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The Spy in Black.Michael Powell knew where he was going. From the first day he set foot in a movie studio at nineteen and was put to work sweeping the floor, he had no doubts about his life’s purpose. “I just knew I was a director, and couldn’t understand why people didn’t stand in line to offer me a film,” Powell wrote of his presumptuous younger self. By 1938, he was a rising young filmmaker under contract to producer Alexander Korda, with the prospect of directing the great German star Conrad Veidt in a World War I thriller, The Spy in Black (1939), set against the mist-shrouded cliffs and basalt columns of the Orkney Islands. On reading the original script, however, he found it flat and lackluster, full of the “pleasant British dialogue scenes” he despised. Then, at a story conference arranged by Korda, he listened to a...

The Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 was put into effect in the late 1920s in order to promote growth in the British film industry. Beginning in 1928 it imposed a quota on the amount of British films that needed to be exhibited and distributed. While on paper the system was a success, with most distributors and exhibitors easily meeting the imposed quotas, the truth was that the majority of these films were made cheaply and poorly. As the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 did not stipulate any measure of quality in their demands, a large majority of these projects were stilted and unwatchable, they were often referred to as “quota quickies”. It is in this environment that Michael Powell, now regarded as among the very best British filmmakers, emerged.

Powell began his film career in the mid-1920s after abandoning his job at a bank. He began as a stagehand on a project...