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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.