Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger

Martin Scorsese’s recent film on Powell and Pressburger, Made in England, is a tribute that stands out for its intelligence, enthusiasm and love, the qualities he so obviously admired in the two film-makers he was seeking to honour.  It gets to the heart of why the 1940s Powell and Pressburger films are beautiful and often profound. It will help people – whether they’re seeing the films for the first time or again after many times – to enjoy them all the more.

Credited as the director is David Hinton, who produced and directed a South Bank Show film on Michael Powell to mark the publication of the first volume of his autobiography in 1986, but it is the personal view of Scorsese that clearly drives what is in effect a very personal film-essay. In taking on such a project, he has a huge advantage. He is, after all, Martin Scorsese, one of the world’s most admired and influential directors, who can command the respect and the resources to make such a documentary with the minimum of compromise.

Explaining what caused him to fall in love with the films, Scorsese recalls the way he first encountered them, when as a boy growing up in 1950s New York he had to watch them on a small black-and-white TV with wonky reception. The extraordinary quality of the clips he uses to illustrate his film-essay – presumably from prints that his own Film Foundation has helped to restore to a state of pristine perfection – can be thought of as a compensation for that childhood deprivation. It’s tempting to see in Scorsese a little bit of the French aristocrat, Conductor 71, who in A Matter of Life and Death (1946) complains of the afterworld’s regrettable lack of Technicolor.

While I can understand why Scorsese chose not to dwell on the less successful post-1960 collaborations between Powell and Pressburger,  it is very strange that he does not mention their 1942 film, One of Our Aircraft is Missing. It is such an important landmark that it feels a little bit as if the film itself has gone missing. After all, it was the first to be made for their new production company, the Archers, and the first to feature that famous logo of the arrows thwacking into a target. Its success won them a contract with the Rank Organisation, which financed their subsequent films on a previously unimaginable scale.  The film is such a key moment of transition that I even wondered whether there was some mishap – an intransigent rights-holder maybe – that accounted for its absence.

A much more serious absence is Emeric Pressburger. In an appreciation that is weighted towards Powell, whom Scorsese got to know best, the fact of Pressburger’s importance is established but not much explained.  There is no sustained exploration of the creative dynamic between the two partners. While it must surely be Powell who is responsible for the technical, visual genius of the films, is it Pressburger to whom we should attribute their philosophical heart? I think so, but I would have liked to have known what Scorsese thought.

Made in England: it’s worth thinking about this title. Scorsese states that A Canterbury Tale (1944) was Powell and Pressburger’s ‘first flop’, but this wasn’t entirely true. The film they made immediately before, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), did well in Britain, but was a box-office failure on its first release in America, because its length and narrative complexity defied the expectations of its US distributor, United Artists, which cut the film savagely and, minimizing any mention of death or war, tried to sell it as a romantic drama.

Contrary to Hollywood’s idea of effective entertainment, Blimp could not have been made anywhere other than England.

Produced in a Britain at war by two film-makers with a profoundly European sensibility, Blimp was the product of British money doled out on an unprecedented scale. When that money disappeared, Powell and Pressburger began to struggle.  After they left the Rank Organisation, they got the backing of a  cash-strapped Alexander Korda, who looked to Hollywood to make up for his lack of British finance. The partnerships he arranged for them with the producers Sam Goldwyn and David Selznick, respectively on The Elusive Pimpernel (1950 – a remake of Korda’s 1934 film The  Scarlet Pimpernel) and Gone to Earth (1950) were extremely unhappy ventures, because they required Powell and Pressburger to conform to a Hollywood system of film-making that did not suit them.  Although their films were intended to appeal to an American audience – vitally so during the war – one of the marvels of the best Powell and Pressburger films is the way in which they seemed to grow organically out  of the soil of England without the artistic compromises that British film-makers so often made to win the American market.

The urgency of war and the nature of artistic creation were the themes that inspired their greatest work, but in the post-war years they struggled to remain relevant.  It was their failure to engage with the way that Britain was changing that led to them falling out of fashion in the 1960s. The often repeated assertion that Peeping Tom (1960) killed Michael Powell’s career seems to me to be a bit of an urban myth that Scorsese – I assume, out of his loyalty and respect for Powell – does not make any effort to challenge.

Powell and Pressburger worked on a couple of films together after Peeping Tom but they were rather disappointing ones – it is hard to get very excited over They’re a Weird Mob (1966) or The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972). While his contemporaries Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean and Carol Reed – much more in tune with the Hollywood way of making films – had big, successful movies in the 1960s, which helped to sustain their reputations, Powell had by this time become something of a Colonel Blimp himself, out of touch with the new age. It was not really surprising that from the 1960s he struggled to get the finance to make more than the handful of films he did, just as it was not surprising that the Powell and Pressburger films of their 1940s golden age were in the 1980s re-discovered and treasured again as they became more easily available through the advent of video. Powell was now an old man, who, looking a lot like Blimp himself (‘I identified completely with him,’ he told the South Bank Show), spent much of his time at his London club. But to quote from the wonderful Turkish Bath scene in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp at least he was able to say that forty years ago he was ‘a fellow of enterprise’.