It's far from the glories of his partnership with Emeric Pressburger that produced The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, but Michael Powell's look at an artist recharging his creative batteries has its charms. Based on a novel by Norman Lindsay, the story will be familiar to fans of Sirens, the John Duigan film about Lindsay and his bevy of nude models posting in Australia's lush Blue Mountains. The scenery here is just as eye-catching, with Bradley Morahan (Powell's co-producer James Mason) decamping from New York to an island along Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Bradley allows nature to prick his muse, but its appearance of a young woman, Cora (the teenaged Helen Mirren, identified in the closing credits as a "member of the Royal Shakespeare Company") who really lights his fire. A comic subplot with Brad's drunken sot of a pal (Jack MacGowran) pursuing a local woman of some means, is pretty silly stuff, and the ending, with Cora's mean old granny conveniently out of the way and the young woman literally throwing herself at Brad, seems forced. But Powell elevates Lindsay's piffle into something intelligent and moving and, finally, rather autobiographical. The director had been wandering in the wilderness for a number of years following the failure of his scandalous Peeping Tom, and this film was his way of keeping his hand in. Sadly, whatever artistic success the fictional artist Brad gained managed to elude Powell.
