Alongside his career as one of the premier directors of his generation, Martin Scorsese developed a sideline in introducing audiences to films he loves but which are not widely known outside of cinephile circles. The latest of these documentaries, Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, does for The Archers what A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995) did for American cinema and My Journey to Italy (1999) did for Italian Neorealism: it introduces key films and provides technical and historical analysis from the point of view of a director who freely shares his love for the films discussed in a way that is positively infectious.
Michael Powell and Emric Pressburger may not be household names in America today, but in the 1940s and early 1950s their production company, The Archers, created a distinctive body of work that was both popular and critically acclaimed. And boy are these films English—you’ll never mistake their sensibility for something coming out of Hollywood or Berlin or Paris. Powell, a native of Kent, had directed several films for Alexander Korda before teaming up with Pressburger, an émigré from Hungary who met Powell through Korda. Powell continued to direct after they dissolved their partnership in the 1950s until he became persona non grata in the cinematic world after the release of Peeping Tom in 1960. Such is the risk of being too innovative in a popular art form: Peeping Tom is today recognized as a classic and possibly as the first slasher film, but at the time it was just too much for critics and audiences to handle.
Restricted in his activities because of asthma, Scorsese grew up watching movies on his parents’ black and white television. Because Hollywood didn’t want their movies to screen on TV (which was then regarded as an existential threat to the cinema industry), foreign films featured heavily among those screened (the diverse population of NYC also meant there were large audiences interested in films from other countries). The brilliance of films like The Red Shoes (1948) came through to the young Scorsese, even though he was seeing them in black and white, from poor quality prints, on the small screen. Later seeing the same films in theatres, in quality prints and in full color, was yet another revelation (and I’m not sure anyone has ever made more expressive use of color than cinematographer Jack Cardiff did when working with The Archers on films like The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus).
If you don’t know the films of Powell and Pressburger, Made in England provides a great introduction to their work, with a generous selection of film clips along with keen analysis and enthusiastic appreciation by Scorsese. It also includes some clips from Scorsese’s films, as the director shares what he stole from Powell and Pressburger and how he used it in his own work. The truism “good artists borrow, great artists steal” has never been more apt: whatever Scorsese took from The Archers, he made it his own, and I’m sure there are young directors today doing the same thing to Scorsese films. | Sarah Boslaugh
Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger is distributed on Blu-ray and DVD by Kino Lorber. The only extra on the disc is the theatrical trailer.
