For any film lovers who grew up on, generationally depending, the cinema of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, or the essential ’90s cinephile primer “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies” — or both, as for this writer — “Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger” arrives as an unmitigated treat.
A straightforwardly constructed documentary trawl through the dizzy highs and sporadic lows of the most iridescently fabulous filmography in British cinema, David Hinton‘s film would be plenty pleasurable as a mere feature-length clip reel. That it gets longtime Powell and Pressburger champion Martin Scorsese to narrate the proceedings, with the same blend of scholarly authority and avuncular enthusiasm he brought to “Personal Journey,” makes the doc more than the sum of its already attractive parts: a movingly sincere valentine from a filmmaker now due his own equivalent tributes, shortening the distance between youthful discovery and senior nostalgia.
In the U.K., “Made in England” arrives neatly on the heels of a recent spike in public awareness and exhibition of the duo’s work, following a British Film Institute retrospective last fall, and nationwide re-releases of “The Red Shoes” and “Peeping Tom.” (Six of their titles, meanwhile, placed in Sight & Sound magazine’s 2022 edition of their Greatest Films of All Time poll.) But if Hinton’s film will likely find its most appreciative audience on home turf, Scorsese’s presence — paired with a chatty, linear approach that is welcoming to non-experts while still providing plenty of nuggets for aficionados — makes it a cinch for global specialist distribution, as well as ample further festival spots, following its Berlinale premiere.
For it is, as Scorsese points out, his own generation of American filmmakers and cineastes that began the rehabilitation of Powell and Pressburger’s reputation when they fell drastically out of favor with the British industry in the 1960s — after Powell’s radical, solo-directed psychothriller “Peeping Tom” was roundly excoriated by a prudish national press. Scorsese, he explains, arrived at their work “without cultural baggage,” having first encountered 1940’s delirious Technicolor fantasy “The Thief of Bagdad” (only co-directed by Powell, minus Pressburger, but indicative of his extravagant visual imagination) as a child on his family’s grainy black-and-white television set. This compromised experience was enough to mint a loyal fandom that evolved into friendship when, as a young filmmaker, Scorsese sought out the elusive Powell as a mentor.
This personal connection — Powell eventually married Scorsese’s longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker, here credited as an executive producer — naturally colors the American director’s affectionate narration, though not at the expense of insight, or candor regarding the duo’s occasional artistic failures. Well-chosen archival interview footage, meanwhile, ensures Powell and Pressburger get their own, frequently wry voice in the matter, while an abundance of clips from their work, running the gamut from canonized to obscure, speak for themselves. At 133 minutes, the doc runs long but never dull, given the generosity of attention lavished on almost the entire Powell and Pressburger filmography. If there’s any scope for trimming, it’s in a celebratory introduction that largely gets recapped as the film progresses.
Before launching into a film-by-film analysis, Scorsese’s narration fills in some essential biographical details: Powell’s entry into filmmaking as a gofer for director Rex Ingram at Victorine Studios in Nice, graduating to helming “quota quickies” for American producer Jerry Jackson, and the Jewish Hungarian Pressburger’s flight to Britain from Nazi Germany, where he’d cut his teeth as a screenwriter at Berlin’s UFA studio. Brought together by British-Hungarian producer Alexander Korda, the pair first collaborated on a mutual hire job, the 1939 thriller “The Spy in Black,” before 1941’s taut anti-Nazi war drama “49th Parallel” became a hit, making their name as a team and winning Pressburger a writing Oscar. At that point, they split directing and writing credits between them; those became shared after they formed their own production company, The Archers, in 1943.
Thus began the duo’s golden age, spanning such films as “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” a romantic anti-war epic said to have rubbed Winston Churchill the wrong way (“Not a very good film critic,” says Pressburger drily of the former Prime Minister); the heart-clutching afterlife fantasy “A Matter of Life and Death”; the sensualist convent psychodrama “Black Narcissus”; and the luminous, fairytale-riffing ballet tragedy “The Red Shoes.” Scorsese speaks of these coruscating landmarks with still-rapt awe, occasionally drawing attention to the influence of their editing, music and color work on his own films — the red light that sometimes floods “Mean Lights” is a direct Powell and Pressburger tribute, he notes, though Powell himself thought it overkill.
But Scorsese is equally attentive to the more modest, monochrome genre films that filled out their filmography, the wistful romantic comedy “I Know Where I’m Going!” and the bristly wartime noir “The Small Back Room” among them, while detailed passages on lesser-loved works demonstrate the full extent of his devotion. In particular, a substantial section on 1950’s neo-romantic rural folk odyssey “Gone to Earth” — an unhappy collaboration with American super-producer David O. Selznick, who extensively reshot and recut it for the U.S. market — will send the unacquainted rushing to seek a copy, on the strength of Scorsese’s besotted analysis and some ravishing, mist-laced scene selections.
Later flops like “Oh Rosalinda!” and “Ill Met By Moonlight” are harder for even Scorsese to sell, but are thoughtfully placed in the context of a career buffeted by industry trends, while “Peeping Tom” is given a reverent appraisal in line with its reclaimed-classic status. “When did the British ever appreciate their greatest men?” says a tongue-in-cheek Powell, beside a cringing Pressburger, in a droll 1980s interview clip taken around the time they received a BAFTA Fellowship. That award signified their gradual re-embrace by a local industry that had once spurned them, toward an uncontested master status that this bright, doting documentary underlines. With genial, nerdy assurance, Scorsese reminds us he was on that page all along.
