Mythologized artists receive a restrained overview in Made In England: The Films Of Powell & Pressburger

Michael Powell was born in the coastal English county of Kent. He started in the silent-era film industry of the 1920s, working countless studio odd jobs before he was promoted, in the 1930s, to directing low-budget “quota quickies,” of which he made almost two dozen. His eventual creative partner, Emeric Pressburger, came from what had once been the Austro-Hungarian Empire by way of Germany, where he’d been a writer at the famous UFA film studio, and France, where he’d fled for reasons of rising Nazism. They met on the Alexander Korda-produced thriller The Spy In Black, which Powell had been hired to direct and Pressburger had been brought in to rewrite, and began the most celebrated and mythologized partnership in British film.

It appears to have been a meeting of sympathetic minds in which Powell’s quintessential Englishness, with its fondness for regional quirks and rugged country landscapes, was complemented by Pressburger’s ambitious plots and affection for fairy tales and theatrical enchantment. They formed their own production company (The Archers, with its distinctive bullseye logo), which gave them a remarkable, albeit inconsistent, level of artistic independence. They shared directing, producing, and writing credits, though, in fact, it was Powell who did the directing while Pressburger largely handled the writing.

Between 1939 and 1957, they would produce 18 features, works of eccentricity and heightened artifice in which emotion regularly supersedes realism. In the best of these films (among them such classics as Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, and A Matter Of Life And Death), we find characters with transcendent yearnings and destructive temptations; operatic fixations with passion and death; long passages of mysticism, delirium, fantasy, and strange eroticism; flights of fancy; bouts of the morbid and macabre; extended sequences of visual music in garishly bright Technicolor.

It’s something of a cliché to observe that these movies are a world unto themselves, with their own magic, and that in the context of the restrained British film industry of the time—and the demands of wartime propaganda and, later, postwar escapism—they appear visionary. Nonetheless, there was a period of time, roughly coinciding with the cinematically adventurous 1960s and ‘70s, when the films of Powell and Pressburger were critically neglected. (Pauline Kael, for one, dismissed them as “master purveyors of high kitsch.”) It wasn’t until the early 1980s that their work began to undergo a widespread reappraisal, thanks in no small part to the efforts of some diehard American fans of the New Hollywood generation.

That’s the simple version of the story, as presented in David Hinton’s Made In England: The Films Of Powell & Pressburger, a feature-length introduction to the Powell and Pressburger oeuvre executive-produced and narrated by Martin Scorsese, the most prominent of the aforementioned diehard American fans. As Scorsese explains, his relationship with these movies is personal, not only because of their formative influence, but because of his close friendship with Powell, which began in the mid-1970s. (Powell would eventually marry Scorsese’s longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, also credited as an executive producer.)

Out of all the major American filmmakers, Scorsese is probably the most comfortable and credible at being a film-history talking head, and anyone who has heard him talk about his favorite films in documentaries, interviews, or old DVD special features is probably familiar with the story (repeated here) of how he discovered cinema as an asthmatic child in postwar Little Italy, cooped up indoors watching broadcasts of British and Italian movies on his family’s little black-and-white TV. To the young Scorsese, Powell and Pressburger became “mythical beings” who made films of “grandeur, lush images, heightened emotions.”

What follows is a chronological overview of the major Powell and Pressburger films (along with some of Powell’s solo works), illustrated with extended clips; a trove of archival materials, including behind-the-scenes footage, newsreels, home movies, and excerpts from earlier interviews and documentaries; and clips of Powell-and-Pressburger-influenced sequences from Scorsese films like Raging Bull and The Age Of Innocence. The main focus is on the partnership’s “golden decade,” which spanned from 1941’s 49th Parallel, about a stranded U-boat crew trying to sneak across Canada, to their last full-on creative triumph, the phantasmagoric 1951 opera adaptation The Tales Of Hoffmann. The only film outside of that range to get the in-depth treatment is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Powell’s most famous solo effort, the perversely self-reflexive pre-Psycho proto-slasher Peeping Tom.

Though much is made (as it should be) of the duo’s bold and unconventional artistic decisions in The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp and A Matter Of Life And Death, Made In England still finds room to explore the less stylized likes of A Canterbury Tale and I Know Where I’m Going!, black-and-white mid-1940s productions whose virtues don’t lend themselves to outrageous clips, but which seem to hold a special place in Scorsese’s heart. Later, the under-discussed, David O. Selznick-meddled Gone To Earth is described as a “a gothic masterpiece,” and one wishes that Made In England made time for Scorsese to elaborate further.

There are, of course, omissions, some more curious than others. Powell’s final foray into filmed opera, an intensely expressionist adaptation of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle that was produced for West German TV in 1963, goes unmentioned, though it probably merits more discussion than the creaky Johann Strauss update Oh… Rosalinda!! (which gets the most polite of drubbings from Scorsese). Similarly unacknowledged are Powell and Pressburger’s later reunions on the comedy They’re A Weird Mob (which Pressburger wrote for Powell under a pseudonym) and the children’s film The Boy Who Turned Yellow—not important works by any stretch of the imagination, but probably worth a passing mention.

But that might be just a critic’s nitpicking. Much has been written and said about Powell and Pressburger’s art over the decades; the purpose of Made In England isn’t to offer novel or thorough analyses, but a collection of introductory insights and appreciations for viewers who have only a passing familiarity with the works in question. As such, it makes for an ironically modest, tasteful tribute to two filmmakers who, in their finest and most moving moments, were anything but restrained.