Submitted by
Roger Mellor
Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter
by Kevin Macdonald (Emeric's grandson)
A review by John Ellis
A biography of Emeric Pressburger is both necessary and impossible.
Necessary, because he is otherwise destined to remain the second term in
his film-making team with Michael Powell; impossible, because he was a
deeply elusive individual.
Pressburger came from that now vanished generation of Europeans who honed
their lives into a portfolio of fascinating anecdotes, as full of conceits
and lightning changes of perspective as the newspaper feuilletons they
created. As Kevin Macdonald was Pressburger's grandson, he heard more of
these stories than any ordinary biographer could possibly hope. And the
biography is best where Pressburger was best, in providing a vivid story
of his transition from stateless Hungarian Jew to successful scriptwriter,
and his flight from Hitler's Germany.
Pressburger found his later life more difficult to anecdotalise. His heady
success with Michael Powell during the 1940s was followed by a period of
creative uncertainty in the 1950s and undeserved obscurity thereafter.
Pressburger found no way of making this into a grand narrative, and neither
does Macdonald. Neither, it seems, was able to hone it into small pearls
of anecdote.
Pressburger evidently held the same ambivalent attitudes to himself as he
did to his wonderful range of central characters: Thomas Colpeper in A
Canterbury Tale; Sammy Rice in The Small Back Room; Clive Candy and Theo
Kretschmar-Schuldorff in Colonel Blimp (the magnificent final draft script
of which is published in Ian Christie's edition alongside Macdonald's book;
Faber & Faber, £9.99). To put these feelings in a screenplay or novel
is one thing; to speak them directly about yourself, especially in your
declining years, is quite another.
So Macdonald is thrown back on his own resources, and despite his prodigious
research, the result is unsatisfactory. He relies too much on contemporary
judgments of the wonderful canon of films for which Pressburger receives
the extraordinary credit: "Written, produced and directed by Michael Powell
and Emeric Pressburger". Curiously, Macdonald takes it as a cardinal sin
for
a screenwriter that Pressburger turned after the war to adaptation of novels
rather than the creation of original stories.
Since it is an adaptation from Nigel Balchin's novel, he misses the audacity
of The Small Back Room in 1949. As Ian Christie points out in his incisive
study Arrows of Desire: the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
(Faber & Faber), this film "struck a very different note from
the cosy unanimity of most British war films, long before it became
fashionable to challenge such myths ... The violence and implicit sexuality
seem alien to the genteel naiviety that still dominated British films."
This was a slap in the face to a Britain that was desperately trying to
mythologise its war. Such a gesture defines Pressburger's uneasy status
here. He was an alien; he loved the place; yet he feared absorption just
as much as he desired acceptance.
As a result, he gave us a series of awkward fictions, exposing raw feelings
and ambivalences whose existence the British would rather not acknowledge.
Pressburger did this in a fictional register that is profoundly alien to
British naturalism. His first published work is already a fine example of
this: a short story from a Berlin newspaper (which Macdonald usefully
reproduces), of a flirtation bound up with aphoristic philosophy and
lightning changes of perspective. Pressburger had a taste for artifice that
coincided exactly with Powell's obsession with the mechanism of the cinema
illusion. Their films appear modern, despite the period trappings, because
they have that level of self-awareness necessary to avoid crass naivety.
Such self-awareness ran against the grain of the 1950s. Macdonald seems
to collude with the contemporary disappointment with Pressburger and Powell's
films of that period like Tales of Hoffmann, asserting that "it is true that
the films were no longer personal or passionately felt". Inevitably, this
paints Pressburger as a failure for the last 30 years of his life, whereas
there is a case, from Macdonald's own evidence, for a view that would bring
more ambiguity.
Pressburger wrote a novel, "The Glass Pearls" (1966), which deals with
a Nazi war criminal now living in disguise with an invented past.
His war crimes involved medical experiments on the nature of human memory;
his invented past contains many elements of Pressburger's own.
This sounds like an attempt at expiation of the vast guilt that he must
have felt facing the Holocaust.
His moment of greatest success and public acclaim coincided with,
and even owed itself to, the unimaginable horrors suffered by friends,
acquaintances, even his own mother. Such feelings must have gnawed away
at him, finding an outlet only in this misunderstood novel.
No wonder Pressburger was ill-equipped to deal with the recurring crises
of the postwar British film industry. His later achievements appear
disappointing only when compared to the extraordinarily complex view that
he brought to his adopted Britain during the 1940s. Perhaps, after this,
he was a man crushed by the complexity of his own private feelings.
New Statesman & Society
27th May 1994 v7:n304. p46(2)
