Throughout Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger, the softly croaky and comforting voice of Martin Scorsese repeatedly reminds us that the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were anything but conventional. The duo may have worked within a conventional system, but their sensibility was always subversive, if not outright experimental: the desire to discover the mysterious through playfully innovative use of associative editing or vivid Technicolor or exaggerated performances dominated almost all their films. They didn’t just want to record reality, then, but noticeably compose it — to bring a hallucinatory mélange of opera, literature, painting, and drama to films whose magic leaves a permanent imprint on its audience. Scorsese himself recalls the astonishing “camera pulling back, then lifting up” moment from the sword fight in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), the hesitant expression of love in the face of death in A Matter of Life and Death (1946), and the baroque expressionism of the ravishing centerpiece ballet sequence in The Red Shoes (1948) as moments of pure cinematic ecstasy whose undeniable impact has only enhanced with time.
The most damning criticism of David Hinton’s documentary is that it doesn’t contain any moment of its own that leaves a lasting impression. Now, that doesn’t mean that the documentary is meritless: it’s a well-researched, neatly curated account of a place and time that made the Archers — the production company founded by Powell and Pressburger in 1943 — and then, post-1957, forgot them. It also briefly covers the duos’ individual careers before and after their partnership: Powell eventually worked with Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola as the senior director-in-residence at the latter’s production company, American Zoetrope, so his “madness” for visual experimentation gets more attention than Pressburger’s writing genius. But, for most of its runtime, Made in England is content to linearly chronicle the time the two directors spent making films together: first, during wartime, when blatant British propagandist films like Colonel Blimp and 49th Parallel were imbued with nuanced, humanist spins courtesy of Pressburger, a Jewish emigrant who, having spent the best time of his life in Germany in the early ’30s, wanted to make sure the enemy in his films was Nazi Germany, not all of Germany. The peace-time effort moved attention away from complicated content to a more exuberant style, with regard to both Pressburger and Powell. Particularly, Scorsese waxes lyrical about the latter’s increasingly surreal visual musicality in films like The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman (1951), which prioritized cinematic excess and spectacle beyond all else.
But Hinton’s film itself, at least formally speaking, is excessively, stalely “documentarian.” In other words, almost everything a Powell and Pressburger film isn’t: safe, conventional, somewhat disposable. Perhaps that’s BBC’s mandated approach: Hinton, maybe, wants to reach the broadest possible (British?) audience who isn’t aware of the Archers’ filmmaking magic. To that end, logic states that you enlist a director like Scorsese to, sometimes studiously, other times sleepily, recite words from what reads like a polished graduate essay on the Archers. It’s informative, sure, but what Scorsese calls the “real film magic” — the defining quality of a great Powell and Pressburger movie — feels entirely absent. Except there are also brief moments when Hinton uses the blood reds of Mean Streets (1973), the tormented face of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), and the cut-away from Jake LaMotta’s fight in Raging Bull (1980) to narrate the Archers’ story. Maybe it’s in this fractured, almost hallucinatory remembrance of their films through the lens of Scorsese’s where “real film magic” lies.
DIRECTOR: David Hinton; CAST: Martin Scorsese; DISTRIBUTOR: Cohen Media Group; IN THEATERS: June 12; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 11 min.
