Michael Powell (1905-1990) and Emeric Pressburger
(1902-1988) were one of the most influential director/producer/writer
teams ever to work in films. From the beginning of their partnership
in 1938
[1939 - Steve]
until their last formal project together in 1957, they made a
total of 17
[20 (or 20 if you count Gone to Earth & The Wild Heart as different
films)
- Steve]
films. All but four
[all but 5 (Spy in Black, Contraband, 49th Parallel,
Silver Fleet & End of the River - Steve]
contained that unique credit,
"written, produced, and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger," a testament to the intertwining nature of their work
and talents. The partnership between Powell and Pressburger began
when the two met at Alexander Korda's London Films. Powell, who began
his career as an apprentice on the productions of the celebrated
silent director Rex Ingram, had worked as a propman and sometime actor
in late silents. He later became a still photographer, and eventually
worked with Hitchcock in that capacity. He also worked as an
uncredited screenwriter on Blackmail (1929). He began his
directing career with a string of very low-budget thrillers and
comedies, known as "quota quickies." In the mid-1930s, he hit
upon an idea for a film that would dramatize a true story about the
abandonment of an island off the coast of Scotland -- The Edge of the
World. Powell's first truly personal cinematic effort, the
resulting film, released in 1937, helped him land a contract with
Korda Hungarian-born Emeric Pressburger began his career as a short
story writer. He later wrote screenplays at Germany's UFA studio.
Following Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Pressburger left for
Paris. He arrived in London in 1935. Korda, who made a habit of hiring
fellow Hungarians, hired him at London Films in 1937. Pressburger's
British screenwriting debut was the adventure drama, The Challenge
(1938). In 1938, Korda teamed Powell and Pressburger together to
work on a film of the novel
The
Spy in Black. Working from an adaptation by Roland Pertwee,
the two of them deconstructed, in Powell's words, "a creaky old
story" of World War I intrigue. They reshaped it as a vehicle for
the movie's two stars, Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson. Veidt portrays
a World War I German U-boat captain assigned to an espionage mission
to destroy the British fleet at anchor off the coast of Scotland, and
Hobson plays his contact, an agent masquerading as a schoolteacher
working inside the British security zone.
The
Spy in Black was the beginning of a long and rich partnership
between the two men, who would ultimately form their own production
company, The Archers, to create films that would evoke their shared
creative vision.
Completed in 1938, The Spy In
Black was held back from release by Korda until August of 1939,
just before war broke out between England and Germany. Set during World
War I, the movie was an immediate hit on both sides of the Atlantic,
especially in America, where it opened under the fortuitous title
U-Boat 29. The new title capitalized on the real U-Boat 29, which
had recently made headlines around the world by sinking a British capital
ship off the coast of England. Korda's organization ran out of time and
credit in England early in 1940. Korda moved to Hollywood for the duration
of the war, to complete work on The Thief of Bagdad, on which Powell
had been one of several directors. Powell and Pressburger, however, sought
to capitalize on their success with
The Spy in Black with a follow-up film that would again star
Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson.
The resulting film,
Contraband,
was a surprisingly topical thriller that uniquely captured England's spirit
during its awkward transition from peace to war at the end of 1939.
This time Veidt plays a Danish merchant who, together with Hobson, helps
break up a German spy ring operating in London.
The movie was released in America by United Artists under the title
Blackout.
Contraband's success led
Powell and Pressburger to propose another film dealing with the war, this
time from a Canadian perspective.
This evolved into 49th Parallel,
their most ambitious film to date.
49th Parallel depicts an
attempt by a quintet of stranded German U-boat crewman to escape from
Canada to the still-neutral United States.
Featuring an all-star international cast and initially funded by the
British Ministry of Information, the budget was quickly exhausted by the
logistics of location shooting across thousands of miles of Canada.
However, The Rank Organisation -- already the largest film distribution
company in England -- bought out the government's interest in the film and
it was completed with great success.
49th Parallel
achieved extraordinary popularity in England as well
as in America, where it was released by Columbia Pictures in 1942 -- in
considerably shortened form -- as The Invaders. Nominated for three
Academy Awards® -- the film won Pressburger his only Oscar® for
the story. The
film's success led movie magnate J. Arthur Rank to seriously consider
the production of ambitious motion pictures for the American market.
Accordingly, Powell and Pressburger approached Rank with a
proposal. They would form an independent production unit, The Archers,
based at the Rank Organisation, through which they would make feature
films that Rank would distribute. Rank agreed to this idea, but only
after he made the mistake of turning down
One of our Aircraft is Missing.
Essentially a reversal of
49th Parallel,
this film told the story of a stranded British
bomber crew who make their way through occupied Holland. Rank had
misgivings over the title's inherently pessimistic overtones, so
Powell and Pressburger made the movie for British National. It, too,
proved to be hugely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. The script
earned Powell and Pressburger another Oscar® nomination, their
fourth for 1942.
The Rank Organisation became home to The Archers and, in time, to
independent production units headed by David Lean and Carol Reed. The
Golden Age of British cinema began, and flourished over the next
decade. Powell and Pressburger's first film for Rank,
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,
however, seemed less than
auspicious at the time. The movie depicts the life of a career
military officer from 1902 through 1943, and his gradual decline into
obsolescence in the face of modern warfare. Originally called The
Life and Death of Sugar Candy, the Colonel Blimp title was
appropriated from the popular satiric comic strip character created by
David Low. Shot in Technicolor, with an enormously long script,
Blimp
was an ambitious project in wartime--but the Ministry of Information
also believed it to be a dangerous one for its depiction of an aging,
out-of-touch British general. The government, and most of all Prime
Minister Winston Churchill, wanted the public and (equally important)
the Americans to believe that all such officers had been purged from
the services. The Ministry did its best, at the behest of Churchill,
to halt the movie's production and then to prevent its export to
America until the end of the war. Heavily cut before its release,
Blimp
nevertheless was among the finest films to come out of the war, a
superbly crafted piece of cinema regarded today as the team's first
masterpiece.
While Blimp
was in production, The Archers produced one non-Powell/Pressburger
film. The Silver Fleet was directed by Vernon Sewell and Gordon
Wellesley, and produced in association with its star, Ralph
Richardson. It proved less successful than the duo's own
movies. Powell and Pressburger also wrote, produced, and directed a
46-minute short entitled
The Volunteer (1943),
depicting an actor and his dresser both joining the Fleet Air
Arm. For their next feature film, Powell and Pressburger decided to
look inside the English people--at the fears, desires, and aspirations
that preoccupied them amid five years of war. The result was
A Canterbury Tale, perhaps the most spiritual of all their
collaborations. It tells the story of modern-day pilgrims to
Canterbury, who encounter a local magistrate preoccupied with English
history, and is frustrated by wartime dislocation. The movie found an
audience in England, but was not released in America until long after
the war. Ultimately, the U.S. distributor, United Artists, grafted on
new framing footage featuring Kim Hunter, who didn't appear in the
original movie, and John Sweet.
I Know Where I'm Going! came about due to Powell and
Pressburger's desire to keep working while waiting for the Technicolor
camera equipment that they would need for their next proposed film,
A Matter of Life and Death.
Although it superficially resembled
A Canterbury Tale in its criticism of materialistic concerns,
I Know Where I'm Going! had a more tightly focused story, which
allowed its timeless, "magical" elements freer reign. Set in
the Scottish Isles, it tells the story of a headstrong young woman
whose plans to marry a rich businessman are thwarted when she becomes
stranded in a storm and meets a young naval officer. Curiously, though
its release was delayed in the United States, it became the first of
Powell and Pressburger's movies to be released in America uncut.
The two previous Archers films could not have prepared
audiences for their next release,
A
Matter of Life and Death. The film had two seemingly
disconnected inspirations. The first was an article read by
Pressburger, about an R.A.F. sergeant who had jumped out of a stricken
plane without a parachute and lived. The second was a request by the
Ministry of Information that The Archers make a movie that would
address the deteriorating relationship between Britons and
Americans. The Archers would have proceeded immediately, but for the
fact that the military, and rival producer Gabriel Pascal (hard at
work on Caesar and Cleopatra ), had priority on the only available
Technicolor equipment. The Archers finally got the equipment in
1945. The movie that resulted transcended all expectations. It
featured a richly drawn fantasy plot, with visuals designed on a
breathtaking scale. The movie was an astonishing cinematic conjuring
trick, about an R.A.F. officer who survives a leap from a burning
plane without a parachute and falls in love with the American air
controller with whom he has made contact. Amidst a series of
hallucinations caused by his injuries, the officer finds himself on
trial before a heavenly tribunal.
A
Matter of Life and Death (released in America as Stairway
to Heaven) was virtually the last film of World War II, released
over 18 months after the fighting in Europe had ended. It was the
first movie ever to receive a Royal Command Performance, and remains
one of Powell and Pressburger's most beloved films.
