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.

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