This year marks the 40th anniversary of Michael Powell’s Age of Consent – not one of his great films, admittedly, but of interest for its cast and its problems with the censors.
In the late 1960s, Michel Powell’s reputation was in the gutter – where his film Peeping Tom belonged, according to one reviewer. It was a fallow period for him that became more fertile with a visit to Australia in 1966 to make They’re a Weird Mob, which set in motion a new interest in Australian cinema that peaked in the 1970s with films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, Breaker Morant and Walkabout.
Always the restless traveller, Powell headed down under again to make a film of Norman Lindsay’s novel Age of Consent. Powell’s former writing partner Emeric Pressburger had written the script for They’re a Weird Mob under the pseudonym of Richard Imrie but was not involved with Age of Consent.
The film’s star and co-producer was James Mason, with whom Powell had not worked previously, though Mason was cast as Torquil in I Know Where I’m Going! in 1944 before withdrawing because, as Powell put it, he “didn’t propose to play boy scouts for anybody” by enduring the rough wartime conditions on a remote Scottish outpost.
Age of Consent explores the theme of art and the artist, a motif that occurs frequently in Powell’s work. Later, the director felt that “the only failure of Age of Consent was that the artist himself was not original enough.” But he could never be modest for too long. Age of Consent has a delicious scene in which a dog puts on its own collar – “one of the best scenes I’ve ever made,” reckoned Powell.
There were some problems with the British censor about the opening bedroom scene between Mason and Clarissa Kaye, who enjoyed their time together so much that they were married in 1971. The censor also objected to the amount of flesh shown by 22-year old Royal Shakespeare Company actress Helen Mirren. Powell called it “a painter’s nudity” but cuts were made to avoid the difficult ‘X’ certificate, introduced by the Board of British Film Censors in 1951 to exclude under-16s. To Mason and Powell’s astonishment, the film was nonetheless distributed on the Rank circuit alongside an ‘X’ film.
Even without the censorship, it was challenging to have an Australian film accepted in the UK and US markets. The critical response was as cool as an English summer, with the mixed tone of the film leaving viewers indifferent. The Observer’s critic Penelope Mortimer sniffed, “I tremendously admire James Mason and I believed, until I saw Age of Consent, that he could do no wrong… It is best forgiven and forgotten.” There is much to enjoy in Age of Consent – Mason’s portrayal of the Gauguin-like artist who escapes the city to pursue a simpler life; the relationship between an older man and a much younger woman that recalls Mason’s earlier film Lolita; Helen Mirren’s luminous beauty; and the dog collar scene. But Mortimer’s assessment is fair enough.
Age of Consent was more or less the end of the road for Powell. Three years later he made The Boy Who Turned Yellow and then that was it. He never directed another film.
