Powell and Pressburger

Partnership 1939–1972; Michael Powell 1905–1990, Emeric Pressburger 1902–1988 · British (Pressburger Hungarian-born)

The Archers — British wartime and post-war romanticism, Technicolor fantasy

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger worked together for more than thirty years, making nineteen films under the banner of The Archers and sharing a single credit: "Written, Produced and Directed by". Against the documentary sobriety of British wartime cinema they made lush Technicolor fantasies about heaven, ballet and the Himalayas, several of which irritated the authorities and all of which are now canonical.

How to spot them

▸The Archers logo — an arrow thudding into a target — and a shared writing, producing and directing credit
▸Technicolor at its most saturated, shot by Jack Cardiff; designs by Alfred Junge and Hein Heckroth
▸A romantic, mystical England, and a strain of continental European feeling brought by a Hungarian refugee
▸Deborah Kerr, Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrook, David Niven, Moira Shearer
▸Championed for decades by Martin Scorsese, whose editor Thelma Schoonmaker married Powell

Key films

A U-boat crew put ashore in Hudson Bay make their way across Canada towards the neutral United States (1941)

49th Parallel — Pressburger won the Oscar for Best Original Story

Forty years in the life of a British officer, from a duel in Berlin to the Home Guard; Churchill tried to have it suppressed (1943)

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp — Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook

A land girl, a soldier and an American sergeant investigate a man who pours glue into women's hair in a village on the old pilgrims' road to Kent (1944)

A Canterbury Tale

A young woman travelling to be married on the Hebridean island of Kiloran is stranded by gales on Mull (1945)

I Know Where I'm Going!, with Wendy Hiller

An RAF pilot bails out without a parachute, survives, and must argue for his life before a celestial court; heaven is monochrome and Earth is Technicolor (1946)

A Matter of Life and Death, with David Niven — released in America as Stairway to Heaven

Anglican nuns try to found a school in a former harem palace high in the Himalayas; a bell on a precipice and a nun in red lipstick (1947)

Black Narcissus — Oscars for Jack Cardiff's cinematography and Alfred Junge's art direction; the mountains were built at Pinewood

A ballerina is torn between a composer and an impresario, and a pair of shoes will not let her stop dancing (1948)

The Red Shoes, with Moira Shearer — Oscars for art direction and for Brian Easdale's score

An operatic fantasy in three tales, staged and danced rather than sung to camera, admired by Scorsese and Romero alike (1951)

The Tales of Hoffmann, after Offenbach

Key ideas

A deliberately anti-realist British cinema: 'the war of the magicians' against documentary sobriety
Sympathy for the enemy — Blimp's decent German friend was exactly what the wartime authorities objected to
The composed film: shooting to pre-recorded music so that image and score move as one

Quick-fire facts

•Emeric Pressburger was born in Miskolc, Hungary, in 1902, and came to Britain as a Jewish refugee by way of Berlin and Paris
•They first worked together on The Spy in Black (1939) at Alexander Korda's invitation
•They formed The Archers in 1943, using an arrow-and-target logo and a joint credit
•Winston Churchill attempted to block The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and to prevent its export
•The Red Shoes won Oscars for art direction and original score, and its ballet sequence runs about seventeen minutes
•Black Narcissus was shot almost entirely at Pinewood, with the Himalayas painted and modelled
•Powell's solo film Peeping Tom (1960), about a cameraman who films women as he kills them, was so savaged by critics that it effectively ended his British career; Martin Scorsese later led its rehabilitation
•Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese's editor, married Michael Powell in 1984; Scorsese produced the 2024 documentary Made in England about the pair

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources

British Film Institute — Where to begin with Powell and Pressburger
Michael Powell — A Life in Movies: An Autobiography