Made In Eng­land: The Films Of Pow­ell & Press­burg­er review – a deli­cious whirl­wind tour

It can­not be said too many times: Mar­tin Scors­ese is an earth­ly deity. He seems only too hap­py – occa­sion­al­ly bor­der­ing on the insis­tent! – to fes­toon us with the con­sid­er­able fruits of cinephile pas­sions. He espous­es obscure and mar­gin­al work, and draws on sen­su­al per­son­al mem­o­ries to breathe new life into clas­si­cal art. There is noth­ing fraud­u­lent or arti­fi­cial in the sense of won­der­ment you see in his bush-shroud­ed eyes when he starts riff­ing on the pic­to­r­i­al beau­ty of John Ford, or the breath­less dynamism of Howard Hawks.

This new film direct­ed by David Hin­ton oper­ates as a kind of deli­cious adden­dum to Scorsese’s own 1995 cine-con­fes­sion­al, A Per­son­al Jour­ney with Mar­tin Scors­ese Through Amer­i­can Movies, as the direc­tor assumes the posi­tion once more (face-on, direct address to cam­era) to give us a whirl­wind tour through the work born from the col­lab­o­ra­tion between British direc­tor Michael Pow­ell, and emi­gré screen­writer Emer­ic Press­burg­er. His ado­ra­tion of their expres­sion­is­tic work bor­ders on the obses­sive, and along­side deliv­er­ing a spry nar­ra­tive his­to­ry of their var­i­ous pro­duc­tions, he explains how the spir­it of their work seeped into his own, and often in sur­pris­ing ways.

The film charts the evo­lu­tion of P&P’s pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny, The Archers, through wartime pro­pa­gan­da, lav­ish exper­i­men­ta­tion, filmed opera and even­tu­al decline. 1942’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, con­sid­ered to be one of the pair’s crown­ing achieve­ments, was poo-pooed by Churchill as being unpa­tri­ot­ic at a time when cheap moral-boost­ing was required. Black Nar­cis­sus (1947) show­cased the pair’s yen for visu­al fan­ta­sia, elab­o­rate Mat­te paint­ings, com­plex female char­ac­ters and a desire to devel­op a pure­ly visu­al form of mon­tage-based sto­ry­telling, where the moves of the cam­era are chore­o­graphed like those of a hot-foot­ed dancer.

Scors­ese hop­scotch­es through all the films in chrono­log­i­cal order, and is bru­tal­ly hon­est in his feel­ings about some of their less-well-beloved late fea­tures, Oh… Ros­alin­da!! (1955) and Ill Met by Moon­light (1957), and the fact that it was obvi­ous by that time that their spark was gone. Pow­ell and Scors­ese became close per­son­al friends fol­low­ing the col­lapse of the latter’s career after the nox­ious reac­tion to his unpalat­able 1960 mas­ter­piece, Peep­ing Tom, and the film ends by detail­ing their pair’s per­son­al deal­ings and Powell’s even­tu­al recrown­ing as a British mas­ter filmmaker.

The pres­ence of Scors­ese as the sole talk­ing head helps to super­charge and focus the film, and it’s inter­est­ing to see an artist pro­file doc­u­men­tary that’s so unabashed­ly sub­jec­tive. And it pass­es the test that all these films must under­go with fly­ing colours: yes, it makes you want to watch those incred­i­ble movies.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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