Loving cinema is a one-way street. Oh, I love movies. Hell, I love certain movies more than some of the people in my life. But I realize that adoration isn’t reciprocated. I Know Where I’m Going! doesn’t give a damn about me. A Matter of Life and Death doesn’t even know I exist. Black Narcissus won’t return my calls. But I love them anyway. And I’ll go on loving them until death do us part.
Which makes me wonder what it must be like to be Martin Scorsese. As a young boy growing up in Little Italy, Manhattan, Scorsese fell under the spell of The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffmann and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Broadcast on local TV, these movies transfixed the young cinephile. He loved them so deeply that he internalized them, and when the time came for the watcher to become a maker, those works of unparalleled creativity didn’t just influence him. They fueled his very imagination.
The pageantry of the duel in Colonel Blimp became Jake LaMotta’s title fight in Raging Bull. Robert Helpmann’s shifting eyes in Hoffmann possessed the uneasy gaze of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas. The musical core of The Red Shoes became … well, just about everything Scorsese has touched. The man likes music. The man likes movies. And specifically, the man likes the movies of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
Directed by David Hinton and featuring Scorsese as guide, Made in England: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger is at once a retrospective of cinema’s greatest collaboration and a love letter from one filmmaker to another.
Under the banner of The Archers, Powell and Pressburger wrote, produced and directed an unequaled string of bonafide classics. That made the British duo popular in the 1940s, but they fell out of favor in the ’50s and ’60s and almost vanished into obscurity. Then came the emergence of the New Hollywood with the likes of Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola and Scorsese, who counted the Archers among their favorite filmmakers. (Coppola even employed Powell at his studio, American Zoetrope.) These days, Greta Gerwig is waving the Archers flag with more than a few nods to the duo in Barbie.
But it’s Scorsese and his long-time collaborator, Oscar-winning editor and Powell’s widow, Thelma Schoonmaker, who work tirelessly to restore the Archers’ films via the Film Foundation and make sure the cinema of Powell and Pressburger has a permanent place in the cinematic curriculum.
For Scorsese, it’s personal. He met and developed a friendship with Powell in the ’70s and ’80s, helping him and his movies get recognition — he even introduced Powell to Schoonmaker. Powell returned the favor by helping Scorsese through some difficult years as an artist and as a person. You sense the adoration immediately in Made in England, but it isn’t until the end of the doc that you realize how deep the love is, how personal the connection.
Movies about the movies are often a lot of fun because you get whole careers condensed into a single runtime. That’s true in Made in England, with Scorsese taking viewers through the Archers’ films chronologically. Then there’s the knowledge Scorsese brings from outside of the frame. The behind-the-scenes stills, the correspondences, the interviews with Powell and Pressburger shot in the ’80s — Hinton breezes through it all without losing the significance.
But at the center is Scorsese and his love for these movies and these men. Fitting for two romantics who loved and respected each other as much as Powell and Pressburger did. Few filmmakers wore their emotions on their sleeves as proudly as the Archers. It’s only proper that Made in England follow suit.
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ON SCREEN: Made in England: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger opens in limited release Aug. 2.