The startlingly original British film-maker Michael Powell was against the flow at a time when everyone else was falling into step. His movies still have a remarkably distinctive way about them. Here are the most memorable, although anything he touched was worth seeing.
    The 49th Parallel was 1941 propaganda piece that follows a group of Nazi sailors from a landing party stranded in Canada when their U-boat is sunk. As they try to make their way to the neutral USA, the generosity of the simple folk undermines their discipline and, when only the hard liners survive, they are thwarted by three fine examples of the very people they feel themselves superior to - a simple-minded outcast, a decadent author and a  Yankee hobo - played respectively by Laurence Olivier, Leslie Howard and Raymond Massey. Eric Portman is terrific as the toughest Nazi.
    Powell had the temerity to make a big budget anti-war film in Britain in 1943 - the movie Winston Churchill hated most. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp told of the enduring friendship between two army officers - one British and the other German - through three wars (Boer, WWI & WWII). It suggested the British could fight unfairly and that Nationalism and military discipline are bunk. The title character was based on a comic strip deploying the Home Guard to laugh at the foibles of wartime bureaucracy. In each war, Blimp loves and loses a different woman, all of them played by Deborah Kerr. Roger Livesly and Anton Walbrook were equally outstanding. The upshot is that the good-hearted Colonel learns that his ideas of chivalry and honour are out of date, and his whole life devoted to the military has been wasted.
    Black Narcissus was a visually stunning tale of a group of nuns struggling to survive at a remote Himalayan monastery, headed by Deborah Kerr. Continually battered by the ceaseless wind in their lofty domain, they are equally tormented by the customs of the locals, their own failing morale and struggles with faith, and it all culminates when sexual frustration transforms one of them into a homicidal maniac. Flora Robson, Kathleen Byron (as the nutter) and David Farrar as the only local white man, ably backed up Kerr’s strong performance while Sabu was feeble and Jean Simmons hopelessly miscast as a native princess. But it was the mountains and the wind and the extraordinary building clinging to a thousand foot cliff-face that dominated proceedings.
    There aren’t too many films about ballet that I like. (There aren’t too many about nuns and Nazis either) but The Red Shoes tells of how a promoter (Anton Walbrook) destroys the career and life of his greatest prodigy (Moira Shearer) by means of falling in love with her. Robert Helpmann supported them with a fine self-parody.
    And Peeping Tom, a very brave and very ugly (in fact quite repulsive) but somehow engrossing film about a photographer-murderer obsessed with the idea of capturing the image of the moment of death on his victim’s faces. Probably taught Hitchcock a good deal about the pitfalls to avoid when he made Psycho a year later. A peeping tom, by the way, is named after the only bloke in town with the depravity to perve on Lady Godiva as she rode by.

It was a desperate game of cat and mouse and slowly everyone became aware of it. One by one they began to forget their own grievances and revenges and turn their eyes and minds toward the merciless game being played out in front of them. They shouted at Myopic, calling him rat and snake and arsehole, and he behaved like all three, darting back and forth along the ranks, trying to find ways to slither through their legs, trying to make himself as small and forgettable as possible. It was one tiny insignificant figure against the whole school, and they formed two solid walls, each of five hundred boys, between which he was trapped. While I, the predator, stalked him coldly.