until a sudden close-up of their anguished faces against the sheer drop below makes our hearts race.
Few films in 1937 had the visual impact of “The Edge of the World.” And, despite all our digital technology, few films do today. Since Powell obviously regarded “Edge” as a major turning point and achievement, it must have galled him that the film was out of sight for most of his lifetime. He would have loved this revival — as, posthumously, he stuns and delights us once again.
`THE EDGE OF THE WORLD’
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Directed and written by Michael Powell; photographed by Ernest Palmer, Skeets Kelly, Monty Berman; edited by Derek Twist; musical director Cyril Ray; choral effects by The Women of the Glasgow Orpheus Choir, conducted by Sir Hugh S. Roberton; produced by Joe Rock. A Milestone Films release; opens Friday at The Music Box Theatre. Running time: 1:21. No MPAA rating (family).
THE CAST
Peter Manson ……….. John Laurie
Ruth Manson ………… Belle Chrystall
Robbie Manson ………. Eric Berry
Jean Manson ………… Kitty Kirwan
James Gray …………. Finlay Currie
Andrew Gray ………… Niall MacGinnis
