Powell and Pressburger: a new tribute

They were a unique team: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the quintessential Englishman and the central European Jew. Together they made some of the greatest British films: The Red Shoes, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death. Powell was the director, Pressburger the screen writer, but their credit always read: “Written, Produced, and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.”

In the mid-1950s they fell out of fashion. Black-and-white realism and kitchen sink drama was in. Powell and Pressburger, with their glorious technicolour fantasies, were out. Then came the revival. After twenty years in the shadows, they were rediscovered.

Or, rather, Powell was. Partly it was a matter of temperament. Powell was the extrovert, flamboyant self-publicist. Pressburger was always quieter, more reticent. Powell wrote two huge volumes of autobiography, running to over 1300 pages. Pressburger never wrote a memoir and only gave one published interview. It was Powell who befriended young directors like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and it was Powell, as the director, who fitted in with the dominant auteur orthodoxy. Some wrote as if Powell had made the films on his own. Pressburger was sometimes not even mentioned.

Whatever the reasons, when the recognition came it was largely centred on Powell. In his superb biography of Pressburger, Kevin Macdonald points out that when the first NFT retrospective was shown in 1971,”‘it was called: ‘Michael Powell (and in much smaller letters) in collaboration with Emeric Pressburger’ and the photograph on the cover of the programme bore a picture of Michael.” Then, in 1978, when there was a second, more comprehensive retrospective, “the front cover of the NFT programme proclaimed ‘A Michael Powell Season’… Michael Powell’s name alone was above the door of the cinema and BFI officials failed to invite Emeric to the official opening party.” In 1981, when they were both awarded BAFTA fellowships, writes Macdonald, “initially the board were only going to give one award – to Michael Powell.” It wasn’t until 1994, and Kevin Macdonald’s biography, that Pressburger received his due.

In 2005, the year of Michael Powell’s centenary, once again, Pressburger, the shy Jewish refugee, was sidelined. In Ian Christie’s introductory notes to the NFT season on Powell there were just two references to Pressburger. In JG Ballard’s admiring piece about Powell in The Guardian in July 2005, Pressburger was missed out altogether.

There were several reasons for this. We are obsessed with film directors, not screenwriters. The main reason for the revival of interest in these films is the way they look – the brilliant colours, the fantasy, the incredible sets. Powell was the director and so he got all the attention. One of the greatest screenwriters in the history of the movies, by contrast, has been forgotten. While we rightly celebrate Michael Powell’s achievements, we should also remember how important collaboration and partnerships are in the history of cinema, and make sure that both men, who rightly shared the credits on their films, get their proper due.

One of the great joys of David Hinton’s new tribute to Powell and Pressburger, Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, is that he and Martin Scorsese, who presents the documentary, let us see clips of interviews with Pressburger. But the focus is still on Powell. Scorsese, after all, is a director and right from the start he is keen to emphasise the huge influence of Powell, one of cinema’s greatest directors, on his own work.

The director of Made in England, David Hinton, was one of the stars of The South Bank Show in the 1980s, directing programmes about such luminaries as Alan Bennett (1984), Michael Powell (1986) and Francis Bacon (1988). The programme about Powell was produced to coincide with the publication of Powell’s autobiography, A Life in Movies, and follows Powell’s career from his first black and white quota quickies in the 1920s up to The Red Shoes in 1948, which marks the end of the first volume of Powell’s autobiography. It’s a brilliantly made documentary, intensely visual, superbly presented by Powell, a consummate showman who had recently turned eighty when it was made. At its heart, the programme is a tribute to Powell’s Englishness, emphasising the importance of A Canterbury Tale and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, whose hero, Clive Candy, “couldn’t be more English”, according to Powell.

What is missing here, of course, is Pressburger’s relationship as a central European Jew to Englishness. Also missing are all the Jewish refugees who played such an important role in the Powell and Pressburger films: the actors Conrad Veidt and especially Anton Walbrook, the set designer Hein Heckroth, the composer Allan Gray (born Józef Żmigrod), the cinematographer Erwin Hillier, who had worked with Murnau and Fritz Lang in Berlin — and, of course, Emeric (born Imre) Pressburger himself.

But as well as Englishness, Hinton’s South Bank Show was about colour and Powell’s vision as a director (“always imaginative, often surreal, bizarre and fantastic”). Above all, there is the use of Technicolour (remember the words of the Marius Goring character in A Matter of Life and Death, “One is starved for Technicolour Up There,” he says as he leaves the black-and-white world for the world of colour.) And what colour! Think of the early scene between Kim Hunter and David Niven in A Matter of Life and Death, with Hunter’s red lips and the golden flames behind Niven’s face. Powell’s vision is about colour not words. Pressburger’s smart line about Niven’s character looking forward to having white wings like an angel when he dies as his plane crashes is lost in the brilliant colours of Powell’s filmmaking.

Then, with Black Narcissus, there is the brilliant red of Kathleen Byron’s lipstick and her bright red dress in vivid contrast to the off-white dresses of the nuns. And, above all, in The Red Shoes, there are the red shoes, Moira Shearer’s red hair and, above all, the famous blood when Shearer dies for her art at the end of the film.

Which brings us to Scorsese, who presents Made in England and whose films are full of red, from one of his first shorts, The Big Shave, to the use of red in Mean Streets and Good Fellas. Scorsese hasn’t much time for Pressburger. It’s Powell the great director who is at the heart of Hinton’s documentary, perhaps not surprisingly given the key roles of Scorsese but also, crucially, Thelma Schoonmaker, Powell’s widow and Scorsese’s longtime film editor.

Made in England is in chronological order and, again, is not very interested in Pressburger the refugee or the team of German and Polish refugees who worked on so many of the films. This is particularly curious when you think of the importance of insiders and outsiders to the Powell and Pressburger films, in particular, the lifelong relationship between Clive Candy and Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, the German officer, superbly played by the German refugee Anton Walbrook, in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Walbrook later played the impresario Lermontov in The Red Shoes, again in contrast to the very English ballerina Victoria Page and the young composer Julian Craster. It’s not just another love triangle, it’s also another clash between Englishness (Candy/Craster) and a European outsider (Theo/Lermontov). It’s hard to think of any other great British films which focused so much on European outsiders. Perhaps Pressburger had some input into this? If so, Hinton and Scorsese don’t seem especially curious to find out. Hinton, a hugely talented director in his own right, and Scorsese, one of the great filmmakers of the past half century, are more interested in Powell.

This may seem picky. After all, the reason these films speak to us so powerfully more than eighty years after they were made, is because of the astonishing mix of music and image, the use of colour, the vivid close-ups. Who can forget that extraordinary close-up of Moira Shearer dancing in The Red Shoes, eyes wide open, brilliant eye make-up, bright red mouth? Or the battle between Deborah Kerr and the diabolical Kathleen Byron character in Black Narcissus? The opening of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture as Theo, now a German prisoner of war, snubs Clive Candy in Colonel Blimp?

These are among the greatest moments in British cinema. After Powell and Pressburger had spent years in the wilderness, it was these kinds of scenes that won over a whole new generation of young filmmakers: Scorsese, of course, but also Spielberg and Coppola. The wheel had turned. In the late 1950s and 1960s the luscious Technicolor melodramas of the Archers (the production company formed by Powell and Pressburger in 1942) had seemed old-fashioned, compared to the British New Wave with their social realism. By the 1970s and 1980s it was Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Jack Clayton who were out of fashion and the so-called “Movie Brats” had discovered the masterpieces of Powell and Pressburger.

Together with Scorsese, Hinton and Associate Producer Jamie Muir (another graduate of The South Bank Show) have done a terrific job to introduce a new generation to 1940s masterpieces like Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, all made within a few years of each other, some of them during the war when budgets and resources were desperately tight. They have not just brought these films to life. They have reminded us of a neglected chapter in British film history and by so doing they have changed the canon. These films belong at the very heart of British cinema.   

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