Blogging By Cinema-light: November 2024

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (David Hinton, 2024) The Cohen Media Group is getting more than their fare share of attention from me the last few weeks. In addition to Merchant Ivory and another documentary I'll be writing about in August next year, they've also released a nifty little overview about the film career of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and we're using the singular "career" as the two men formed a creative alliance called "The Archers" and, as such, made some of the more arresting, deep-dish films that came out of England during the 1940's and 1950's. Because they were made in England, some of them are not so widely known as the Hollywood product—in fact, most people got their first looks at them in the early days of television, something of a technological crime, really, as some of these vividly Technicolor films could only be viewed on black-and-white television receivers. That's certainly how Martin Scorsese first encountered them—watching them on TV growing up. And those films were his Rosetta Stone for understanding what movies could do, what they were capable of and how they were art. But, they also influenced Coppola (some of Coppola's more fantastical images are based on their work or at least the "spirit" of them), De Palma, and I would dare say Hitchcock was looking over his shoulder at them, as well.*

I've done individual reviews of early "Archers" movies (including the first five pictured above), but I've missed quite a few of them and this documentary does exactly what it ought to do: whet the appetite to see the unseen. And it reminds you of what made the things great that you have experienced—moments that might have got by you while you were immersed in the story or plot. Now, I really want to see A Canterbury Tale, Gone to Earth and The Tales of Hoffman. Even odd entries like Oh...Rosalinda!, Pursuit of the Graf Spree, and The Queen's Guards. Gee, I even want to see the episode of the American TV series "The Defenders" Powell directed.

Pressburger and Powell couldn't be more different as people—different temperaments, different backgrounds—but they brought out the best in each other and raised the bar for cinematic expressiveness amid emotional repression that veered between the manic and the imperceptible. Plus, they were capable of making movie magic as far as design and effects that veered on the magical. Or the insane. And they were an intertwined team: Pressburger wrote the story and the two would hammer out the script. Together, they'd cast and Powell would direct (with Pressburger on set if changes to the script needed to be made). Powell would go off to Scotland, while Pressburger supervised editing and music. Pressburger dealt with the studios. Powell dealt with cast and crew.

And they had a manifesto:

We owe allegiance to nobody except the financial interests which provide our money; and, to them, the sole responsibility of ensuring them a profit, not a loss.
Every single foot in our films is our own responsibility and nobody else's. We refuse to be guided or coerced by any influence but our own judgement.
When we start work on a new idea, we must be a year ahead, not only of our competitors, but also of the times. A real film, from idea to universal release, takes a year. Or more.
No artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for other reasons than her nakedness.
At any time, and particularly at the present, the self-respect of all collaborators, from star to propman, is sustained, or diminished, by the theme and purpose of the film they are working on.

As a primer on all things "Archers" it's a cracker-jack presentation, audited, guided, and presented by Martin Scorsese (who executive-produced). As he's done with a lot of his film documentaries, it's "a personal journey" talking of how he found movies by "The Archers" playing on New York television channels—as mentioned in black-and-white—and his discovery of the films in color, his friendship and correspondence with Powell in his later years, and the influences on his films throughout his own directorial career, even illustrating with comparative clips.

If the film has a flaw, it is that there's a little too much of that. Showing the one clip from Raging Bull—or any one film sequence where the aesthetic applies—would have been enough. We believe you, Marty, "The Archers" were a BIG influence. But, the point doesn't need to be made more than once, and the time spent on other instances would rightly have been better spent on the work of the gentlemen the movie is about, as their films are the ones that need exposure.

But, I suppose...with a younger audience, there needed to be some additional hand-holding in explaining that Powell and Pressburger's work is evergreen, that it is still culturally and artistically significant no matter how many young turks get behind a movie camera. And how timeless.

* Over the last few weeks, seeing documentaries and such, you can see the close visual proximity that some of these movies shared at the times of their creation, and one starts to see films echoing off each other rather than single films in the work of one particular artist. These people were visual artists—they watched things, studies the eddies of the art and the business—and you can't help but see comparisons between them.

Sunday, November 10, 2024

Don't Make a Scene: The Remains of the Day

The Story: You look at Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay for The Remains of the Day and...you're amazed. It's just the dialogue with a minimum of description. No direction (James Ivory did that). No description of the room (the art department did that) or what people are wearing (costumers...). It's as simple as could be. The scene, its location and the dialog. That's it. Everybody else did their jobs.

Like the actors. Emma Thompson wasn't quite "getting it" that day, evidently, and Anthony Hopkins said something to her that clicked. She recounts the story in the documentary Merchant Ivory:

"I remember that day very well, because I came in in a sort of tension. I was heightened and I came in. We played it a couple times, and I thought 'Well...not quite working.' I said 'Ton' I don't know, I'm not quite getting this' and he said...Tony said 'It's one of those afternoons that there's a very tired bee...buzzing around (or a fly actually, nothing so romantic as a bee), against the glass, occasionally hitting it....bzzzzz....bzz. It's a sleepy afternoon. He's reading. You come in. You have no intentions. Relax. And let's see what happens.' And then what happens is this extraordinarily sex-ual, erotic moment where at the end of each "take" you know, I felt quite faint. Quite faint. And, of course, Ton'...the way he looks not at her eyes but her mouth. And then the hand comes down and you think he's going to touch her. But, he never does...It's a towering performance, absolutely...it's perfect."

We can talk motivations, we can talk cultures, we can talk about all sorts of things about why she does what she does and he does what he does. But, it's fascinating in the macro (his embarrassment about the book and his privacy and his being typed up with his job of service) and the micro (his eyes flit from her eyes to her mouth to her scalp and finally, while she's clawing at the book and his fingers, simply opens up his hand and allows her to have it). It is as counter to Hollywood romantic tradition as could be, yet it is charged with sexual and emotional tension. And it's large drama built with tiny, infinitesimal gestures.

"If your heart isn't broken by that scene, it will not be broken by anything," says John Pym, Associate Editor of "Sight and Sound" magazine.

"My God, he was good in that film!" Hugh Grant enthuses in Merchant Ivory about that scene. "If someone said to me show me perfect film acting, I'd show them Tony Hopkins in Remains of the Day and, in fact, The Remains of the Day is one of the best films I've ever seen, let alone been in."

The Set-Up: James Stevens (Anthony Hopkins) serves Darlington Hall, the estate of the Earl of Darlington (James Fox) and has known nothing else, as his father (Peter Vaughan) has also served there faithfully. He hires Miss Sarah Kenton (Emma Thompson) to be the Darlington housekeeper, and although the two are equally efficient, they are like fire and ice. Still, over time and over duty, the two begin to warm to each other and anticipate their actions and reactions.

Action.