“Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger” makes nearly every other filmmakers’ work, past or present, look like faded remnants of a separate, more inhibited medium. Collectively known as the Archers, Michael Powell, a hop farmer’s son from Kent, England, met Hungarian emgire Emeric Pressburger, who fled Nazi Germany for Paris and then, in 1935, London, and collaborated on 24 movie projects from 1939 to 1972. Their prime years of creative freedom, and just enough commercial successes to sustain it, were tantalizingly few. A decade, really.
But their best years soared with astonishments, stretching the boundaries of screen fantasy (“A Matter of Life and Death”), wartime romance both grandly expansive (“The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp”) and soulfully intimate (“I Know Where I’m Going!”), screen ballet and outrageously heightened melodrama (“The Red Shoes,” the Archers’ biggest hit, though its financers predicted disaster after seeing the final cut) and equally dreamlike operatic foray (“The Tales of Hoffman”).
That list leaves off so much. If you haven’t experienced “Black Narcissus” (1947), you’re in for fiercely poetic illusion, from its extraordinary matte painting backgrounds to the droplets of sweat just above the wild eyes of Kathleen Byron. The visual whole works in service of the feverishly repressed desires roiling in the psyches and thereabouts of Anglican nuns high in the Himalayas. There’s no other cinematic spread quite as sumptuous as the Archers’ golden era. “Made in England” director David Hinton recounts the seeds of those years as well as the fissures afterward.
“Made in England” is narrated on camera, vividly and well, by Martin Scorsese, billed here as presenter. He was also Powell’s longtime friend, confidant and champion. “I was so bewitched by them as a child,” he says of the Archers, recalling his formative, asthmatic and somewhat sheltered hours and years spent in front of his family’s 16-inch black-and-white TV screen.
Scorsese rewatched their work, hungrily, by way of the “Million Dollar Movie” broadcasts, usually cruddy prints. Decades later, when the filmmaker saw their films in color, he couldn’t quite believe his eyes.
Much of “Made in England” draws direct parallels between the Archers’ aesthetic — drenched, exquisitely, in gorgeously berserk, richly saturated color, especially the color red — and Scorsese’s own visual and thematic preoccupations. At first glance there may not be much to connect “The Red Shoes” with “Mean Streets” or “Taxi Driver” or “Raging Bull.” But the documentary makes a persuasive case, artfully interweaving images and shots and strategies from the Archers and Scorsese.
The latter discusses the heavy imprint Powell and Pressburger made on his own imagination, and his desire for the creative freedom enjoyed, for a time, by these “experimental filmmakers working within the system.” That’s precisely how Orson Welles got away with “Citizen Kane,” by the way, though for Welles the studio-sanctioned freedom lasted for exactly one picture.
Without Pressburger, Powell’s last major work, the startling “Peeping Tom,” brought reputational ruin on his head. Then time brought reassessment, and the admiration and rapture of young maverick filmmakers, Scorsese chief among them. (Powell later married Scorsese’s brilliant longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.) “Made in England” may wobble a bit near the end, when it makes a somewhat breathless attempt to widen its focus and deal with British cinema contemporaneous with Powell and Pressburger’s exceptional output. Small matter. This is an elegant and eloquent love letter from one master filmmaker to two of his prized idols.
“Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)
No MPA rating (some violence)
Running time: 2:13
How to watch: July 28 to Aug. 1 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; siskelfilmcenter.org
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.