The Battle of the River Plate
(a.k.a. Pursuit of the Graf Spee)
1956

The Battle of the River Plate

With this film, the Powell Pressburger team return to WWII and would do so in their next film Ill Met by Moonlight (Night Ambush) (1957). Battle of the River Plate is set on the Atlantic and in Uraguay while Ill Met by Moonlight uses Crete as its location. So like many of the Powell Pressburger films, the location is not England in whole or in part (Scotland – Spy in Black, I know Where I’m Going) or even Britain (Black Narcissus, Tales of Hoffman, Red Shoes, 49th Parallel etc.)

Powell and Pressburger were invited in 1954 by Peron to go to Argentina to attend a festival of European Cinema in Buenos Aires. Given their current problems, they were somewhat unhappy about going back to the “glory days” of Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, but they were big names in Latin America. They decided not to go unless they could find a “positive reason to go” that is to say, there was a film in it. Pressburger did not come up with an “original script” (that is a story drawn from nothing, nor did he look for some novel to “translate” into a film. Rather he looked to history and found a famous battle from WWII that wound up in Uraguay in a famous naval encounter called The Battle of the River Plate (River Plate is the British name for Rio de la Plata in Uraguay) and they decided that was close enough.

The encounter involved 3 smaller slower British vessels taking on the larger faster Admiral Graf Spee (Graf=Count or Earl - named for Vice Admiral Maximilian Reichsgraf von Spee, a count and Admiral of WWI). The ship Admiral Graf Spee was a German Panzerschiff (literally “armored ship” a class of ships often referred to as “pocket battle ships”). The British saw it as a story of British bravery and heroism and honor against odds (although some say a 3 to 1 battle really has the odds in the other direction)

A film which sets as its main focus the movement of ships in the oceans is not likely to be terribly interesting unless some human factors can be found. As a result, Pressburger interviewed a number of the surviving naval officers and sailors who had been involved in the battle. One had a copy of a memoir called “I was a Prisoner on the Graf Spee” written by a Captain named Patrick Dove whose ship was one of 9 torpedoed and sunk by the Graf Spee. While he was on board the ship he came to know and even admire and respect the Commanding officer Hans Wilhelm Langsdorff. This was the peg on which Pressburger could hang his human story. Like Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, the German officer is not stereotyped in a cartoon Nazi or Hun.

While this was going on, the Archers were making Oh Rosalinda!! (with two exclamation points, outdoing Oklahoma! By one). This was a filmed version of what may be the most famous operetta in the world, Johann Straus’ comic operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat). The film bombed with critics and crowds alike who were now totally into realism and violently opposed to anything that deviated from it.

So with that disaster behind them, 1955 saw the duo start on the production of The Battle of the River Plate. They filmed at Pinewood and went to Montevideo to film some of the scenes in the film (one ni Manelo’s bar and the crowd scenes at the harbor). Michael apparently enjoyed filming there more than Emeric. It gave him his location shots he liked so much.

The last two of the Archer’s films, this one and Ill Met by Moonlight parallel their first two films. They deal with war time, they deal with friendships across borders and cultures, they deal with places that are foreign.

In many ways, they repeat the themes of Spy in Black and Contraband, but for most Powell Pressburger fans, they lack the originality and drive of the originals. AFTER THE FILM

This is the first film we have seen of the Powell/Pressburger films shot in widescreen. Actually Oh, Rosalina!! was also shot in wide screen 2.35:1 (35 mm “Cinemascope) although this is 1.85:1 (35mm widescreen). This helps the film with its naval battle scenes which are dramatic (albeit dated)

The partnership between Powell and Pressbruger (like the financial situation of London films) was becoming shakey. They were moving apart artistically this was not an ego clash.

MacDonald writing of the film says “It is leaden. The script is a pale, cosmeticized reflection with none of the novelty of form, character or theme that distinguishes Emeric’s best work. The structure is sound, classical and in three acts. The dialog is circumscribed by the necessity of having to divulge too many dull naval details, the characterization is competent but clichéd (as opposed to humanized ironic archetypes of earlier work). The direction is static (with endless stagey tableaux on the foredecks of the British ships) and flat (partly the result again of Arthur Lawson’s designs –Hein Heckroth had returned to Germany. Everything is done in wide shots – fine if your actors are at ease, but these are stiff as plywood. The only tangible energy comes in the documentary style shots of the ships manoeuvers.”

Part of the problem doubtless lies with the inability to keep the story focused on an interpersonal relationship as happens in Spy in Black and Contraband. The Dove/Langsdorff relationship which dominates “Act I” seems to vanish for the rest of the film. The relationships between the captured crew members (a sort of an early Hogan’s Heroes) and the battle at sea seem to be what Act II is about Act III takes place in Uraguay.

In terms of filming the opening shots dealing with the sinking of Dove’s ship and his movement on board are dramatic (if not reminiscent of 49th Parallel);

Some nice contrasts are made between the light hearted carnival atmosphere in Montevideo and the rather heavy discussions about the ship.

Despite this criticism it was in fact well received by the public probably because it was closer than anything else they had done in past years to the public’s taste for realism. The film was a commercial, if not critical success. Powell and Pressburger were always proud of the film implying that their main consideration was not “art” but “popularity”. MacDonald calls them “an uneasy combination of the showman and the artist”