Michael Powell, ex-banker and studio contract director who churned out 23 films between 1931 and 1936, and Emeric Pressburger, a well-educated Hungarian whose career as a journalist was cut short by the rise of Nazism causing him to flee to Paris and switch to becoming a screenwriter, may have begun their careers in wildly disparate ways, but together as the legendary filmmaking team of Powell & Pressburger they would create a highly polished body of work of staggering beauty, humanist but turbulent emotion and sheer sophisticated creativity that would go on to influence major directors such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma as well as creative artists in many different disciplines like Kate Bush and Tilda Swinton. Sit back and enjoy as director David Hinton take us on a whirlwind tour of the technicolor world of Powell & Pressburger!
Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger is a very polished and well-researched documentary that covers the joint careers of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger as well as their work independent of one another. The film is narrated by director Martin Scorsese who has long professed his love of this filmmaking duo, and their influence can be seen all through his work. Scorsese even breaks down exactly how he learned from them, particularly in his use of music to drive the narrative, which is a signature of his directing style that he took from watching films like The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffmann. Having Scorsese leading us through this filmmaking team’s oeuvre definitely makes for a more engaging watch than a typical dry narrative doc you might find as a bonus feature and gives it much more of a personal touch. Hinton uses lots of archival footage as we step through Powell & Pressburger’s films one by one, including numerous interviews with the men themselves discussing how the films came together, their thoughts on making them and how they worked together (while both are generally credited as directing, it was actually Powell who handled most of the on-set directing duties and Pressburger who primarily wrote the films). If you have seen great films such as Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes and want to know more about the men behind them, then having a great director like Scorsese being your guide is possibly the best way to learn more. His admiration for them is infectious.
As one would expect of a documentary with lots of archival footage, the quality of the images on screen vary wildly. The film features a very clean transfer though with no noticeable problems in the scan itself. The sound quality also comes across very clear and free of hiss or distortion in the modern segments like Scorsese’s narration with, once again, the archival footage being somewhat variable in quality. Unfortunately there are no extras at all on the disc. I personally would have liked to see some extras here, maybe some extended interviews from people involved in the doc, possibly even some obscure short films or older features that Powell and/or Pressburger worked on (The Criterion release of 49th Parallel includes a wartime propaganda short they made, for instance).
Despite the lack of extras, Made in England itself is an excellent documentary that provides a thorough film-by-film overview of Powell & Pressburger’s work narrated by the great filmmaker Martin Scorsese whose passion for the disparate duo is palpable and catching. This one is an easy recommendation for classic film fans who want to know more about a pivotal pair of filmmakers whose mark on film history is inarguably vast.