Martin Scorsese has been a headline-grabbing presence at the Berlin Film Festival this week, hosting a sold-out guest talk and picking up an honorary Golden Bear for his lifetime’s work in cinema. At 82, the veteran Italian-American director is currently enjoying a sustained late-career purple patch, basking in great reviews for his historical murder thriller Killers of the Flower Moon, whose mighty haul of 10 Oscar nominations includes Best Director, making Scorsese the oldest ever contender in that category.
But Scorsese is primarily in Berlin to launch Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, a documentary tribute to two of his cinematic heroes, British director Michael Powell and his Hungarian-born collaborator Emeric Pressburger, the legendary duo behind beloved classics like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). Directed by David Hinton, this glorified lecture-film is a fairly conventional career overview, low on surprises or formal flourishes. That said, it is an effortless pleasure to watch, made with the finesse and quiet authority typical of Scorsese projects, featuring a rich blend of rare behind-the-scenes footage and personal anecdotes. It premieres at the Berlinale ahead of a May theatrical launch by Altitude in the UK and Ireland, with MUBI signing up rights for much of Europe. Other territories are still being negotiated.
Like Scorsese, Powell and Pressburger were sophisticated, highly original auteurs who enjoyed a rollercoaster career of highs and lows, often clashing with studio heads. Some of their visually ravishing, meticulously composed films were critical and commercial disasters. But unlike Scorsese, they never recovered from a major slump in popularity following their blazing imperial phase in the 1940s and 1950s. After their partnership dissolved, the pair amassed just a handful of minor solo credits in their final decades. Their lofty reputation has since been rehabilitated, of course, and they are now seen as major film-makers, but this was partly thanks to public support and active intervention from younger American acolytes including Scorsese, Coppola and De Palma, who grew up devouring the duo’s films on US television.
Back in the 1990s, Scorsese directed two marathon documentaries about his love of US and Italian cinema. Made in England is more tightly focussed and modestly scaled, with Scorsese as host rather than director, though it follows a similar format, a largely chronological collage of clips framed by straight-to-camera narration. A safe pair of hands as director, Hinton is a British TV veteran whose BAFTA and Emmy-winning credits include a late-career documentary profile of Powell and Pressburger, broadcast in 1986. The archive material used here quotes extensively from this earlier show, which is notable for capturing the droll personal chemistry between the odd couple. Long after they stopped working together, Powell remained the eternal can-do optimist and Pressburger his deadpan, sardonic Middle European sidekick.
Fronted by Powell and Pressburger’s most famous fan, Made in England is inevitably affectionate in tone, overwhelmingly positive even in its rare, mildly critical comments. Scorsese offers detailed, informed analysis of the duo’s major works as well as Powell’s scandalous solo breakout, Peeping Tom (1960), which was was widely slammed by mainstream British critics. “The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom,” wrote one disgusted London correspondent, “would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer.” Released just months before Hitchcock’s similarly lurid hit Psycho, Powell’s blood-soaked portrait of a voyeuristic serial killer met with a very different fate.
Disowned by its original distributor, Peeping Tom effectively ended Powell’s directing career. His long period in the wilderness was also partly due, Scorsese rightly notes, to the new wave of gritty social realism that swept British cinema in the 1960s. Only decades later was this unsettling Freudian proto-slasher finally embraced as a groundbreaking psychological thriller, partly thanks to public champions like Scorsese, who befriended Powell in the mid 1970s, helping to rescue the veteran director from critical obscurity and financial hardship.
These warm personal connections give Made in England its most unique selling points. Alongside his forensic film-expert observations, Scorsese also recalls his early meetings and long friendship with Powell, while tracing how the Anglo-Hungarian duo’s lavish visual aesthetic influenced his own films Taxi Driver (1975), Raging Bull (1980) and more. In a touching reversal of roles, Scorsese also credits Powell for helping him though his own soul-crushing career slump after The King of Comedy (1982) bombed at the box office.
Famously, Powell ended up marrying Scorsese’s long-time editor Thelma Schoonmaker in 1984, staying with her until his death in 1990. Schoonmaker is credited as executive producer on Made in England, though her marriage to Powell only merits a fleeting mention. Some first-hand memories from her might have made for a richer, deeper film. Indeed, a few more insights from Scorsese’s contemporaries would have been very welcome. But Hinton’s documentary is still a feast for film fans, a classy love letter from an Old Master to the trailblazing visionaries who opened his mind to the magical, hallucinatory power of cinema.
Director: David Hinton
Cast: Martin Scorsese
Cinematography: Ronan Killeen
Editing: Margarida Cartaxo
Music: Adrian Johnston
Sound: Damian Rodriguez, Todd Maitland
Producers: Nick Varley, Matthew Wells
Archive: Sam Dwyer
Executive Producers: Olivia Harrison, Thelma Schoonmaker, Will Clarke, Thomas Hoegh, Martin Scorsese, Claudia Yusef, Eva Yates, Mark Thomas, Charles Cohen
Production companies: Ten Thousand 86 (UK), Ice Cream Films (UK)
World sales: Altitude, London
Venue: Berlinale (Special)
In English
131 minutes
