David Hinton’s documentary celebration of the ‘Archers’ team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger is a feature-length rumination filtered through Martin Scorsese’s narration, emphasizing his first awakening to the Power of Film. The collaboration was so rich and the films so impressive that it takes over two hours just for a cursory pass through the Archers’ career: The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death. The curatorship is excellent and the film clips good; the main focus is not biography or thematic analysis but the sheer Love of Movies by a supremely talented filmmaking team.
Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger
Blu-ray
Cohen Media Group
2024 / Color + B&W / 1:78 widescreen / 133 min. / Street Date November 5, 2024 / Available from / 29.95
Starring: Martin Scorsese.
Cinematography: Roland Killeen
Film Editors: Margarida Cartaxo, Stuart Davidson
Music: Adrian Johnston
13 Executive Producers, 9 on the poster credit block
Produced by Nick Varley, Matthew Wells
Directed by David Hinton
Martin Scorsese has for decades been an able substitute for all those great film school lecturers we miss; one of the better ones just passed away, and received some nice eulogies for his leadership of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. When Scorsese talks about movies, the enthusiam comes through without qualifiers. When he likes something, from Citizen Kane to Fair Wind to Java, he speaks from the heart.
Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger is a straightforward career bio for a pair of filmmakers about whom little was known in the old days, when the English film magazines were more likely to write about David Lean and Carol Reed. As a schoolboy Scorsese fixated on the Archers’ target logo as a guarantee of quality: features bursting with creativity, life, and the potential of film craft. Scorsese explains that early TV showed a lot of English product because American studios were slow to release their libraries for broadcast. He first saw The Archers’ magnificent Technicolor shows in fuzzy B&W on a 16″ screen. Even under those conditions they inspired his continuing love of film.
The documentary bears no writing credit but the content is all Scorsese. Excellent still photos and surviving bits of news film and home movies illustrate the way two brilliant and complementary filmmakers came together. Michael Powell got into the movies working for Rex Ingram’s silent film unit in the South of France; when sound arrived he spent years grinding out some of the best of the quota quickies before breaking through with the acclaimed The Edge of the World. The experienced Hungarian screenwriter Emeric Pressburger had a career in Germany, but fled the Nazi regime and ended up working in London. Mogul Alexander Korda teamed them on the superb thriller The Spy in Black, and just a couple of pictures later they formed their Independent company The Archers. Although Powell mostly directed and Pressburger mostly wrote, they shared the credit for producing, writing and directing 50-50.
Scorsese’s overview of this remarkable collaboration is fast but thorough, making each new bit of information feel important. He goes from title to title, naming only a few key star actors and staying entirely away from showbiz gossip. Deborah Kerr gets special mention for her triple role in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, but Scorsese doesn’t cover Powell’s mention of her as a romantic partner, in his autobiography. For I Know Where I’m Going!, Pressburger’s wife is given special attention as the inspiration for Wendy Hiller’s materialistic and assertive heroine Joan Webster.
Scorsese prefers to focus on the cinematic wizardry that made The Archers’ films so distinctive: dynamic camera work and dazzling visual effects — not just for spectacle, but to create mood. There is no filler in an Archers picture. As Scorsese clearly demonstrates, their style requires design preplanning on every level. He notes that the method ruled out improvisation, yet Powell’s direction brings out performances that feel fresh and unrehearsed. The Archers weren’t documentarians. Their goal was to capture a heightened reality, and their dramatic method employed hyper-theatrical effects.
Scorsese mentions Powell’s great respect for some of his collaborators, especially production designer Alfred Junge. But the show doesn’t stop to praise every creative contribution — the great cameraman Jack Cardiff is singled out once or twice, and that’s it. Of course, the film clips are impressive just in themselves. Fans of the Archers will like what they hear and see, while viewers unfamiliar with the films will be intrigued by the dazzling images, maybe enough to investigate further.
The film’s secondary through-line is Martin Scorsese’s discovery of and appreciation for the Powell-Pressburger films. He explains that he had to wait for years to see some of them in color. He didn’t see the film maudit Peeping Tom (a solo Powell film) until 1970. Scorsese would of course later spearhead its reissue, when promoting a full revival of Michael Powell’s cinema legacy. Scorsese also shows how he patterned certain scenes in his own movies ( Raging Bull, The Age of Innocence) after constructions he admired in the Archers’ work.
Incidental film of Powell and Pressburger includes BTS footage from A Matter of Life and Death and various documentaries. I believe I recognize some television documentary material, and a special shot from Craig McCall’s feature film on Jack Cardiff, Cameraman: the Life & Work of Jack Cardiff.
Martin Scorsese’s opinions are always illuminating. He finds apt words to express the unique qualities of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffman. He also allows that defending England in World War II gave shape and purpose to the artistic collaboration. The team produced a couple of standard propaganda pictures, including the un-mentioned One of Our Aircraft Is Missing and The Silver Fleet. But in place of heroics, their wartime films encouraged the defense of the Nation by expressing the qualities that make England worth defending.A Canterbury Tale is the key film in that regard.
The Archers’ artistic independence broke what would seemingly be a big rule in wartime propaganda: they repeatedly presented German characters in a positive light, with the idea that ‘they’ll eventually be our friends again.’ When victory came in sight, their romantic drama I Know Where I’m Going! skipped patriotic slogans and instead promoted non-materialistic values as the key to a happy future.
Being familiar with most of the films mentioned, we found Made in England very entertaining and highly watchable. We like that the choice of film clips is not always predictable, although producer Martin Scorsese’s best docu using re-edited feature clips is still Kent Jones’ Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows. Jones had a knack for excerpting surprisingly unfamiliar bits and pieces from Val Lewton’s pictures — it was like seeing them for the first time.
The Scorsese view doesn’t exactly disparage Powell & Pressburger’s less celebrated movies, but his choice of words make it sound as if some aren’t worth the effort to seek out. Oh… Rosalinda is the only one I don’t need to see again. Scorsese only mentions VistaVision for The Battle of the River Plate and calls Ill Met By Moonlight an outright dud. But both are excellent war movies even if they don’t expand the scope of cinema achievement. The masterful The Small Back Room gets a little more respect, but our main takeaway from the coverage is that it was commercially unsuccessful. Who cares? Scorsese himself says he learned to love the Archers films long before he had any idea which ones had been hits.
The only real nit we pick with Made in England are a spoiler or two. The docu lays bare a couple of story bits that ought to be left for newbie viewers to discover for themselves. We see only part of the climactic cliff-top conflict from Black Narcissus, but a film clip from A Canterbury Tale spoils a priceless revelatory moment. If you haven’t seen that particular movie, mute the sound in the dialogue clips, or just skip over it.
Made in England lauds an artistic collaboration that lasted for 18 years, with achievements that can be called both great movies and great film art. The breakup of The Archers is not characterized as a tragedy, but simply a diverging of interests. The miracle is that any artists this talented could have collaborated so successfully and so productively, on so many fine projects.
Cohen Media Group’s Blu-ray of Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger is an excellent encoding of a fine docu that seems to zip by in a fraction of its posted 133 minutes. The video is top quality, with the film clips looking exceptionally good. We’ve spent the last 30 years enjoying increasingly improved video copies of the Archers classics so we expect The Red Shoes to look superb, which it does. But the 1939 The Spy in Black also looks pristine, and we’ve only seen an ancient DVD with garbled audio … it motivates us to go wander to Amazon.uk to see if a remastered UK Blu-ray exists.
For official production companies, the film’s credit block lists Cohen Media Group, BBC Film, Screen Scotland, Ten Thousand 86, Ice Cream Films, ‘in association with’ Sikella Productions, Altitude Film Entertainment, BFI National Film Archive, ITV Studios Global Distribution, Park Circus Productions, Studio Canal, and Turner Classic Movies. That sounds like a lot of paperwork. The IMDB lists the two producers Nick Varley & Matthew Wells, and a full 13 executive producers, presumably from all those producing entities. Director Hinton hopefully didn’t have to answer to all of those money folk when making creative decisions.
The only extra is a trailer. A series of video promos plays whenever a Cohen disc loads, forcing us to step through them to access the main menu. On the brighter side, the newish Cohen Media promo on this disc offers is one interesting image after another, a big improvement on their older promotional edits.
Guilty Personal Connections: some docu footage covering Michael Powell’s ‘filmmaker in residence’ time spent at Francis Coppola’s American Zoetrope Studio, shows Powell walking to work in the morning. He identifies a white building on the way as the former Technicolor plant, the original home of the 3-strip color process. Powell was making this daily walk across Romaine Street at the exact time I was editing commercials — at a company in this same old Technicolor building. I posted a map of what I thought was Powell’s old morning walk route in an older review, but haven’t located it yet.
The 2001 Academy Awards show gave a special Oscar to Jack Cardiff, and I got the job of editing a 3-minute montage to accompany the famous cameraman’s acceptance ceremony. It was a plum assignment: any random assortment of Cardiff film clips would dazzle an audience, so the only problem was choosing which drop-dead gorgeous shots to include. We judged the success of the montage by the coverage given it and Cardiff in the press and video media — it was a highlight of the show, and reportedly sparked new interest in Powell & Pressburger, starting with The Red Shoes. The montage relied on the fine interviews filmed by the dedicated Jack Cardiff film biographer Craig McCall.
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good ++
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplement:
Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: October 27, 2024
(7217arch)
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