Much like his wonderful, epic-length documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, the Scorsese-produced and narrated Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger is far from a dry, impersonal history lesson about the British directing team that captured the imagination of a young man. Instead, Scorsese moves film by film through the works of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, giving context and details about each production, as one would expect. But then he finds ways to connect these magical works to his own productions, from every phase of his career, so even if you’re less familiar with the Powell and Pressburger movies, you can still see their significance to and influence on more familiar Scorsese works.
Directed by David Hinton, Made in England gives us the necessary biographical background for both filmmakers before they met each other and explains how they came to begin their long-running and fruitful partnership (collectively known as The Archers, the name of their production company), which began in 1939. The film makes clear who did the bulk of the writing (Pressburger) and the directing (Powell), and how their varying interests in stylistic approaches to filmmaking made their movies so singular and without compare in the British cinematic landscape. They weren’t afraid to drift into fantasy or magical realism, but they were just as likely to make their films seem almost documentary in terms of their visual approach.
Scorsese walks us through his early experiences with 49th Parallel, the controversial The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I’m Going!, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffmann, and their last bonafide hit, The Battle of the River Plate. And with each film discussed, Scorsese recalls how and why each of these works impacted him as a young person, even though he saw most of them for the first time on a small, black-and-white TV (many of the films were originally in Technicolor). Scorsese also details his friendship with Powell, who eventually married Scorsese’s longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker and gave the young filmmaker some much needed career advice and personal support in his earlier days.
With another filmmaker, this approach may have come off as self-indulgent and self-centered, but Scorsese is one of the most personable film historians I’ve ever seen speak, and learning from him this way has always been a pleasure and weirdly relatable. And his detailed examination of the Powell and Pressburger filmography (including Powell’s impactful and much-reviled Peeping Tom) is useful to those to whom the Powell and Pressburger films are a hole in their cinephile’s journey, as well as to those who are more familiar with their more famous work but could use some reminders of how to fill in the gaps. Made in England is an impressive, useful, and educational piece, if for no other reason than to be reminder as to what true cinema magic can look like.
The film is now playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
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