A Singular Vision: Powell and Pressburger

With their celebrated masterpiece The Red Shoes currently showing on the big screen, Mike Pinnington considers the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger…

When I think about the moments of movie magic that have stayed with me well beyond the first viewing of a film, few can compete with the flights of fantasy conjured by filmmaking duo, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Each subsequent viewing of certain of their films (and there have been many) is accompanied with an anticipation of a warm, comforting hug; but, also, and as if for the first time, to be touched in head and heart with something of the ineffable-verging-on-the-miraculous.

The partnership of Englishman Powell and Hungarian émigré Pressburger is one of the most fruitful in British cinema history – they would work together (under the name, The Archers) between 1939 and 1972 on more than 20 features. I feel it is worth noting here that even a relatively minor P&P movie is better than much of what we might see at the multi-plex today, but they truly hit their stride with a phenomenal run during the 1940s in a perfect marriage of creativity and execution; that run produced no less than four masterpieces, beginning with 1943’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

But it was their following trio of phenomenal films that I can’t separate, either in terms of their resounding excellence or, indeed, which I saw first. (Whichever, it would most likely have been on an old black and white TV set during a happy weekend spent at my nan and granddad’s.) Chronologically, it begins in 1946 with A Matter of Life and Death, followed by Black Narcissus (1947) and, rounding out the perfect hattrick, 1948’s The Red Shoes. These were bold, even subversive, experimentations with style, form and more.

If I can’t place them in any kind of hierarchy, what this superlative triumvirate have in common are themes that ran like life blood through the best (and much of the rest) of The Archers’ oeuvre: identity, morality – ‘They aren’t poor, they just haven’t got any money,’ says Roger Livesey’s Torquil in 1945’s I Know Where I’m Going – romantic and platonic love, and the human condition.

Set during the Second World War, P&P delivered A Matter of Life and Death – hardly your typical propaganda film, it focussed not on the indomitable allies, but rather on the indomitable, unpredictable power of love. At its centre is the blossoming romance between David Niven’s seemingly doomed airman and Kim Hunter’s radio operator, with whom he shared what were anticipated by all to be his final moments. But, bailing out of his irreparably damaged aeroplane sans parachute, Niven’s Peter Carter, lost in the fog, somehow – initially at least – escapes the ultimate fate, only to be summoned to the afterlife, where a case must be made to ascertain the life or death of the title.

With scenes of life shot in glorious Technicolor and those in heaven a resolute monochrome (but one of a number of daring and effective aesthetic decisions), here Powell and Pressburger tell us that life, in all its visceral glory, is worth – and for – the living. In a sense hopelessly romantic, at no point during its 104 minutes does it lapse into cheap sentimentalism. The Archers had amassed a skilled team; with cinematographer Jack Cardiff and incredible sets – not least the still-impressive stairway to heaven – from production designer Alfred Junge, the film is a feast for the eyes as well as the soul, and looks as astonishing today as it must have when seen for the first time almost 80 years ago.

In the following year’s Black Narcissus, we find Deborah Kerr’s Sister Clodagh corralling a group of nuns into establishing a Himalayan convent. Trouble emerges in the form of sceptical, antagonistic Mr. Dean, another colonialising Brit abroad played by David Farrar, with whom Kathleen Byron’s psychologically tormented Sister Ruth becomes increasingly, dangerously infatuated. For the mid-twentieth century, having much of your film hinge on an open-shirted male sex object wearing short shorts was not, as you might imagine, an everyday occurrence.

Again, colour plays a significant role, often setting the tone and signalling the real and implied danger to come. When Sister Ruth throws off the habit, swapping it for a red dress and lipstick to match, the effect is almost one of delirium –  in both her and the viewer. A psychosexual tour de force, Black Narcissus continues to stir the senses. Redundantly remade for TV in 2020, it didn’t hold a candle to the original.

The duo arguably reached their apogee with The Red Shoes, an innovative and daring demonstration of filmmakers at the very height of their powers. Using Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale – in which the wearer of enchanted shoes cannot help but dance until death – as the basis for a story about the dynamic between an ambitious young dancer (played by real-life ballerina, Moira Shearer), her composer lover, and a kingmaker impresario, The Red Shoes is a triumph of Powell and Pressburger’s shared belief in the power of art. Powell said of it that “We had been told for 10 years to go out and die for freedom and democracy… Now the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go out and die for art.”

Technically stunning, it is the product of Powell’s reaching for what he termed ‘composed film’, a cinema that could draw you in and hold you, rapt, in a heightened state. A total work of art that brought together choreography, theatre, music, set design, innovation and the performers themselves, it is an unequivocal singular vision.

It is also an emotionally charged study in ambition, love, obsession and the complexity of the human condition. And, of their films that featured in 2022’s Sight and Sound poll of The Greatest Films of All Time, The Red Shoes sits pretty in joint 67th place, an honour it shares with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I. Other films of theirs that make the cut are, in ascending order, A Canterbury Tale; The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp; I Know Where I’m Going!; Black Narcissus; and A Matter of Life and Death.

But, as the duo’s films regularly tell us, all good things must come to an end (they rarely delivered a straightforward, so-called happy ending). While they weren’t finished as a creative force (they would make a further nine films together), by the close of that decade, momentum – and success – began to fall away. After splitting from long term studio, Rank, a relinquishing of The Archers’ name and a catastrophic failure of the subsequent relationship with David O. Selznick (resulting in legal action), Powell and Pressburger would, via some missteps and an inability to ever truly match their golden years’ output, go their separate ways.

The afterlife of The Archers is mixed; by this time, they had been all but written off by a British film industry that they had given so much to. They were mothballed, dismissed as almost anachronistic in the face of the emergent angry young men of kitchen sink dramas such as Look Back in Anger, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. In parallel came Powell’s deeply misunderstood solo outing, Peeping Tom (1960). It has since been largely rehabilitated and is frequently put in conversation with Hitchcock’s Psycho, made the same year, but on release it was met with blanket critical vilification. The ensuing years saw them become marginal figures at best.

It seemed the game was up. That is, until, their rehabilitation and vindication, which came from a surprising source – not from the UK, but the US. A new generation of filmmakers, men who would come to be in the vanguard of the so-called New Hollywood (including Francis Ford Coppola, Brian de Palma and Martin Scorsese) had seen, just as I later would, Powell and Pressburger’s films on TV in the living rooms of their youth, and lionised them. Citing their influence, Coppola would go on to invite Michael Powell – who would marry long-time Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker – to be ‘senior director in residence’ at his Zoetrope Studios.

Powell and Pressburger have since been rediscovered many times over. Subject to various retrospectives (most recently with BFI’s Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger), their films – frequently shown on the big screen – are reaching, and, I expect, thrilling, new audiences all the time.

Contemporary Western Cinema is, sadly, addicted to remakes and the rehashing of old tropes; it could do worse than to take a leaf out of the Powell and Pressburger playbook, filmmakers whose commitment to their art is rightly remembered and celebrated so enthusiastically today.

Mike Pinnington

The Red Shoes screens today @ FACT Liverpool; Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (Martin Scorsese, 2024) is currently available on BBC iPlayer