Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger Review

Martin Scorsese Praises The Archers in Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger might be the culmination of a decades-long project by Martin Scorsese, to bring English director Michael Powell and his Hungarian émigré screenwriter partner, Emeric Pressburger, the kind of attention and regard that Scorsese always thought they deserved. Since Scorsese came to prominence in the 1970s, he has not just helped rehabilitate the reputation of this once out-of-fashion pair, known collectively as The Archers, but elevated them from near-forgotten myths of an old British film industry to almost god-like magicians of the cinema. Now, having made Powell and Pressburger legendary, Scorsese with Made in England finally helps to mortalize them.

Directed by David Hinton and produced and hosted by Scorsese—he provides the voiceover and appears on-screen throughout between clips of The Archers’ work—Made in England is both a personal essay film and a kind of revisionist history. Through archive footage of Powell and Pressburger, as well as extracts from Powell’s autobiographies and Scorsese’s own recollections of the director as he knew him personally, we get a twin portrait of two rather modest men: Powell the dryly witty dreamer who enjoyed the trappings of popular success before he was humbled by obscurity late in life; Pressburger the tight-lipped realist who fled fascism in Europe for England, where he became known for his ability to quietly turn a story inside out.

Made in England winningly humanizes two filmmakers who were at one time so mythical that Scorsese genuinely had doubts about whether they really existed, or if those names might be pseudonymous, he admits in the documentary. This film manages to present the two men in all their everydayness while simultaneously still championing their art as divine—their work informed by their personal lives while also seeming to be the product of some rare alchemy achieved in their creative union.

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Ecstatic images abound in Made in England: the time lapse indicated by Candy’s growing collection of trophy animal heads in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp; Vicky Page spinning wildly on stage in The Red Shoes; the screen turning red as Sister Ruth faints in Black Narcissus. Hinton’s film also slows to play out some of The Archers’ more transcendent moments: the quiet tracking shots looking over the bombed-out city in A Canterbury Tale; the “composed cinema” sequences of wordless action set to music in Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffmann.

The clips carefully chosen and arranged by Hinton and his editors Margarida Cartaxo and Stuart Davidson make Powell and Pressburger’s brilliance undeniable. But those clips have not been selected to give an objective overview of a filmography; rather, chiefly, they illustrate Scorsese’s own thoughts and feelings on The Archers as a cinephile, filmmaker and man of 81 years.

Made in England is as much about its host as it is about Powell and Pressburger. It recalls Scorsese’s own A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, the 1995 documentary series in which Scorsese gives a history of Hollywood cinema from his perspective, its images taken from those American films that inspired and influenced him personally. In Hinton’s film, we see clips from Archers films playing side by side with scenes from Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, films which contain images and ideas suggested to Scorsese by Powell and Pressburger decades before he made them.

Where Made in England differs from the now almost 30-year-old Personal Journey is that the man who may be the greatest living filmmaker now looks back more than a little poignantly on his own life—a life in which Powell and Pressburger happen to have always been present. As in Scorsese’s two most recent films as director, The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon, time and mortality weigh on Made in England. We hear about a young Marty being taken by his father to see The Red Shoes and receiving a letter from Powell critiquing Mean Streets (“Too much red”), and see footage of a 38-year-old Scorsese laughing on the set of The King of Comedy with a visiting Powell—moments all long since passed.

Where once Scorsese was a dynamo, he has lately become more contemplative, and the work of The Archers clearly means something different to him than it did when he was a younger man. He speaks in Made in England of being struck by the first time he saw Leonide Massine being run through with a sword in Tales of Hoffmann, and of Moira Shearer’s dramatic exit in The Red Shoes—moments of sudden, impactful violence that surely inspired those in Scorsese’s own classic films.

In Made in England, though, Scorsese gives more focus to the story of a man aging complicatedly in Colonel Blimp, to the tender love story of I Know Where I’m Going! and to those transcendent Powell and Pressburger moments, moments where these two ordinary-seeming men managed to speak to something unspeakable. This is what really makes Made in England a tribute to Powell and Pressburger, and to the extraordinary richness of their films, films that shift in their meaning as we grow older but which remain powerful for ever-different reasons.

Director: David Hinton
Release Date: July 12, 2024

Brogan Morris is a London-based freelance writer and editor, whose writing on film can also be found at the BFI, The Guardian, BBC Culture and more. You can follow him on X formerly known as Twitter at @BroganJMorris.

Martin Scorsese Praises The Archers in Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger