Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell were odd-couple filmmakers who teamed up to make some of the most beloved British classics of all times, and the Jerusalem Cinematheque is currently running a retrospective of their work through the end of November. The Tel Aviv Cinematheque is showing a smaller selection of their movies from November 11-19 and the Haifa Cinematheque will also screen some of their films.
Their movies feature lush cinematography (whether in color or black-and-white), passionate romances that are all the more affecting because the characters are so very British, and masterfully paced storytelling. Many of their movies were made during and just after World War II, and the gravity of that experience infuses these films, making the moments of romance and comedy feel well-earned. Several of their films focused on music and dance, with highly theatrical costumes and sets.
Pressburger was a Hungarian-Jewish director and screenwriter who built a career in Berlin and fled the Nazi regime in the 1930s. Unlike many of his European Jewish contemporaries who went to Hollywood, Pressburger immigrated to Britain, where he reinvented himself as a quintessentially British director.
To accomplish this, he teamed up with another up-and-coming filmmaker, Michael Powell, and the two collaborated on a series of wildly popular films, which influenced a generation of young American directors. Among these was Martin Scorsese, who produced a recent documentary about their work, Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, which is being shown as part of this tribute program. This documentary is best seen on the big screen and it’s one of the best movies about filmmaking ever made.
Scorsese, who is famous for talking fast, narrates the documentary and he can’t say enough about how these films, which he first saw on television as a sickly child in New York, blew his mind and shaped his sensibility as a filmmaker. The documentary, directed by David Hinton, details their working relationship, in which Pressburger, who didn’t speak English until he was in his 30s, outlined the intricate screenplays and created the characters, while Powell wrote the dialogue and oversaw the sets.
If you can see only one movie on the program, I would recommend The Red Shoes, the larger-than-life and gorgeously photographed story of a ballerina (played by real-life ballet dancer Moira Shearer) who must choose between love and dancing, which became the favorite film of a generation of dance-loving little girls. It was made in 1948, when Britain was still recovering from years of wartime austerity, and it is like a love letter to music, dance, and color. In today’s wartime reality, I can’t think of a movie more likely to transport you to another world than The Red Shoes. Dance aficionados will know that the character of the impresario who influences the heroine was based on Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes (itinerant ballet company, 1909-29), and will enjoy the presence of many well-known dancers in the movie, among them Leonid Massine and Ludmilla Tcherina.
Their opera adaptation, Tales of Hoffmann, features evocative cinematography that makes the drama of the songs come to life. Shearer, Tcherina, and Massine were among the actors again, as was legendary choreographer Frederick Ashton.
Among Powell and Pressburger’s non-musical classics was The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a gentle comedy-romance that celebrated British sweetness and eccentricity, and which was made at the height of World War II. It was an allegory that focused on the rivalry between British and German officers in the early 20th century.
I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) stars the distinctive actress Wendy Hiller as a woman heading to a Hebrides island to marry her older, wealthy fiancé, but who gets marooned on a different island due to a storm and falls for a British naval officer.
If you enjoy whimsical movies about heaven, see A Matter of Life and Death (1946). It stars David Niven as a British bomber pilot in World War II whose plane is hit. Jane (Kim Hunter, who played Stella, the wife whose name Marlon Brando famously yelled in A Streetcar Named Desire, as well as Dr. Zira in the original Planet of the Apes movies), a young American radio operator, tries to help him land. The pilot has to argue before a celestial court that he deserves a second chance to win over this woman.
One of the duo’s lesser-known films, The Small Back Room (1949), was recently restored. It also has a wartime background and tells the story of a bomb disposal expert who becomes an alcoholic after losing a leg and the girlfriend who tries to stand by him as he goes into a downward spiral. David Farrar and Kathleen Byron star.
A Canterbury Tale (1944) is about three strangers in the town famous for its cathedral during the war: a girl volunteering on a farm, an American soldier stationed there, and a British officer, who team up to solve a strange crime that has taken place in the area.
Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons star in Black Narcissus (1947), the dated but still interesting story of nuns trying to establish a convent in the Himalayas.
After Powell and Pressburger stopped working together, both struggled to succeed without the alchemy that came from their collaboration. The best-known film that either of them ever made solo, Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), is included in this tribute. It’s a disturbing story of a serial killer who films his victims and it was way ahead of its time.