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MADE IN ENGLAND THE FILMS OF POWELL AND PRESSBURGER
PRESENTED BY MARTIN SCORSESE
DIRECTED BY DAVID HINTON
I was born in 1942
and I developed asthma at about three years old.
And that meant that I couldn't run around and play as much as other children,
and so I found myself
sitting in front of the TV, watching movies.
Some of the very first moving images that I can remember seeing
are from The Thief of Baghdad.
Whip yourself, winds of heaven!
Whip till you wail aloud!
I didn't know it then, but Michael Powell was one of the directors on that film.
And for a kid,
there could be no better initiation
into the Michael Powell mysteries.
This was a picture made by a great showman
and every image
filled me with wonder.
The power a movie can hold,
it absolutely enthralled me.
My eyes!
I'm blind!
Of course, what I was seeing then
wasn't a glorious Technicolor print of the film
but actually a very poor black and white version
on a 16 inch screen on our family TV.
And yet
it still had the power to grip me
and stay with me forever in my mind.
American films, yes.
Even Italian films, neorealist films I saw on television.
But the interesting thing about television at that time
was that many of the films that were shown on American TV
were British films.
Because American distributors would not sell to TV.
But apparently British distributors would.
And that's why
British Cinema for me, was so formative.
I used to get excited by the different
logos of the different British film companies.
But there was one which held out a very special promise.
That was the target of The Archers
A PRODUCTION OF THE ARCHERS
that heralded a Powell Pressburger film.
And by the time I was ten or eleven,
I'd be watching Powell Pressburger films endlessly on TV.
They were shown a lot.
There was one called The Tales of Hoffmann.
Which is not an obvious film you'd say for a child to enjoy.
It's basically a 19th-century opera, but
I just didn't watch it once, I mean, I watched it
repeatedly and obsessively.
It was on this program called Million Dollar Movie
which showed the same film all week,
twice every evening
and three times on the weekend.
But the thing was that I was hypnotized by it.
And those repeated viewings taught me pretty much
everything I know about the relation of camera to music.
And even now,
music and images from that picture
often run through my mind.
In fact
I think the Powell Pressburger films have had
a profound effect on the sensibility that I bring
to all the work I was able to do.
I was so bewitched by them as a child
that they make up a big part of my film subconscious.
Now going to the cinema with my father
was also a very important part of my childhood.
The nicest theaters then were spectacles in themselves, great movie palaces
and the screens were huge.
And they filled you with hope and expectation of wonder.
And one film
that fulfilled all those expectations
was The Red Shoes.
It was the first time I saw The Archers logo in color.
And of course, I particularly remember the ballet sequence.
Wanting to know how they made the dancer turn into a scrap of newspaper.
These days I'm told that Powell Pressburger
represents something called 'English Romanticism'
But I don't really know what that is.
To me, the overwhelming impression of their films
has always been to do with color,
light
movement and a sense of music.
And even as a child,
I was certainly struck by the theatricality of The Red Shoes.
The cinematic theatricality.
The design of actors in the frame,
the surprising ways they looked and they moved.
The dramatic angles and lighting.
You got the sense that
anything could happen in a film like this.
And I was riveted by the mystery
and the hysteria of the picture.
The experience was so intense, in fact, that first viewing of The Red Shoes
may be one of the origins of my own obsession with cinema itself.
When I became a student and then a young filmmaker
Powell and Pressburger remained a constant fascination.
But we could only see their films in very incomplete forms.
Very degraded versions, bad copies.
But we knew there was something special going on with these movies.
And we became fascinated by the distinctive signature on the films.
Written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
Now a shared credit like that
was really unheard of and we wanted to know who did what,
who said cut, who said action?
It was all a mystery.
In those days, the only sources of information were books
and magazines, maybe.
And we read about British directors, of course,
like David Lean and Carol Reed and Alfred Hitchcock.
But there was rarely, rarely a mention of Powell Pressburger.
So in effect,
they became mythical beings
to myself and my friends.
Then finally in 1970
I got to see a 35mm color print of Peeping Tom.
Which had become a legendary work among film students and filmmakers.
It'll be two quid.
I was an obsessive young filmmaker watching a film
about an obsessive young filmmaker who is also a psychopath.
It's a horror movie with no blood.
Where the object of terror seems to be the film camera itself.
No!
When I first saw it, it was hard for me to believe
that such a raw and provocative film was made
by the same Michael Powell who had made The Red Shoes.
But indeed, it was.
And he dared to do what no one else had really dared before him.
To show how close moviemaking can come to madness.
How it can devour you if you let it.
By this time, I was making movies on my own.
And in 1974, after I made Mean Streets, I went to England
and I found myself at a cocktail party given by a man named Michael Kaplan.
And I was asking him about this, this mystery.
Now, do you know of a Michael Powell?
Does he exist?
Is there such a person?
And he said "Oh, yes, he's living in a caravan somewhere."
Well, that turned out to be an exaggeration.
He was actually living in a cottage in Gloucestershire,
but he'd fallen on very hard times.
He'd been pretty much forgotten
and abandoned by the British film industry
and he could barely even afford to heat his own house.
But of course, I wanted to meet him
and a drink was arranged.
So suddenly there I was talking to Michael Powell.
Who was amazed that someone wanted to discuss his pictures with him.
He had no idea that his work had been an inspiration to me,
and Brian De Palma,
and Coppola and so many others of the new generation.
Of course, I speak fast and I was very energetic and very excited.
I was bombarding him with questions.
And he didn't say much.
Michael didn't say much. He was very reserved.
Very quiet in his answers.
But later, I discovered that he was moved by the meeting.
Because he wrote in his autobiography
that during that meeting,
he felt the blood course through his veins again.
The other day, I ate a ricochet biscuit.
Well, that's the kind of biscuit That's supposed to
Bounce off the wall Back in your mouth
If you don't bounce back...
You go hungry!
After our meeting, I arranged for Michael to see Mean Streets.
And he sent me a letter praising the film.
Except...
he said that I use too much red.
I GOT TIRED OF THE RED
Too much red?
I didn't point out to him that his films had something to do with this too.
Look at all the red he uses.
Anyway, we started to write to each other and eventually he came to New York.
He was introduced to a lot of people and he was invited to become
the senior director in residence at Zoetrope,
Francis Coppola's company in L.A.
And his life sort of turned around.
I got a sort of routine here. I...
I work on my autobiography in the morning
and about 11 o'clock, I walk over to the studio.
I stop the traffic this way.
If I did it in New York, they'd run right over me.
You can get away with anything in California.
Believe it or not
this magnificent building
was built by Dr Kalmus of Technicolor,
for Technicolor.
Wonderful art deco building.
Those were the days.
Glorious Technicolor!
Morning Colonel. Anything for me?
OK.
Michael was born in the village of Bekesbourne, Kent in 1905,
and grew up in the countryside,
the son of a hop farmer.
His career in the movies began when he was twenty.
Went on holiday, got a job in a film company in the south of France
and never came back.
He started work as a general dogsbody
at the Victorine Studios in Nice
where the American director Rex Ingram
was making epic silent films for MGM.
I was with a big American company working in Europe,
discipline was lax
and I had the run of all the departments.
And I always think it was his apprenticeship with Ingram
that made Michael aim for grandeur in his pictures.
Lush images, heightened emotions
and a preference for shock and spectacle over realism.
And quote "good taste" unquote.
Now, while working with Ingram
he also did acting and stunt work
in a series of comedy shorts that they called The Riviera Revels.
But here he is in 1927
throwing himself into the role of an innocent English tourist.
Michael returned to England in 1928
and he went into partnership with the American producer Jerry Jackson
to make 'quota quickies.'
These were short features which were made very fast, very cheap,
Are you there Bob?
God! It's us. My light's out.
And Michael learned his trade as a director
by hammering out more than 20 of them.
Light's gone out.
Full astern.
Port or starboard?
My God!
It's the phantom light. The one they all talk about.
Where the devil are we?
Wait a moment, Mr. Owen. We're just off the North Stake rocks
Bring us down again!
Warn the engine room.
This one is The Phantom Light.
That was a near one.
You're right, Sir, it was.
By 1937 Michael had acquired the experience and the confidence
to make his first really personal work.
The Edge of the World.
It's about a small community on a remote island off the coast of Scotland.
It was a great leap forward for Michael.
A beautiful committed and poetic film.
And on the strength of it,
he was given a contract by the producer Alexander Korda
at Denham studios.
Korda put Michael to work on a film called The Spy In Black.
[They whisper in German]
Introducing him at a script conference to a writer called Emeric Pressburger.
Emeric felt in his pocket
and he produced his version of the script.
This is it.
It was a nice little rolled up piece of paper
and he unrolled it and he read the first scene
and I was spellbound.
I just listened while he went on reading
and unfolding it and unfolding it and unfolding it.
He'd stood the story on its head.
He turned a man into a woman, a woman into a man.
He'd altered the suspense, he'd rewritten the end.
I looked at this producer, he was purple in the face.
I looked at the writer, he was prepared to faint.
And I was just rejoicing
that I was going to work with somebody like this
and that I wasn't going to let him get away in a hurry either.
Have you heard The Soldier's March ?
I say, that medal ribbon?
I don't seem to recognize it.
What is it?
The Iron Cross, second class.
Second class.
Then you must be a prisoner of war.
No.
You are.
Oh dear.
Emeric Pressburger, like Alex Korda
was a Hungarian but also very much a European.
And he went to university in Prague, and Stuttgart.
Then my father died and my student years have finished.
And I had nothing.
And so I came to Berlin
and I wanted to write.
I sent film story after film story,
and everything came back, until one day,
one story didn't come back.
Emeric was eventually hired by the script department
of the famous UFA studios.
This was the greatest European studio of its era.
It's the home of Fritz Lang and German expressionism.
And Emeric spent several happy years there.
Here he is in 1932, you can glimpse him right on the set
here of an UFA production in Budapest.
Emeric was however Jewish
and the rise of the Nazis forced him to flee Berlin.
First for Paris and then for London
where he arrived in 1935 on a stateless passport.
Emeric described his arrival in England as like being born at the age of 33.
He knew nothing about British life
and he had to learn the English language from scratch.
Meeting Michael was a great blessing for him
because he was someone who responded immediately
to his novel script ideas.
Do you think that it was something specifically European
or even Hungarian that you responded to?
No, it was a beautiful mind I responded to.
He didn't have to be Hungarian.
I have never met a person who not only understood
what I was driving at
but guessed already half of it before I said it.
That's Michael.
I don't think that that happens very often in one's lifetime, but this is
how it...
how I felt.
The partners soon developed the collaborative method that
they would use for the next 20 years.
Emeric would always write the original script
which established the shape of the scenes
and the pair would then work together on the dialogue.
They were perfectly in tune about what they wanted to express.
And they never argued.
Do we have a go at each other?
Not really.
No, we trust time.
In a few hours time
he sees that I was right.
London is calling.
London, calling to the world.
Calling to a world at war.
When Britain went to war with Germany in 1939
the film industry survived by committing itself wholeheartedly
to the war effort.
These are not Hollywood sound effects.
This is the music they play every night in London,
the symphony of war.
For Powell and Pressburger
this was the most important event of their professional lives,
giving a striking new depth
and a sense of purpose to their work.
So the curtain rises on Canada.
Down!
Swines!
Filthy swine devils!
Jahner!
49th Parallel tells the story of six fugitive Nazis
making their way across Canada.
Every British film now had a specific propaganda aim.
And the intention here
was to urge America into the war.
Run, Les! Run!
By bringing the horrors of the Nazi threat right onto America's doorstep.
It was a big idea for an epic picture.
And in production terms it was a huge enterprise.
This brought out some of the differences between the two men.
Emeric was the genius of story and structure,
while Michael was the dynamo and the man of action.
Leading his crew to locations all over Canada.
I was moving against the seasons all the time.
Emeric was writing the script back home in London
and I was shooting a lot of exteriors like this
before the autumn came down.
In one episode, the Nazi seek shelter among a group of fellow Germans.
A religious community of Hutterites.
Germans!
Brothers!
I asked you to join with me in paying homage to our glorious Führer .
Heil Hitler!
Now this film insists on making a distinction
between being a Nazi and being a German.
This was very important to Emeric,
who had spent so many happy years in Germany
and had so many German friends.
We are not your brothers.
Our children grew up against new backgrounds, new horizons.
And they are free!
Free to grow up as children,
free to run, to laugh without being forced into uniforms.
Without being forced to march up and down the streets singing battle songs!
So here is Emeric making propaganda for the British.
But instead of simplifying everything like propaganda usually does.
He's always seeking to complicate our sympathies.
You're Nazis aren't you?
Aren't you?
I should tell the police about you.
Little girls should be seen and not heard.
- That'll do. - What's the matter with you?
That'll do.
Vogel!
Come along, Anna.
I'll take you home.
Herr Leutnant , we can't let them go.
I'd like to see what you're going to do about it.
- Vogel! - Yes, Herr Leutnant ?
Have you forgotten who you are?
I'll take her home, Herr Leutnant .
Emeric even makes us feel deeply for one of the Nazis,
a baker when he starts to rebel against his comrades.
Engine Room Artificer Vogel.
You're under arrest.
You're accused of desertion and treachery to the Third Reich.
In the absence of a properly constituted court,
I assume authority as your superior officer
and sentence you to death.
Have you anything to say?
The sentence will be carried out immediately in the name of the Führer .
49TH PARALLEL IS WAR'S BEST FILM
49th Parallel ended up a big commercial hit.
And it won Emeric an Oscar too, for best original story.
Riding high on this success
the partners now decided to form their own production company,
The Archers.
Well as far as possible, we tried to share everything.
Of course, directing on the floor that was entirely my job.
But as far as we could, we shared every decision, didn't we?
Yes.
Do you have anything to add to that, Mr Pressburger? That can't be--
Well, I don't think so.
On the whole, as a simple answer, I would say that Michael directed
on his own.
And I was more the writer.
- And we produce together. - Yes.
The pair signed a production deal with the Rank Organization.
J. ARTHUR RANK PRESENTS
Which gave them the one thing that they wanted most.
The freedom to control their own work.
Now, for me, one of the most exciting things about The Archers
is that they were like experimental filmmakers working within the system.
And it was Rank who created the conditions for that.
By now was 1942
and the worst of the Blitz was over.
But Britain was still faring badly in the war.
And it was at this delicate moment
that Michael and Emeric decided to make a film
satirizing old-fashioned ideas within the British military.
As you would expect, they met a lot of official opposition.
Winston Churchill himself was quite hostile to the idea.
"I'm not prepared to allow propaganda detrimental to the morale of the army.
Who are the people behind it?"
Churchill, such a wonderful leader,
but he just wasn't a good film critic.
It says a lot about Powell and Pressburger's confidence
and attitude to authority that they went ahead
and they made the picture anyway.
This meant they would never get their knighthoods, of course,
but Britain was still a democracy
and no one actually prevented them from making the picture.
The central figure of the film's a British officer called Clive Candy.
He was inspired by the cartoon character of Colonel Blimp.
You're an extremely impudent young officer.
But let me tell you that in 40 years time, you'll be an old gentleman too.
But over the course of two hours,
this two-dimensional caricature will be transformed
into a rich and complex character.
What's that?
- VC, sir. - Where did you get it?
South Africa. Jordaan Siding.
You're Candy!
"Sugar" Candy.
Yes, Sir.
The film transports us back 40 years to 1902
when Candy was a hot-tempered young officer.
On a visit to Berlin, he succeeds in insulting
the whole of the German Imperial army.
And as a consequence, he must fight a duel.
Duel?
The duel is one of my favorite Powell and Pressburger scenes.
I wish I'd brought my uniform.
Simply for the unique and unexpected way that they present it.
Would you undo your shirt?
Thank you.
More as a matter of etiquette than a matter of combat.
Do you want to roll up your sleeve or will you rip it off?
What's better?
I am not permitted to give advice.
I think I'll rip it.
It is definitely better.
Doctor your scissors, please.
I see here that paragraph 133 says,
"A few hours previous to the duel it is advisable to take a bath."
Only the principles, not the seconds.
The scene also represents the first encounter
between the two central characters of the story,
Clive Candy and Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff.
They have never met before
but they must now do battle on a point of honor.
[Soldier speaks in German]
Into fighting position, please.
Afterwards
they will become friends for life.
Fertig?
Ready?
Los!
Just as the duel begins,
Michael has the audacity to start pulling the camera back and up.
It's an act of terrific bravado.
After all this preparation
to retreat from showing the actual fight.
Only a very bold film director would make that choice.
But for Michael, the fight itself is irrelevant.
What matters is the meeting between the two men
and the relationship that comes out of it.
This had a direct influence on the way that I showed
very little of the big championship fight
in my movie Raging Bull.
The long Steadicam shot of Jake LaMotta's journey to the ring
comes straight from the duel scene in Blimp.
The important thing here is the destructive road
that Jake took to get to the fight
rather than the fight itself.
- Kretschmar-Schuldorff. - Yes I know.
After the duel, Clive and Theo recover
from their wounds in the same nursing home.
I'm very glad you've come.
Where they both fall in love with the same woman.
Stop mooning about.
- I'm not mooning about! - Keep your hair on.
I say, old girl, what's up?
Edith? I say, what's the matter?
I love your Miss Hunter.
You're cuckoo.
You cuckoo
because Miss Hunter
loves me.
Clive turns out to be deeply romantic
and hopelessly inhibited.
A toast.
Here's to the happiness of my fiance who was never my fiance.
And here's to the man who tried to kill me before he was introduced to me
- May I kiss the bride? - Why ask? I did not ask.
- Goodbye, Clive. - Goodbye, Edith, old girl.
He doesn't even realize until too late that
he is in love.
I hope we'll meet again sometime.
I'm sure we shall.
And suddenly he finds that his heart is broken.
LION, EAST AFRICA, 1903
WARTHOG, SUDAN, 1904
RHINOCEROS, EAST AFRICA, 1905
Many, many years of Candy's life are simply written off
because they are years without love.
It is brutal, funny,
and devastating.
HUN, FLANDERS, 1918
During the First World War
Candy finds another woman who is the spitting image
of the Edith he has lost.
Nurse?
Do you know the name of the girl sitting at the end of that table?
Come on, Wynne.
He marries her,
and for a while achieves a fragile happiness.
Darling?
Don't hum.
Was I humming?
It's a little habit you've got.
There's something important here.
Candy's professional life
is mostly treated satirically and ironically.
What'll I do if I don't hum?
But his emotional life
is always rendered with sincerity and tenderness.
Perhaps the most audacious thing of all
is the way that every important woman in Candy's life
is played by the same actress Deborah Kerr.
She is his first love, Edith.
Then his wife Barbara.
And then later his young driver in World War II.
Mind if we try and beat the lights, sir?
This radical casting idea came from Emeric.
Come on, don't be all night.
And it fills the film with a constant sense of longing and loss.
And Deborah Kerr was only 20 years old when she set to work on this film,
but she proved herself already a master of her art.
And Powell and Pressburger
succeeded in what they most loved to do.
Take a big risk and bring it off.
I was certainly influenced by Blimp when I came to make The Age of Innocence,
I'll write to you as soon as I'm settled and let you know where I am.
Oh, yes, that would be lovely.
Well, I'll see you very soon in Paris.
Oh, if you and May could come.
Because I was drawn into that film by the love story.
An impossible love between two people who aren't supposed to fall in love.
Good night, Newland.
Good night, Sillerton. Good night, Larry.
And it lasts for years.
I believed it was the same frustrated desire
tinged with regret
that I like so much in Blimp.
I think that's what attracted me.
The fact that emotion is repressed
and that reserve is a must.
I was in love with her. Your wife.
She never told me.
She never knew.
But I seem to remem--
Oh, Clive, that last day in Berlin, when I told you
you seemed genuinely happy.
Dash it, I didn't know then.
But on the train, I started to miss her.
On the boat, it was worse.
By the time I got back to London, well, I'd got it properly.
My Aunt Margaret got onto the scent straight away.
Women have a nose for these sort of things.
You may say that she was my ideal.
Sir?
Did you feel sympathetic to Blimp as a character?
Oh, yes, I identified completely with him.
- Lots of things are exactly like me. - Such as?
Couldn't be more English.
I was sentimental.
And...
love women and dogs.
I'd always felt enormously sympathetic with that kind of man.
Honorable, puzzled, innocent.
I see myself very much like that.
Blimp is Powell and Pressburger's first really profound and personal film.
And for me
their first masterpiece.
I've watched it so many times that it's become part of my life.
And the longer I live
the stronger grows my sense of what the characters are feeling.
It's the film that says the most to me about growing up,
growing old
and eventually, having to let go.
The Archer's next work, A Canterbury Tale
begins like a classic 'Merry England' film.
With Chaucer's pilgrims on the road to Canterbury.
But then...
a famous transition.
The medieval falcon turns into a modern Spitfire.
The film that we are about to see
suggests that a connection to our history is crucial
to our spiritual wellbeing.
One of the propaganda tasks at the time was to ask,
what are we fighting for?
And Powell and Pressburger now sought their answers to that question
in the history and traditions of the English countryside.
Why don't you keep your beastly carriers off the Pilgrims Road?
Michael loved his native Kent.
He loved the people and culture of England.
And in this film, he wanted to express all that.
Eight o'clock, Bob.
He had a specially deep feelings for Canterbury Cathedral.
That's where he had sung as a boy in the King's School Choir.
From the bend, at the eastern edge of the hill,
pilgrims saw Canterbury for the first time.
You've seen it?
Yes.
With a friend of mine.
A boy or a girl?
Boy.
I hope he writes to you.
No, he doesn't.
Maybe the mail was lost by enemy action.
No, Bob.
As it happens,
he was lost by enemy action.
He was a pilot.
Shot down?
Yes.
I'm sorry.
The central characters of the film are, without knowing it,
modern pilgrims.
Each on their own journey to Canterbury.
They're lost souls,
all in some way adrift and bereft.
All in need of a blessing to heal and restore them.
And here
as the Land Girl Alison walks in the Kent countryside
the place starts to speak to her.
She hears in the landscape, the voices and the music
of the old pilgrims.
Her ancestors.
If you stop, listen,
pay attention,
the past will speak to you.
And the voices of the past
will help you to make sense of your life in the present.
Glorious, isn't it?
Is anybody there?
Michael and Emeric are always trying
to set traps to capture magic, as Emeric puts it.
They wanna go beyond the representation of everyday experiences
and find ways to communicate what is deep and mysterious in our lives.
There's a mysticism here that's quite new in Powell and Pressburger's work.
There are higher courts than the local bench of magistrates.
With a light touch
they seek to conjure up the world of the spirit.
Pilgrims for Canterbury all out and get your blessings.
Rum sort of pilgrimage for you.
Pilgrimage can be either to receive a blessing
or to do penance.
I don't need either.
Perhaps you are an instrument.
Do I get a flaming sword?
Nothing would surprise me.
I'll believe that when I see a halo around my head.
You get a very good view of the cathedral now.
For all its strangeness,
this is the most humble of the famous Archers films.
The most restrained and earnest,
and the one most concerned with ordinary lives.
The central characters are in the same condition
that most of the audience would have been in 1944.
Separated from their loved ones.
Dutifully putting up a brave front.
But quietly,
full of fear, loneliness and grief.
One thing that the film very much wants to do
is offer consolation to the suffering.
And just when Alison is in despair,
she gets the news that her fiance's father
is in Canterbury looking for her.
For over two weeks now, he's waited for you here
in Canterbury.
Why?
Because he has news, Miss Allison, official news about Mr Geoffrey.
He's in Gibraltar.
Miss Alison.
This is a film that says that miracles do happen.
I must open the windows.
And at the end of your pilgrimage,
you may indeed receive a blessing.
The film finishes with a whole regiment of troops marching into the cathedral.
They're about to go overseas
and we don't know how many of them will come back.
Here, perhaps
Canterbury Cathedral represents
embattled Britain herself as a place worth protecting.
A place worth fighting for.
Powell and Pressburger are preachers as much as propagandists in this film.
The result was their first flop.
The film is just too strange and elusive for a mass audience.
But the partners were unshaken by this setback.
There was a period of profound trust between them
and they knew exactly where they were going next.
When Joan was only one year old, she already knew where she was going.
Going right, left.
No, straight on.
With I Know Where I'm Going we know right away
that we're going to enjoy ourselves.
By now it was clear that the Allies were going to win the war
and Michael and Emeric were able to relax a little.
Allowing their sense of humor to bloom.
She's 25 now.
And in one thing, she's never changed,
she still knows where she's going.
Good evening, Miss Webster.
Good evening, Leon.
Hello, darling.
We're introduced to a new kind of character
in the shape of Joan Webster
Daddy?
I'm going to be married.
What?
- Your table, Miss Webster. - Thank you, Fred.
Let's go in, darling. Bring a drink.
It's the first Archers film to place a woman front and center
and she is perhaps not a million miles away from Wendy Green,
the woman who Emeric had avidly courted and recently married.
Wendy, it seems was strong-willed,
sophisticated and materialistic.
Charged to your account madam, of course.
Perhaps that's why the script seemed to flow so easily for Emeric.
He drafted the whole thing out in less than a week.
Lady Bellinger's car!
Joans story begins with a journey north.
You can't marry Consolidated Chemical Industries.
Can't I?
She's on her way to a small Scottish island
where she is due to wed Sir Robert Bellinger,
the wealthy head of Consolidated Chemical Industries.
Do you, Joan Webster
take Consolidated Chemical Industries
to be your lawful wedded husband?
- I do. - Glasgow Central!
Oh! Yes?
There's a gentleman to meet you. And the stationmaster's with him.
You'll need all your time to get to Buchanan Street.
Now, The Archers are really having fun here.
Watch that top hat.
This journey north was perhaps a gift that Emeric gave to Michael
because it was a journey that Michael loved to make himself.
Scotland was his favorite place to be in the world.
And whenever he finished shooting a film,
he would refresh himself by going on hiking trips there.
Hear ye!
For Joan Webster,
the Western Isles turn out to be a challenging proposition.
Bad luck, no crossing today.
She'll spend much of the film trying to get a boat to the island
where her fiance is waiting.
Would you like to wait up at the house? I know the people.
Thank you.
But it's been arranged for the boat to meet me here
and I better be here to meet it.
Good.
If my boat doesn't come, will you take me?
No, I will not, m'lady.
In just three or four intensely atmospheric shots
we get a pungent sense of how alien the place is to her.
You'll see a wee gate, up the brae.
Joan must accept the hospitality of the locals until the weather improves.
And they turn out to be a bunch of eccentric and independent people
whose outlook on life is very different from her own.
I was just going down to get you.
Come on in, we've lit the fire. You met the Colonel I see.
I've had that exceptional pleasure. My name's Barnstable.
Colonel Barnstable, the greatest hawk trainer--
Falconer, my dear Torquil!
The greatest falconer in the Western Isles.
In the world, old boy.
Although it's a comedy and romance,
it's also a film about values.
And these feisty characters stand for all sorts of qualities
that Michael and Emeric liked and believed in.
- Catriona! - There's the dear girl now.
Courage, kindness and generosity,
warmth and good fellowship.
Torquil!
[They speak Gaelic]
Mrs Potts!
The character who most fully embodies all of these qualities
is Torquil.
He's a naval officer on leave.
Have you got a match or a lighter?
Thanks.
He clearly represents a terrible threat to Joan's marriage plans.
And the question of the film becomes,
can she resist him?
Thank you.
What stands in Torquil's way, of course, is Sir Robert Bellinger.
Hello, my dear. Robert speaking.
Cartier delivered the ring, I hope.
Of course, Robert, everything was lovely.
Now, listen, Joan, write down a telephone number. Are you ready?
2-36. You got it?
It's the Robinson's number. They've rented the castle at Sorn.
They're the only people worthwhile knowing around here. Over.
And when we meet his friends,
the Robinsons, they are superior
and sensitive and self-regarding.
Let's have a look at you.
Oh yes, you pass.
You're going to marry Sir Robert Bellinger, aren't you?
Yes. Do you mind?
I don't mind.
He's rich, isn't he?
Well, I haven't counted his money.
Are you rich?
No.
Coming after A Canterbury Tale Emeric called this film
the second episode in The Archer's crusade against materialism.
People around here are very poor, I suppose.
- Not poor. They just haven't got money. - It's the same thing.
Oh, no, something quite different.
Better?
The longer that Joan spends with Torquil
the more she falls under the spell of this man and his world.
Careful.
That's a fine song. Nut Brown Maiden. Do you know it?
Tune up, my boys!
My favorite part is where Torquil
recites the words of a song.
"Ho ro my nut-brown maiden,
Hee ree my nut-brown maiden,
Ho ro ro ro maiden,
You're the maid for me."
Now, this is a film that you show to someone you care about
as a way of possibly trying to say something that you can't put into words.
Share the experience so to speak.
And I know I'm not the only person to have done that.
It's a film that seems to
cast a spell over many romantic relationships.
Is it not enough that you've been told that you cannot sail today?
Do you think you know better than folk who have lived here all their lives?
Ruairidh said it was going down. Kenny said so too.
What do you expect Kenny to say? You bought him, did you not?
There's no need to shout at me!
Oh, go ahead, then!
And drown yourself!
She's running away from you.
Say that again.
In the end, we find Joan and Torquil together in a small boat.
Get down under the hood and hang on!
Oh! My dress!
Don't mess about! Bail!
The motor has gone, the weather is evil
and they're heading towards a terrible whirlpool, Corryvreckan.
This is a film about love as a force of nature
that can knock your life completely off course.
And Joan's fate seems to lie, not just in the hands of Torquil
but in the hands of the nature gods.
The film has something which is rather unusual for The Archers,
a conventional happy ending.
But this romance is a truly enchanted creation.
In my view, it's one of the most beautiful love stories ever made.
Hoy!
It is also a mystical poem on the natural world.
And a sermon on correct values.
By now, the whole country was starting to think about
what kind of place Britain should become
once the hostilities were over.
And Michael and Emeric used this film to offer the idealistic proposal
that it might become a nation
that values people according to their character
rather than their money.
MINISTRY OF INFORMATION
FILM DIVISION, THEATRE
The themes of all The Archers films during the war years
had to be agreed with the Ministry of Information.
Well, the Ministry of Information had a films division.
Jack Beddington was the head of it.
And no film could be made during the wartime without their approval.
And Jack Beddington asked us to come and meet him
and said,
while we were losing the war,
our relations with the Americans were very good,
but now we're winning the war they're not so good.
So he said, would you two consider writing an original film and making
an original film about Anglo-American relations, to improve them?
The Archer's response is not a combat film
but a poetic fantasy.
You seem like a nice girl. I can't give you my position.
Instruments gone, crew gone too.
All except Bob, here, my sparks, he's dead.
The rest bailed out on my orders.
Time 0335, you get that?
In the first scene we meet Peter, played by David Niven.
We've had it. And I'd rather jump than fry.
After the first 1000 feet what's the difference?
I shan't know anything anyway,
I say, I hope I haven't frightened you.
- No, I'm not frightened. - Good girl.
From the cockpit of his doomed plane he speaks to June, played by Kim Hunter.
Are you in love with anybody? No, no, don't answer that.
I could love a man like you, Peter.
I love you, June, you're life and I'm leaving you.
Peter is hurtling towards death
and falling in love, at the same time.
I'm signing off now, June. Goodbye.
Goodbye, June.
Hello, G for George. Hello G-George.
Hello G-George?
Hel--
So long, Bob, I'll see you in a minute.
You know what we wear by now. Proper wings!
This is an emphatic expression
of why Powell and Pressburger were not documentary filmmakers.
They wanted to achieve the kind of heightened intensity
that is only possible through artifice.
Peter washes up on a deserted shore with no idea where he is.
He miraculously meets June cycling along the beach.
Hello.
Hello yourself. What's wrong?
And the couple are instantly certain of their love for each other.
You're June.
You're Peter.
The trouble is that according to divine calculations,
Peter ought to be dead.
91,716 invoiced
91,715 checked in.
- Conductor 71? - Madame ,
it could have happened to anybody.
How did it happen?
Everything was calculated except for this accursed fog.
The pilot jumped, he got lost in the fog, I missed him.
The heavenly conductor is now ordered to go back to Earth,
find Peter and rectify his mistake.
By the way, Monsieur , when you see Peter, would you give him a message for me?
- Avec plaisir. - Just say, “What ho.”
Bon.
One is starved for Technicolor up there.
What a night for love.
The idea of the two worlds was Emeric's most audacious concept yet.
And he made a bold decision about color too
when he decided that the other world should be a rather dry, bureaucratic,
monochrome sort of place.
Whereas this world is the colorful one.
The home of fire and passion, beauty, and poetry.
Peter's problem is that he's not sure which world he belongs in anymore.
Will he be allowed to live out his love for June here on Earth
or will he have to move on to the other world.
In short,
does he belong among the living,
or the dead?
He's having a series of highly organized hallucinations
comparable to an experience of actual life.
A combination of vision of hearing and of idea.
The film marked a big moment for Powell Pressburger
because this is where they threw off entirely the shackles of realism
and happily embraced surrealism.
Doc, he's here! June!
Michael, always loved the idea of the film director
as a magician with a box of tricks.
Doc?
Reveling in old-style effects and illusions
It's as though he's remembering his youth in silent movies,
working with Rex Ingram at the Victorine studios.
The Rex Ingram influence gave the film its scale too,
making it ambitious as well as adventurous.
Come back!
Peter! Peter! Come back!
The film needed marvels of set design and cinematography in order to succeed.
But by now, The Archers had evolved into a big family
of highly skilled technicians.
One of the most important members of the team was art director Alfred Junger,
a design wizard
who also had the practical skills of an engineer or an architect.
We had the greatest film art director that I think has ever lived.
He goes back, you see, to the early days of Fritz Lang and Metropolis
and when we asked him to do things like the moving stairway
that all had to be worked out in perspective
and shot practically all the same day.
Because end of the war, we didn't have enough steel
and we didn't have enough electric power
to work that staircase all the time.
So all the shots up the staircase or shots down the staircase,
were all worked out in perspective on the drawing board.
I think it's a very important point with all these people
they are all, not only marvelous technicians,
but they are all people
who loved solving problems.
And we loved setting them!
There are a great number of,
there are a great number of people who are very happy when there are no problems,
but there are some who adore problems.
And we had this big team around us by now, you know
who just came saying, "What's the problem?"
How do you work with actors, Mr Powell, on the set?
I just start the day saying I've been thinking about this sequence,
I suggest we do this,
what do you think?
And they usually say they want to do something different.
So then we argue.
Not for long.
David Niven, just heaven to work with.
And very punctilious. David always leaves at 10 to 6, exactly.
Even if you're in the middle of a shot
comes up and says, "Sorry, old man, gotta go, you know!"
- And he's gone! - Oh really?
It was Michael who decided that everything that Peter experiences
must be based on solid medical evidence.
And all the visual fireworks of the film are underpinned by a very serious purpose.
They are means by which Michael can take his camera inside a tormented psyche
and tell a story
about the mental damage done by war.
He's haunted by these visions of the dead
flowing into the other world in an unending stream
and he's uncertain how he himself was spared.
These days, we might call it survivor's guilt.
This was a time right after the war
when the primary trend in movies was the emergence of film noir.
Bitter cynical movies, usually,
where the characters are doomed from the start.
Peter. Peter!
Powell and Pressburger went against the grain of all of that.
In all their major pictures of the war years, they seek to offer help,
consolation, and the possibility of renewal.
In A Matter of Life and Death what they offer is a vision of love.
Permit me.
The hard won triumph of love, surviving all and conquering all.
That's it, the only real bit of evidence we have.
Quick. We must not keep the court waiting.
One of the film's most beautiful conceits
is that despite the epic scale of the imagery,
the proof of love is the tiniest thing.
A single tear gathered on a rose.
Goodbye, darling.
And June provides a second proof
when she willingly takes Peter's place on the stairway to heaven
showing that she's prepared to give up her life for his.
In this moment of self sacrifice
the moral of the film is bluntly stated.
Yes, Mr Farlan, nothing is stronger than the law in the universe,
but on Earth, nothing is stronger than love.
We cling together in the face of power
and in the face of death.
The single tear on the rose weighs more heavy
than the battalions of heaven.
Outside the Empire, thousands of Londoners crowding the approaches
to see the Royal Family and also the many film stars
and notabilities attending the Royal Command Film Performance.
A Matter of Life and Death represents Powell and Pressburger
at the peak of their powers.
And it was chosen for the first-ever Royal Film Performance.
So great was the throng that the arrival of the Royal Family was delayed.
And when they did reach their objective, there was barely room
for them to make their way through the crowd into the cinema.
The Archers were on top of the world but it was 1946 now
and there was suddenly no war effort to serve anymore.
Emeric no longer had the impetus which had driven him on
to write one original story after another.
And this left The Archers with a big dilemma.
What sort of films should they now be making?
We suddenly felt now we have made several of our films
isn't there the time now
to make a film which has absolutely nothing to do with war?
Black Narcissus marked a whole new direction in Powell Pressburger's work.
It was their first non-original story
and it was a post-war escape
into a different and a distant world.
Rumer Godden's novel depicts the trials and tribulations
of a small group of nuns trying
to establish a convent in the Himalayas.
The atmosphere seems to agitate the senses
and the nuns find themselves troubled
by dangerous temptations and simmering conflicts.
I found myself in the Himalayas making a film about nuns.
And our mountains were painted on glass.
Since the whole film is set in India
It was a startlingly bold decision when Michael decided
to shoot everything in England,
using ingenious sets, trick shots, match shots
all to recreate the Himalayan setting.
Partly this was a practical choice
because everything to do with filmmaking was so much less mobile, in those days.
Everything had to be fully visualized in advance
and very little could be spontaneous or improvised.
Black Narcissus made a virtue of this
by making each shot into a production in itself.
A painterly composition in which every aspect of the image
is meticulously controlled.
This is truly a cinema of beautifully wrought imagemaking.
And it gives the film the vividness and the intensity
of an hallucination.
The cameraman was Jack Cardiff.
And here he consciously drew on the example
of artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer.
There's something special about his very English sense of Technicolor too.
The nuns were very deliberately dressed in white,
or off white robes, then surrounded by cool tones of stone, and green and blue.
So that when you see a hot color like red,
it really jumps out at you.
I still remember the first time I saw the film in a nitrate color print.
When the rhododendrons exploded onto the screen it was almost
a physical shock.
I'm not sure if I know another film
where the color contributes so much
to the story and the emotion of a picture.
Now, right at the center of all the elaborate design
is human faces.
In particular, the face of Deborah Kerr who plays Sister Clodagh.
And standing in contrast and in opposition to Sister Clodagh
is Sister Ruth played by Kathleen Byron.
David Farrar is the unsettling presence who...
Thank you.
Stirs up a feverish rivalry between the two women.
I've noticed you're very pleased to see him yourself.
If that was in your mind, it's better said I think you're out of your senses.
In a bold move for those times,
Ferrar is presented very much from the women's point of view
as a male sex object.
The result is a classic struggle between flesh and the spirit.
You can't order me about
you have nothing to do with me anymore.
When Sister Ruth puts on a red dress and red lipstick,
it's both a brazen act
and a visual shock.
Sex erupts into the story through the use of color.
These images were regarded as shockingly erotic in the 1940s,
when my friends and I first saw the film, it was on TV.
We saw it in black and white
in a version that had been censored by the Catholic Church,
but we were still kind of taken
and kind of amazed by the psychosexual energy of the film
that was inherent in the images that we were allowed to see.
- Ayah, wake up! - Oh, what is it? What is it?
It's Sister Ruth!
Stop her! She's gone mad!
Go and talk to Sister Clodagh.
She brought you here. She can get you back again.
Sister Clodagh, Sister Clodagh!
- You know what she says about you? - Whatever she said, it was true.
- You say that because you love her! - I don't love anyone!
Clodagh...
At the climax of Ruth's madness,
she faints, she blacks out and the whole screen is flooded with red.
It's a terrific way of putting into images the intensity of her passion.
Red, burning desire.
More than any of Powell Pressburger's previous films,
this one was an expressionistic exercise in high style.
And the sequence which most interested Michael
was a ten minute experiment in what he called
"composed film."
It's a carefully choreographed sequence of pure action,
no dialogue at all for the whole ten minutes.
The idea was that music would take the lead
dictating the character's movements,
expressing their thoughts and feelings more vividly than words ever could.
The music was written first
and then the sequence was shot
step by step
so that each shot
fitted the music, exactly.
Everything fits together into a single organic whole.
It turns the melodrama into opera.
It worked, it worked!
I could hardly believe my eyes.
Filmmaking was never the same for me again after that.
And when Red Shoes came up the year following,
we worked out the whole ballet to be a composed film.
The Red Shoes is a story of a girl torn between art and love.
Vicky Page is an ambitious young ballerina
who's taken up by the great impresario Lermontov.
But when she falls in love with the composer Julian Craster
her life gets ripped in two.
This was a project with a long history.
Emeric had first written a script for a ballet film back in the 1930s.
But the main thing that Michael was looking for now in his script
was opportunities to experiment.
His first radical decision was that he would only do the film
if Vicky Page was played by a real ballerina rather than an actress.
It was a tall order to find a great dancer
who could also act well enough to carry a big movie.
But he eventually found everything that he wanted in Moira Shearer.
The only trouble was that she didn't want to do the film,
and it took about a year to convince her.
She was very much a part of the ballet culture of her time.
And she always thought that dancing
was a much higher art than making movies.
Good luck!
Good luck.
The bravest idea of the film was to place at the heart of it,
an original ballet.
All right, Ivan.
Time to go down, Craster.
- Good luck, Mr Craster. - Thank you, Mr Lermontov.
- Nervous? - No.
Come on!
Stopping the story of a movie for over 15 minutes
to present a full length ballet?
This was a huge risk they were taking.
Nobody had ever done such a thing before
and no one had any idea how audiences were going to react.
The Ballet of The Red Shoes is based on a Hans Andersen fairytale
about a girl who is mad to dance.
The magical red shoes allow her to fulfill her dreams.
But when she wants to stop dancing,
the shoes won't let her.
This ballet was the part of the film that excited Michael most of all.
Released from the constraints of dialogue
he could really go to town with experimentation,
working freely with music, light, images,
movement, energy.
The most radical part of his conception
was to represent the ballet,
not as a theater audience would see it,
but as the dancer would experience it inside her head.
Michael used the body and the physicality of the dancer
to express the inner life of the dancer.
He used physical action to represent psychological pain.
And that subjective approach
had a very big influence on
what I did with the boxing scenes in Raging Bull .
When I watched De Niro doing his moves,
I saw that it was dance, it was choreography.
I also realized that I should stay in the ring as much as possible.
And stay inside the fighter's head.
See and hear it from his point of view.
...a right to the jaw, a hard left-hand to the body thrown by LaMotta.
Round eight and it's anybody's...
That way you get the impression of the fight,
the battle, the struggle, the suffering.
But you're also free to do whatever you want visually,
to communicate what Jake is feeling.
A hard left hand to the body, Robinson is driven out of the ring...
How he perceives things in the ring.
Which makes it very personal.
LaMotta has taken charge of the fight,
the undefeated Sugar Ray, his winning ways are in jeopardy.
LaMotta coming at him again.
LaMotta, feigning left hand...
At the end of the ballet of The Red Shoes ,
the dancer's passion carries her to her doom.
The ballet is an ecstatic celebration of the glory of art.
But it also says that being an artist
will destroy you.
It says that a true artist makes art
not because they want to
but because they have to.
It's not a choice, but a compulsion.
Of course, what made Red Shoes unique was that it was about art
and nothing but art.
And nothing but art, the best of art, would do.
There's something of both Michael and Emeric
in the film's most obsessive character, Boris Lermontov
Powell Pressburger films often deal with egocentric, volatile
addictive personalities.
But these characters speak to me and it may be obvious that many
of the characters that I'm drawn to are influenced by Powell's heroes.
They too are antiheroes, broken people driven by conflicts.
Strangely, I can even see
something of an affinity between Lermontov and Travis,
Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver
because they're both characters on the edge of things.
Listening, observing other people
always on the verge of exploding.
Good evening, Mr Craster.
Won't they be missing you at the Covent Garden tonight?
[She speaks French]
Oh, for God's sake, leave me alone, both of you.
Please Julian, wait until after the performance.
It'll be too late then.
You are already too late, Mr Craster.
Tell him why you've left him.
- I haven't left him. - Oh, yes, you have left him.
Nobody can have two lives and your life is dancing.
What makes the drama of The Red Shoes so compelling to me is the fact
that all three of the main characters are driven and tortured people.
Well, Vicky...
I love you, Julian.
Nobody but you.
But you love that more.
I don't know!
I don't know...
if you go with him now, I will never take you back. Never!
Do you want to destroy our love?
Adolescent nonsense!
Alright, go then, go with him!
Be a faithful housewife!
Of course, a scene like this is very risky.
The performances are pushed to the extreme
and it's easy to regard the whole thing as trashy, pulp material.
But I see it as an impulsive and instinctive heightening of reality.
Life is so unimportant.
And from now onwards, you will dance!
Like nobody ever before.
Eventually life and art come together
and the red shoes acquire the same power in life
that they had in the ballet.
I will never forget that most vivid image of Moira Shearer's eyes.
When the shoes begin to take her away.
Her face, grotesque,
echoes of an ancient tragic mask.
It's so bold and flamboyant and extreme.
I liked, I like that it sometimes seems out of control.
Not the emotions of the characters,
but the emotions of the people who made the film.
Their passion's out of control.
And their total commitment to their fairytale story
creates an unforgettable climax.
No!
Why do you think it was so important for you to show somebody dying for their art?
I think because I would do it myself.
- Really? - Mm.
You don’t believe me.
When the executives of Rank saw The Red Shoes , they hated it.
The company was increasingly in the hands of bureaucrats and money men
who saw it as a disastrously uncommercial art movie.
'RED SHOES' GETS ROUSING WELCOME FROM N.Y. CRITICS
It was two Americans, Bob Benjamin and Arthur Krim
who transformed the fortunes of the picture
by running it continuously in a single theater in New York.
THE RED SHOES ARE STILL DANCING ON BROADWAY AFTER 2 YEARS!
From there, he went on to become The Archers' most popular film.
One of the greatest and most successful pictures ever made.
For me, it's the ultimate subversive commercial movie.
It's the epitome of everything that I admire most
about Powell and Pressburger.
It is utterly satisfying as popular entertainment
but also wildly inventive, profound,
complex and not at all comforting.
It's a film that has been gloriously vindicated by history.
But back in 1949
Michael and Emeric were so disgusted by the way that Rank treated the picture
that they split from the company.
They crossed over to London Films and linked up once again with Alex Korda.
Alex was the most pleasant,
fun-loving creature
who could charm money out,
not only those who had the money, but strangely,
also of people, some people who had no money at all.
Which, of course, ended in disaster.
The Small Back Room was the first film they made under their new deal.
And it represented another startling change in direction.
Having just made a huge Technicolor masterpiece,
Michael now decided, naturally, that he wanted to make
a small black and white picture.
"I needed to escape from romance into reality"
is how he put it.
The reality, of course, is what The Archers
were always accused of avoiding.
So they now faced up squarely to their critics
by taking a journey through a bleak succession of blacked-out streets,
crowded pubs,
desolate flats
and stuffy offices.
What excited Michael most about the film though,
was the troubled psychology of the characters,
drawn from Nigel Balchin's original novel.
I must have a drink.
Ask me to have a drink, woman.
Have a drink, Sammy.
Whiskey?
No, thanks, Susan. I'll have some of my nice medicine.
Sammy, the central character is a munitions expert
who's lost a foot, and now wears a prosthetic.
Why don't you take the thing off?
You know that helps.
No.
You do when you're alone.
Why will you keep it on when I'm here?
It's all right now.
You must realize that you can have ideas that'll win the war four times over...
but it still won't do anybody any good unless you can sell them.
We're not in a university department now.
No, nor in an advertising agency, where you belong.
Now look here, Sammy,
You may think you're a great big scientist and I'm just a commercial stooge...
But the plain fact is if you make a mess of things, I have to clear it up.
And the equally plain fact
is the stuff you build a reputation on comes chiefly out of my head!
I'm not a politician or a salesman, but neither am I a kid of ten.
Sammy's frequently in physical pain
and this feeds a craving for whiskey that he struggles to control.
Sammy?
You could run the section yourself. Even Pinker says so.
But you just won't face things.
You go on being sorry for yourself with everything in the world to live for.
But what's so special about only having one foot?
You just haven't got the guts!
- Will you shut up? - Every word I said is true.
Oh, Sammy, you're such a fool.
Why don't you pull yourself together, Sue?
You're making an ass of yourself.
Next time you just decide to go home when we're out together
I'd be obliged if you'd tell me.
The Archers demonstrated here that if they chose
they could do heartfelt work
in the British realist tradition.
Reining in their instincts for fantasy and comedy
and focusing instead on the emotional truth
of a complicated love story.
I've been thinking, if you really think I'm such a poor sap as you said tonight...
we'd better get out of each other's way.
The same thought had occurred to me.
The finished film is full of anger, and anguish
and the critics loved it.
Well, get out of it!
The only trouble was that audiences just weren't interested.
They didn't want grim stories
which harked back to the miseries of the war years.
So instead of being a new beginning,
The Small Back Room proved to be a dead end.
In characteristic fashion,
the pair now bounced from the bleakest picture they had ever made
into their most frivolous film to date.
Alexander Korda had directed a very profitable version
of The Scarlet Pimpernel back in the 1930s.
And he now wanted it remade as a Technicolor spectacular.
Sam Goldwyn would bring in the Hollywood money.
And for the first time in their partnership, Powell and Pressburger
found themselves doing something that neither of them wanted to do,
a remake of a worn out classic.
Nobody can help you, not even your government.
Now, what do you say?
You seem to have thought of everything.
Nothing is left of me now, but to say...
congratulations.
You're very kind, Sir Percy.
They decided that the only thing to do with the corny old Pimpernel story
was to transform it into an exuberant entertainment
by filling it with comedy and music.
There's an impudent cinematic joke when Cyril Cusack
finds himself sneezing uncontrollably,
and when he sneezes, they cut to fireworks.
It's the most startling imagery and editing,
it's got nothing to do with the story.
I mean, it's not as though
there are fireworks going on outside the walls in the movie.
It's simply a visual metaphor coming right out of the blue.
You know, I think you-- Actually, you could trace it back
to early silent films
where often you could see what a person's hearing.
Or it's like an experiment in avant garde film
where anything can happen with images.
But for Michael and Emeric to be doing this here
in the middle of a drama,
for me, it represents their pure enjoyment in just making movies.
But back in 1950
you didn't make fun of the plot in an adventure story.
And Sam Goldwyn hated them for it.
All he wanted was a color version of the original picture.
So they had to do reshoots and re-edits And the result was a miserable
compromise which satisfied nobody.
In the same difficult year of 1950,
They entered into another co-production with another big Hollywood producer,
David Selznick.
This time, the film was Gone to Earth ,
a steamy tale of Shropshire folk
based on a novel by Mary Webb.
Selznick wanted the movie to be a showcase
for his new wife Jennifer Jones,
who turned out to be terrific.
We were delighted to have Jennifer Jones.
Not so delighted with Selznick.
He was madly in love with her.
And intensely possessive.
And also afraid to come on the set when she was there
because she would throw something at him.
And so you can,
you were continually conscious of a glaring eyeball from behind the set.
Gone to earth!
Gone to Earth is a kind of gothic masterpiece.
It's full of Michael's deep feeling for the land,
the natural world and the rituals of English country life.
"When at once, a little of midnight
climbed to the steepest stones on the top of God's little mountain.
lay your shawl on the devil's chair
and walk around it.
Ask your wish."
If I be to go to "Hunter's Spinney..."
If I be to go...
let me hear the fairy music.
Jennifer Jones' character Hazel is a wild thing
in a world of traps and snares.
They're after us, Foxy.
Which way are they headin'?
"Hunter's Spinney"! This way!
- They'll pull you down! - Drop it, they'll pull you down!
Give her to me, you little fool, give her to me!
Gone to earth!
The trouble was that Selznick then refused to accept the film that they delivered.
At the end, his conception of the film...
was different.
And he wanted us to make changes and we didn't.
And he had the film for North America.
So he shot extra scenes with Jennifer,
I think Rouben Mamoulian shot them.
Selznick ended up suing them and releasing his own version called The Wild Heart .
So The Archer's two attempts
to make commercial pictures with Hollywood producers
both turned into a shambles of recrimination and lawsuits.
The switch from wartime idealism to peacetime commercialism
was proving to be very tough.
Creatively speaking, everything was going awry
and the partners urgently needed to get back to making their own kind of pictures.
It was the conductor Mr Thomas Beecham
who proposed a film of Offenbach's opera, TALES OF HOFFMANN .
And Emeric seized on the idea.
Music was always his first love among the arts.
Emeric also found a fellow spirit in the German writer Hoffmann.
They had a shared taste for the magical, the morbid and the fantastical.
In the first tale, Hoffmann falls in love with a mechanical doll, Olympia.
That young fellow there, I vow
Very soon will pop the question
My friend indeed
What excited Michael here
was the radical idea of rethinking opera as cinema
by transforming it into dance.
Birds in woodland ways Are winging...
He cast dancers, rather than singers, in key parts.
This brought the stories to life visually
and drove the production towards Michael's ideal of a film
in which everything is choreographed.
The whole thing was shot like a silent movie
with music always played back on the set.
So the performers and the crew
were all under the spell of it.
Of course, movement itself is central to the art of motion pictures.
I love the way a camera can move.
I love cutting from one movement to another.
And in those special moments when everything is moving just right,
whether you're on the set or you're in the editing room,
you feel possessed by a very powerful energy.
When I'm asked out of all movies, what is your favorite scene?
I always think about the sword fight
in the Gondola in Hoffmann .
It's so supple and fluid.
Thoroughly, physical and entirely dreamlike.
There's no sound effects at all.
It's both very immediate
and very distant.
And it's something that no other art form can do.
It's pure film.
Practically every technique known to movies is employed in Hoffmann
and there's absolutely no respect for conventional continuity.
The film keeps surpassing itself
with the surreal and surprising nature of its imagery.
You get broad theatrical effects combined with perfect cinematic detail.
Like the movement of Olympia's eyes here.
And the eyes are choreographed too, just like everything else.
I always noticed that, particularly with Robert Helpmann's eyes
just a glance
and it's as if he danced five steps.
One of Michael's favorite mantras was "All Art is One".
Because he believed that in a film,
you could bring together literature, music, dance, drama and design
to create a kind of total cinema that would transcend the traditional arts.
The Tales of Hoffmann is the closest that he got to achieving that.
It also represented the fulfillment of all his most adventurous ideas.
I mean, the whole thing is both a composed film
like the 10 minute experiment in Black Narcissus
and a surreal psychodrama, like the ballet in The Red Shoes .
The result is a film that performs like a symphony.
You can watch it over and over again,
discovering new things each time.
It's as close to pure expression as cinema can get.
Just image after image
designed to communicate feelings in a very explicit way.
History was made in New York last weekend,
as for the first time, the Metropolitan Opera House
was turned into a cinema.
And the reason was Tales of Hoffmann ,
a new British picture from London Films, given its world premiere
at a gala social occasion in aid of the Red Cross.
After the big premiere in New York,
Powell and Pressburger got a letter of congratulations from one of their heroes,
Cecil B DeMille.
I THANK YOU FOR OUSTANDING COURAGE AND ARTISTRY
But a painful controversy developed when the film was shown at Cannes,
Alex Korda thought the third act was slow and dull
and it ought to be cut out.
Michael adamantly refused,
but he felt that Emeric was siding with Korda.
And he took this badly.
It was the last time that Michael would work with Korda.
Or worse than that,
it shook the firm foundations of trust between him and Emeric.
There was now a grim period of three years
during which the partners didn't make a single film together.
Michael was full of ambitious ideas,
but he insisted on creative freedom.
And who would give him that now
that he's burned his bridges with Korda and Rank?
Frustrated and restless, he spent a lot of time traveling the world.
He was a celebrity, an important man,
but he was not sure what to do with himself anymore.
Michael dreamed of adventurous productions with great artists,
maybe financed by television.
And one idea was a story from the Odyssey
starring Orson Welles with a libretto by Dylan Thomas,
and music by Stravinsky.
Emeric was always the more practical of the two.
He went back to Korda to direct a film on his own.
This was a tale for children called Twice Upon a Time .
But it was not a success.
The shaken and embattled partnership tried to recover their momentum
with all kinds of new projects.
But they couldn't get anything off the ground.
There just wasn't much money around for British film production
in the early fifties, and it was hard
to make any kind of deal without losing their independence.
I mean, you want to make a picture and you want to get the money,
well, you know, you go everywhere you talk to everybody, you do what you can.
But Michael and Emeric weren't used to working that way.
They wanted to hang on to their independence
and they suffered because of it.
The stress and strain seemed to drag the two men in opposite directions,
with Michael becoming more idealistic and combative
while Emeric grew more disappointed and frustrated.
Eventually they scraped together the wherewithal to make Oh... Rosalinda!!
An updating of Die Fledermaus
set in contemporary Vienna.
The slogan of the movie suited their mood at the time:
"The situation is hopeless but not serious."
It seems to me
with great respect
to have happened like this!
The film starts off promisingly with an utterly distinctive design
and some characteristically ambitious ideas.
But it never quite lives up to that early promise.
Rosalinda!
It is not a composed film, like their best musical works,
but something looser and less disciplined.
And I think they never really had the money
that they needed to carry through their ideas with conviction
and the champagne that the film offers mostly turns out to be flat
rather than sparkling.
The British public, certainly disappointed Emeric
by refusing to share his very European taste for operetta.
And the partners were by now desperately in need of some kind of success.
The next job they took on was an old-fashioned war movie called
The Battle of the River Plate.
Michael had a great time shooting it because he was allowed
to take command of a large fleet of warships
in order to get the film's magnificent shots of ships at sea.
What gave the images their spectacular impact on the screen
was the fact that they were shot in the new widescreen format of VistaVision
which was like the IMAX of its day.
You sat in the cinema and you felt like you were on the deck
of one of those ships.
The scale and clarity of it was magical.
And out of nowhere, the pair suddenly had a box office hit again.
The Empire Theater in Leicester Square was the magnet that drew a vast crowd
of Londoners who came to see all they could
of those attending the Royal Film Performance.
Young French star Brigitte Bardot, for example.
And Mrs Arthur Miller, who you probably know even better as Marilyn Monroe.
Her Majesty talking with Miss Monroe
remarks that they were neighbors at Windsor.
Dramatically speaking, for the first time,
they had made a very conventional movie.
With nothing surprising or new about it.
...it's suicide, she’s tearing herself apart!
The twilight of the gods.
But the success of River Plate
meant that they suddenly had standing in the industry again
and Rank offered them a five-year contract for seven films.
Emeric was eager to accept, but Michael feared that
they would end up making mediocre pictures full of mediocre contract players.
And he couldn't stomach the idea of giving up their dreams and their autonomy.
Eventually he agreed to do just one film for Rank
and this would be Ill Met by Moonlight .
The subject might have been a great one for The Archers.
It was based on the true story of Paddy Leigh Fermor,
a very British hero,
a gentleman amateur,
who managed to kidnap a German general on Crete during World War II.
Come on!
The problem with the film is that Emeric wanted to tell the story
in a downbeat documentary way,
while Michael wanted to make a big romantic picture.
Once again, the VistaVision camera afforded some big beautiful images.
But at its heart, the film was confused and it was uninspired.
Michael felt that Emeric had become tired and timid
and that he had lost all his fire and ambition.
Emeric felt that Michael had gone mad
and become wildly unreasonable about everything.
Michael hated Rank's choice of Dirk Bogarde as the lead.
Come on, flash the signal.
Sugar baker, SB.
How do I flash "sugar baker"?
Don't you know the Morse code?
Me? But don't you...
No.
So...
Do you know the Morse code?
But of course.
Aren't you professional soldiers?
Good lord, no.
The Major here?
No, an amateur, distinguished amateur, but still an amateur.
Michael was refused permission to shoot in Crete,
and had to make the film in France instead.
Everything added up to make a weary and troubled production
that no one really believed in.
When Michael saw the film 30 years later,
even he was surprised by how poor it was.
He felt the acting was mediocre, the camera work a mistake.
And even in 1957, the whole thing must have looked painfully old-fashioned.
"The script was underwritten, and weak on action", he said
"the gags were unoriginal
and the surprises,
not surprising."
During the editing the Powell and Pressburger team
faced up to the fact that they no longer saw things in the same way,
and decided to dissolve their partnership.
I didn't like being tied down to the facts.
Yes, I read that you resisted that sort of realism and wanted to--
- Bit more imagination in it. - Oh, yes. And...
and so we sort of naturally drifted apart on this.
On this idea.
You didn't have a sort of hammer and tongs argument and...
No, no.
Throwing down the gauntlet for realism and you marching off in a huff about...
No, it was just a rather sad mutual gap.
You can't have a mutual gap, can you?
A sad gap which opened between two loving people.
This is the way Emeric summed up the partnership once.
"I always had the feeling that we were amateurs in a world of professionals.
Amateurs stand so much closer to what they are doing
and they are driven by enthusiasm,
which is so much more forceful than what professionals are driven by."
People are always asking us how we managed to work together for so long.
Something like eighteen years.
The answer is
love.
You can't have a collaboration
in anything
without love.
Emeric and Michael always remained good friends
and neither man ever said a bad word about the other.
I started to write novels. Very, very few of them, only two.
And...
well, I think nice novels.
Mark, what a beautiful little boy.
Who is he?
Me.
Course it is.
Then who took this film?
My father.
Michael went on to make one more great film without Emeric.
Ah! What's that?
That was Peeping Tom .
And for me, it represents Michael's determination to keep on experimenting.
Mark, what are you doing?
Wanted to photograph you watching.
No, no!
Michael even included himself in this story
casting himself as the bullying father
who terrifies his own child in order to study his fear.
What's he doing?
Giving me a present.
What is it?
Can't you guess?
A camera.
That child grows up to be a killer.
And what's most unsettling about it,
of course, is that he's shown sympathetically.
As a shy and suffering person.
Switch it off, Mark!
Mark, switch it off!
His trouble is that he is not at home in this world
and he feels truly alive and whole
only in the images he creates built from the destruction of others.
Every night you switch on that film machine.
What are these films you can't wait to look at?
What's the film you're showing now?
Take me to your cinema.
Yes.
The atmosphere that permeates the whole film
is one of overwhelming sadness.
What am I seeing, Mark?
Why don't you answer?
Oh!
It's no good.
I was afraid it wouldn't be.
What?
The lights fade too soon.
It's a very disturbing and transgressive film,
but it's also very moving because
at the heart of it is this radical compassion,
it asks you to feel for someone
who is a madman and a murderer.
What do you think you've spoiled?
An opportunity.
Now, I have to find another one.
Watch them, Helen.
Watch them, say goodbye,
one by one.
I have timed it so often.
Helen!
I'm afraid.
No, no, Mark!
And I'm glad...
I'm afraid.
"I was shocked to the core to find a director of his standing
befouling the screen with such perverted nonsense."
"The word for Michael Powell's Peeping Tom is, quite simply, nasty."
" Peeping Tom stinks more than anything else in British films
since The Stranglers of Bombay ."
"The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom
would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer."
I believed in the film, they didn't.
It vanished for 20 years.
And I vanished with it.
I was no longer bankable.
I was too independent.
I wanted my own way.
The other thing that counted against Michael was the fact that by now
it was the 60s.
Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz,
Lindsay Anderson were making fresh energetic,
a kind of classic films which drew on the documentary tradition
and the ideas of the European New Wave.
This is Ron, I want a word with you!
For these young men, Michael represented ancient history.
- Give me my money back! - Call it!
Cut!
I go out of frame, you don't follow me at all?
- No, we don't follow you. - Oh, it’s alright then. Alright, good.
Oh, sorry...
No, I had a feeling in that take that I was opening my mouth
and licking my lips a little too much. I suddenly found myself doing that.
- Yes, do it again. - Would you like to take another?
Action!
After much struggle, he managed to put together
two low budget pictures in Australia.
Mrs Ryan, I want a word with you!
I want a word...
Including this one
Age of Consent with Helen Mirren and James Mason.
- Give me that money back, it’s mine! - You stole it from me!
Cut!
It never became a real tug of war, with both of you tugging.
If it really is a tug of war, so that your life is depending on the bag.
And if you lose the bag, you've gone, you know.
Cora!
Action now.
Cut!
It was wonderful, darling.
Marvellous. Are you alright?
It was very clever.
Everybody happy?
He had no way of knowing it, but this would be his last feature film.
He was never able to raise the money to make another one.
She's dead.
Grandma?
Of course, it was during the very years
that Michael was struggling and sinking into obscurity
that people like me and Francis Coppola were discovering
his work on the other side of the Atlantic.
And our great fortune was that we were watching the Powell Pressburger films
without any cultural baggage.
We had no prejudices based on when they were made
or how they were received.
We just saw them as enjoyable films
and sometimes wonderful works of art.
We watched all types of British films, whether it was Grierson or Jennings,
David Lean or Carol Reed, Hitchcock or Powell and Pressburger.
And we didn't think of any one style as better than the others.
For us, they all reflected different aspects of one people.
The British.
And we were open to all of it.
When I got to know Michael well,
he certainly seemed to me imbued with the spirit and the soul of Britain.
And it was my great good fortune in the 1980s
to finally see him and Emeric rediscovered
and reassessed in Britain too.
I can't begin to describe how touched
and how happy I am to be presenting this award tonight.
An award which I feel very deeply is long, long overdue.
These two giants of the cinema
who had pretty much disappeared into oblivion for 20 years
were finally granted the honor and respect that they deserved.
In 1984, Michael got married
to my longtime film editor, Thelma Schoonmaker,
who's edited all my films since Raging Bull .
They lived here in New York and Michael became a constant friend
and a constant presence in my life.
He was a guy who hadn't made a picture in 25-30 years.
But every day he was planning one.
When I went through difficult times, he was a tremendous support.
I remember when I was finishing The King of Comedy
I was at a very low point.
But Michael somehow seemed to understand everything I was going through.
He never...
he was never intrusive.
But he was able to talk to me personally
from the experience that he had of a very long creative life.
And his voice was very different from
the voices of the others around me at the time.
He had a spirit that was always strong
and uncompromised.
Even when he seemed to be a forgotten man.
That spirit supported me in periods of doubt
and desolation.
I look back on it now
and I find it extraordinary that I knew Michael Powell personally
for 16 years.
And he was not only a support but a guide.
Pushing me along, giving me confidence, keeping me bold in my own work.
It's OK, fellas, no problem.
This one's gone. What? OK, yeah.
I'll never be able to fully understand or express
why he meant so much to me and why he'll always be with me.
And that current of thought
always leads back to those films he made with Emeric.
I'm signing off now, June.
Goodbye, goodbye June.
Hello, G for George. Hello, G-George?
Hello G-George?
David Niven saying goodbye to Kim Hunter over the radio
in A Matter of Life and Death .
Let it ring.
The intensely erotic scenes between Kathleen Byron and David Farrar
in The Small Back Room .
The camera moving up and away from the duel
in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp .
Certain films, you simply run all the time and you live with them.
As you grow older, they grow deeper.
I'm not sure how it happens, but it does.
For me, that body of work is a wondrous presence,
a constant source of energy,
and a reminder
of what life and art are all about.
When you look back
do you think that somehow or other, the British
didn't appreciate you both as much as they might have?
When did the British ever appreciate their great men?
Cut.
I hope this will, this will be cut.
MADE IN ENGLAND