Given the sense of wonder and promotion of emotion over reason that courses through Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s work, it’s appropriate that David Hinton’s Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger starts with a recollection of a defining childhood moment. The film’s narrator and one of its executive producers, Martin Scorsese describes himself as an asthmatic child confined indoors and thunderstruck by these old films he was seeing on television. Giddy with the memory of being a young boy accidentally coming across fantastical mindblowers like The Thief of Baghdad, Scorsese says there was simply “no better initiation” into what he calls “the mysteries of Michael Powell.”
The film that follows does a thoroughly commendable job of providing that same initiation for unwashed viewers. But because Made in England is structurally a somewhat staid illustrated lecture from Scorsese on Powell’s directing career, and to a lesser degree Powell’s frequent screenwriting collaborator Pressburger, Hinton’s documentary is hampered from the start. Still, the sheer enthusiasm generated by Scorsese and the rich tableau of work that he guides us through mostly makes up for the film’s Turner Classic Movies-style presentation.
Recalling what Scorsese himself did in his documentary My Voyage to Italy, Hinton frames Made in England as a personal journey for Marty. Describing being a young movie brat enraptured by Powell’s work in the ’70s (Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola were also members of the fan club), Scorsese says that he was shocked to find that this man he saw as a master artist had essentially been drummed out of the business after the critical thrashing he received for 1960’s Peeping Tom. Following a short section on Powell’s late-in-life rediscovery by cineastes (home movie footage of the director working at Coppola’s short-lived American Zoetrope studio shows him clearly giddy with his good fortune), Made in England takes viewers not only through his body of work but their connections to the narrator’s films.
Describing Powell’s formative years as a “dogsbody” in the French silent film industry during the 1920s, Scorsese opines that the period not only taught Powell his craft but created the image-first approach that marked his style. After returning to his native England and working as a credible but unheralded journeyman director, Powell teamed up with Hungarian Jewish refugee screenwriter Pressburger and came to be known as the Archers (the name of their production company). Their streak from 1939’s The Spy in Black to 1951’s Tales of Hoffmann looks now like one of the most unparalleled runs of artistry and popular success in film history.
While Powell and Pressburger’s first collaborations were mostly wartime propaganda films, Scorsese points out the unusually complex sense of humanity seen even in thrillers like 49th Parallel. But it’s the Archers’ more fantastical work that really gets Scorsese’s blood flowing. His analyses of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death, their potent combination of Powell’s exuberantly showy visuals with Pressburger’s alternately witty and romantic humanism, make strong arguments for the films’ greatness.
Scorsese continues to rhapsodize about postwar works like the psychosexual classic Black Narcissus and of course his beloved operatic fantasia The Red Shoes, while describing the challenges an “experimental” filmmaker like Powell, with his love of creating feverish sound-and-vision collages of color-splashed abandon, faced when challenged by the rise of more cynical and realism-focused filmmakers. But he also acknowledges the failures of Powell’s less successful and understandably forgotten works like A Canterbury Tale.
Though directed by Hinton, this is really Scorsese’s film. A love letter to Scorsese’s directing mentor—Pressburger’s screenwriting is given thoughtful consideration but is clearly and maybe unfairly seen as secondary to the partnership—Made in England takes an unsurprisingly celebratory view of the man’s work. Powell and Scorsese became close friends (Powell married Scorsese’s longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker), supporting each other through challenging times in their careers. Scorsese also talks about how Powell’s films directly inspired him, as evinced by a montage showing what he took from the duel scene in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp for Jake LaMotta’s championship fight in Raging Bull.
Made in England might not advance a sustained argument about the deeper connected artistic spirit between the Powell and Pressburger canon and that of an acolyte who’s made his own fair share of masterpieces, beyond a shared love of expressionistic camerawork and extreme emotions. However, it does lay out an impassioned case for the nearly unique greatness of Powell and Pressburger’s body of work. And if any documentary can get more people to seek out 49th Parallel or A Matter of Life and Death, then it deserves to be considered a success.
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