Made in England: the Films of Powell and Pressburger

 Made in England:  The Films of Powell and Pressburger is a BBC documentary featuring Martin Scorsese as "presenter."  The picture is essentially an anthology of highlights from Powell and Pressburger movies produced in England between the late thirties and about 1960 -- there are also a couple of notes on some movies made by the two men outside of their famous collaboration.  These pictures are so extraordinary and visually opulent that it is a pleasure to revisit them and Martin Scorsese's ardent commentary is often acute and interesting, casting light on his own films which are also excerpted in the documentary.  There is more about Scorsese's life and cinephilia in the picture than there is biographical information about Powell and Pressburger -- we are provided almost no information about their lives, marriages, children and things of that sort.  The movie's director (David Hinton) keeps the film steadfastly focused on the movies under consideration.  Scorsese is shot facing the camera in a full-frontal portrait, appearing in somewhat gloomy-looking screening room.  It's a cliche that demonstrates that this movie about supremely imaginative filmmakers is itself singularly unimaginative and, rather, plodding in its approach to the material.  The picture slogs through the Powell and Pressburger repertoire in chronological fashion, showing classic and memorable sequences from their films with Scorsese's comments interpolated.  There is no voice-over and Scorsese, although eloquent isn't particularly penetrating in his remarks nor is he profound. Clearly, these movies mean so much to the director that he regards their merits, and their technical achievements, as self-explanatory -- the Powell and Pressburger films are monuments and, therefore, accorded monumental status.  The film is a delight because of the clips from the movies, presented fully restored and in glorious black and white as well as technicolor, but it feels longer than its 136 minutes. 

Scorsese first saw these movies in disfigured versions in black-and-white (and cropped) on television.  But he was able to intuit their poetic qualities.  The curious imprimatur on these films:  productions of Powell & Pressburger with neither man given precedence is explained in some short interview clips from the film's subjects:  Pressburger who was Hungarian and Jewish wrote the pictures and devised the structure of the films; the two men collaborated on the dialogue; Powell directed photography, set direction, and editing.  Clearly, some sort of alchemy was at work because the whole is greater than the parts:  Powell seems a shy, reticent, and plain-spoken English country squire, a hail fellow with vibrantly ruddy cheeks. (In the sixties, when he had fallen out of favor, he was living in poverty in a cottage in Kent and spending a lot of time in his "Caravan" -- that is, a mobile camper wagon.)  Pressburger looks like an accountant gone to seed --he wears horn-rimmed glasses and unkempt hair and he speaks with an accent that makes him sound like Bela Lugosi.  Powell's style is intensely visual -- part of the peculiar aura cast by these movies is that the mise-en-scene is essentially that used in silent pictures:  the story is told visually in a collage of intricately edited shots, montage that looks like it could have been devised by Pabst or, even, Griffith or Abel Gance; this footage is punctuated with enormous close-ups of faces (often looming, short reaction shots) that are both beautiful and grotesque -- characters wear too much make-up, their eyes are unnaturally huge, and they are surrealistically expressive.  There is a certain "look" to a Powell and Pressburger film, I think, arising from the juxtaposition of shots of natural locations or sets, generally both beautiful and somewhat stylized, and the glaring eyes like high-beam headlights of the characters in the movies.  (Powell served his apprenticeship with Rex Ingram working in big French studios in Nice and his ultra-expressive way of staging movies clearly derives from lessons he learned on those silent film sets).  Scorsese links his use of color in Mean Streets with P & P's The Red Shoes; he traces some sequences in Raging Bull back to an elaborate scene setting up a duel of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943); Scorsese did the commentary on the Criterion disk of that picture.  Scorsese says that P & P's eccentric loners and uncompromising artists influenced his creation of Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle (he points to the obsessed Lermontov in The Red Shoes).  Scorsese, whose greatest pictures are, arguably, his highly staged and lyrically edited music documentaries (for instance The Last Waltz) has great admiration for Powell's "composed film" sequences -- for instance, a climactic scene in Black Narcissus in which two women fight on the edge of an abyss (the one woman has red swollen eyes like a vampire or zombie) fused with a soaring score.  This technique of editing film to music reaches its climax in the wild and grotesque phantasmagoria in Tales of Hoffmann.  Scorsese seems to regard P & P's WW2 pictures as profoundly moral, seeking a meaning in the chaos of the war while endorsing British common sense and values.  After those films (Colonel Blimp, 49th Parallel, A Canterbury Tale, and A Matter of Life and Death), the two men seem to have lost their way and the differences in their orientations toward film became more and more divergent -- Pressburger wanted to move in the direction of realism and seems to have endorsed stories that now seem to be proto-New Wave; Powell's imagination became more exuberant, surreal, and fantastical, culminating in the wildly lurid and intensely operatic The Red Shoes and, then, of course, his adaptation of an actual opera in surrealistically inventive and sinister Tales of Hoffmann.  It was this latter movie that wrecked the men's partnership.  The film's producer, Alexander Korda wanted to shorten the picture by radically cutting the last tale -- Powell protested but Pressburger implied that he agreed with the critique.  After that dispute, the pair made a couple of additional movies but they are said to be bland and stolid:  O Rosalinda, Ill Met by Moonlight, and The Battle of the River Plate.  After parting, Powell made one final transgressive masterpiece on his own, Peeping Tom, an alarming meta-film about the dangers of voyeurism and sadism in the movies, and, then, after another couple of cheaply made final pictures, more or less went silent.  By this point, P & P, largely forgotten in their native Britain, were ripe for reevaluation -- Powell, in particular, had been so viciously maligned by critic for Peeping Tom, that his career was in ruins in the U.K.  American directors like Brian de Palma, Scorsese, of course, and Francis Ford Coppola presided over a revival of their films and Powell actually married Scorsese's editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.  Scorsese was a close friend to Powell for more than 15 years and says that he talked to him daily.  Scorsese emotionally tells us that Powell's support helped him through hard times, particularly after he made The King of Comedy, a departure from the director's previous very expressionistic films that was initially baffling to many critics.  

The documentary is a tribute and Scorsese is passionate and eloquent.  To some extent, the movie ignores some P & P's extreme eccentricity -- consider for instance, the subplot involving an assailant fetishist hacking off women's hair in A Canterbury Tale, or the elaborate debate about American versus English culture in A Matter of Life and Death or, for that matter, the strange pastoral idyll in that film with a naked shepherd playing a panpipe to his animals as the bedraggled David Niven staggers across the meadow; Colonel Blimp ends with a very peculiar and digressive coda about subterranean water in bombed-out London.  Every major P & P production contains some sequences that doesn't exactly fit, something discordant and even eerie -- at least, as far as I am concerned, the documentary give short shrift to this aspect of these men's work. 

It's best for viewers, particularly those who don't know P & P, to take note of the film's cited in picture and seek out these movies.  I know that I will try to find an opportunity to see a Powell and Pressburger film that I didn't know about, The Small Back Room (1949), an example of a hyper-realist post-war picture that seems to be a combination of the The Best Years of our Lives and a film noir.  If this film, encourages you to watch Powell and Pressburger's great pictures, it will have served its purpose, whatever it's limitations.