The Spy in Black Michael Powell, script: Emeric Pressburger (UK; 1939)
The Spy in Black Michael Powell, script: Emeric Pressburger (UK; 1939) Conrad Veidt, Valerie Hobson
viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 1st June 2025; ticket: £7
another good German
Powell’s ‘Spy in Black’ for most of its duration is an exercise in intensities: cinematic intensities and relational intensities. At the core of the intensity is the transgressive nature of what we are viewing and in a sense its normalisation in the very act of film making.
In ‘The Spy in Black’ (Spy) there are significant echoes of Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’ which he made some 20 years later. Both films are built around rogue anti-heroes, quasi sympathetic protagonists whose actions violate society’s moral code, but whose characters do not conform to the expected negative cinematic stereotypes. Both films have German lead actors.
In ‘Spy’ the unwritten code that Powell breaks is that of representing in a positive light the German Officer, Hardt, a secret agent trying to carry out a master plan to destroy the British fleet in Scarp Flow during the First World War. (Day of the Jackal another example of strong transgressive protagonist) Hardt is depicted as a career naval officer, committed to serving his country. The film opens with a sequence in Kiel where action against the British fleet is being planned. In a restaurant used by German military personnel, the conversation and good natured bonhomie of the enemy officers is depicted no differently from that which might have been used to portray Royal Navel officers in a British pub. The German officers are humorous sardonic and honourable men discussing the war in a professional way consistent with their duty to advance their nation’s cause. Given the general demonisation of Germans both during and after WWl (and in 1939 war with Germany was expected imminently) to be a German was equated with being ‘other’. The positive aspects of Hardt’s character as drawn by Powell represents an inspired piece of reverse protagonist creativity. The disassociation between character attributes and character role builds into the script a dynamic of inner tension that is left for the audience to resolve.
Similarly Mark as protagonist of ‘Peeping Tom’ is a creation comprising a similar dissociative relationship between character and actions. With his accent Mark (played by Karl Boehm) establishes himself as a German. in other words he, like Hardy is ‘other’. It must have been important to Powell for Mark to be identified, marked out as German. We have a biography for Mark because this is key part of the script. As Mark was born and raised in England his German accent can only be an artifice that was necessarily decided upon by Powell. Powell obviously wanted Mark to be taken by the audience as a German. The question is why? At one level perhaps he might have felt the audience would find the film more acceptable if the serial killer was equated with a demonised nation; or perhaps it was Powell’s way of codifying Mark’s otherness; or perhaps Powell projected onto German identity a quasi romantic twisted vision – a vision of ‘being pre-doomed’ with which in some part of his character Powell himself also identified.
From the first opening sequence of ‘Peeping Tom’, shot mostly from Mark’s point of view as he murders his first victim, a prostitute, we understand we are in the presence of a cold killer. But Mark, as a killer, is belied by the character he presents in his daily life. Mark’s a loner but he’s also kind considerate and can be seen as lacking self confidence. The audience understand that he’s schizo, driven to kill by the arousal of an obsessive drive, scripted with some of the same dissociative characteristics as Hardt. Mark’s representation gives ‘Peeping Tom’ a spring loaded tensility that drives the narrative for the audience.
Central to the scripts of both ‘Peeping Tom’ and ‘Spy’ are forbidden relationships, relationships between a German man and classic English rose type women. Neither of the women, Helen in ‘Peeping Tom’ and Tiel in ‘Spy’ are victims, they are simply mesmerised by the dark attraction of the ‘other’. Interestingly both women are in positions of superiority to the men: Helen’s the daughter of Mark’s landlady, Tiel is Hardt’s superior officer. In the plot twist Tiel’s revealed as a double agent. She is working for the British not the Germans. But whatever hat she is wearing, her attributes always suggest a quintessential Britishness.
The red room and the black room. The heightened erotics of ‘Peeping Tom’ take place in Mark’s ‘ photography darkroom, a room saturated in red that invokes blood death and sex. The erotics of Spy take place in the noir chiaroscuro interior of the ‘safe house’. Being a 1930’s film explicit depiction is restrained but the kiss between Tiel and Hardt and the development of the scene leading up to it are marked by an intensity that presages “Peeping Tom’. Rooms for torture, rooms for forbidden relationships.
Virginal sweet English rose women abound in British movies: in effect they are angels. They evince certain types of attributes: women whose role is act as counterweight to the male protagonist’s often destructive instincts (and actions) in their unabashed femininity they draw attention to the voice and presence of the vulnerable, acting as a consciousness representing the dispossessed, caring for the male and nursing them; all the archetypal stereotypical female roles. And they appear frequently in Powell and Pressburger’s films: I know where I’m Going, One of Our Aircraft is Missing, A Matter of Life and Death. But buried in the scripts and acting out of both ‘Spy’ and ‘Peeping Tom’ is the idea of violation, an impulse to effect a desecration of a lynchpin of the British film industry.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk