The Powell/Pressburger season at London’s BFI Southbank has given us this rediscovered gem from the later works that Michael Powell directed on his own. It is an amazing and expressionist-hallucinatory adaptation of Béla Bartók’s one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle, with original libretto by film critic and theorist Béla Balázs; it was first transmitted in 1963 on West German television, but mostly unseen since then, due to legal issues with the Bartók estate. Now it has been restored under the supervision of Powell’s widow Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese.
Bluebeard’s Castle was originally to be the first part of a double bill directed by Powell; the other half being Bartók’s nightmarish cabaret ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, about a young girl forced by three sinister figures to perform seductive dances at a window to lure men in from the street to their doom. That second part was abandoned, but it’s intriguing to think what Powell would have made of it, and how Bluebeard and Mandarin would have illuminated each other.
