In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Film Chronicle
  • Jefferson Hunter (bio)
Blowup, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (Warner Home Video, 2004, and Amazon Instant Video)
Shampoo, directed by Hal Ashby (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2003)
Les Enfants du Paradis, directed by Marcel Carné (Criterion Collection, 2012)
Red River, directed by Howard Hawks (Criterion Collection, 2014)
Ball of Fire, directed by Howard Hawks (Warner Home Video, 2014)
The Pajama Game, directed by George Abbott and Stanley Donen (Amazon DVD On Demand and Instant Video)
Pather Panchali, directed by Satyajit Ray (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2003)
In Which We Serve, directed by Noel Coward and David Lean (Osiris Entertainment, 2011 and Amazon Prime Instant Video)
The Deadly Affair, directed by Sidney Lumet (SPHE, 2011 and Amazon Instant Video)
Doctor in the House, directed by Ralph Thomas (VCI Entertainment, 2011)
Dilys Powell, The Golden Screen: Fifty Years of Films, ed. George Perry (Pavilion Books Limited, 1989).

American cinephiles familiar with the names Pauline Kael, John Simon, Stanley Kauffmann, Renata Adler, the pre-eminent film critics of the last generation, might draw a blank at the name Dilys Powell. Not so with cinephiles in Britain, where for 56 years, from 1939 to the day of her death in 1995, Powell was a national institution, a hardworking and much-relied-on reviewer of films, mostly for the Sunday Times. Even if the cinema has become an international phenomenon, financially and stylistically, cinema journalism has stayed stubbornly national. We don’t read British reviews; the British don’t read American reviews. In this Chronicle I want to make Powell’s work—the wit and intelligence she brought to her subject—a little better known, while following her lead to films which she noticed on their first release and which still seem worth noticing.

A first-class honors graduate (in modern languages) from Somerville College, Oxford, a precocious participant in English literary life of the 1920s, Powell was good at many things, including poetry criticism and travel writing. After her marriage to the British archeologist Humfry Payne she journeyed with him to Greece and eventually wrote a small charming book, The Villa Ariadne, about excavations at Knossos and the eccentric British types doing the excavating. Powell fell into film reviewing more or less by chance, without any formal training in the medium but with the unshakeable belief, by no means widely shared in the early twentieth century, that cinema was an important expression of contemporary [End Page 256] culture and that attention ought to be paid to it. She learned how to review simply by doing it. In a 1990 Desert Island Discs interview on BBC Radio 4 (available as a podcast and very much worth hearing), Powell apologizes for the excessive verbal cleverness of her early reviews. To be sure, writing about x in a film because x offers opportunities to turn a clever phrase is a temptation facing every reviewer, but I think that Powell’s verbal wit, besides being enjoyable, was from the start an efficient way of explaining things.

Take the phrase she applied to the fashion models in Antonioni’s Blowup, “orchidaceous model girls drooping in hothouse groups.” This is a lovely, quick summing up of the artifice of the film’s mise-en-scène, not to mention the languor and preciousness of the models themselves. “The exquisite design of the interiors,” her review goes on, “strengthens the sense of a struggle between reality and illusion; with its cascade of lilac-coloured backdrop paper and its glimmering sheets of glass, the photographer’s studio…seems to be a masquerade of reality.”

Powell reviewed Blowup in 1967. To watch the film now is to behold, as in an archeological museum, artifacts of a London that seems nearly as bygone as Knossos. The playfulness about reality and make-believe, the indulgence in whimsy, the worship of youth, the tolerance of or even preference for ambiguity—all the 1960s themes are there onscreen. Antonioni’s famous imaginary tennis match played without racquets or balls, pantomimed into convincing existence by proto-hippies, perfectly sums up the cultural moment. David Hemmings is excellent as the film’s main representative of this moment, a photographer who happens to stray outside the fashion hothouse only...

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