Film review

  • Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Hinton (2024)

    Still early days (18 reviews only) but this documentary currently has a 100% fresh rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.  The summary for one of those positive reviews is pretty negative, though:  according to Adam Solomons on IndieWire, Made in England ‘ends up a stellar example of what in Britain would play on BBC Four:  polite, rarely profound, and packed with facts.  It’s unable to channel the essence of what made Powell and Pressburger’s films unforgettable.  Sadly, it’s not really trying’.  Happily, it doesn’t need to.  David Hinton’s film is replete with clips illustrating P&P’s visually and thematically imaginative cinema; rather than attempt to ‘channel the[ir] essence’, better to opt, as Hinton does, for straightforward, admiring exploration of their work.  And Made in England is formally more distinctive than the mildly disparaging reference to BBC Four arts documentaries suggests.  Unlike many of those, Hinton’s documentary features only three talking heads – Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger and Martin Scorsese.

    The Archers’ most famous fan, Scorsese has already put his money where his mouth is in overseeing restoration of some of their most celebrated pictures and he’s the on-screen narrator of Made in England.  The audience therefore has as guide someone who has also made unforgettable films (long ago now, alas), and he’s very engaging company.  Scorsese has complete command of the subject but wears his knowledge lightly.  The narration is indeed ‘packed with facts’ but Scorsese’s verbal style is relaxed – speaking direct to camera, he makes his monologue feel like a conversation with us.  He tells us plenty about himself.  Along with Francis Ford Coppola and other illustrious contemporaries, Scorsese, whose childhood asthma meant that he spent plenty of time indoors, grew up on a rich diet of transatlantic film fare:  when early post-war Hollywood was refusing to license its pictures to US television, the humbler British film industry was happy to oblige.  It’s amusing to learn that Scorsese first got into the cinema of Powell and Pressburger, renowned for its physical scale and extraordinary colouring, watching his family’s small black-and-white TV at home in the Bronx.  He explains, it seems effortlessly, why he loves the Archers’ work, what they’ve meant to him both as a film-maker and in his life outside film shoots.  He several times shows, in juxtaposing clips from one of their films and one of his own, how the former influenced the latter.  (For example, he was inspired by camerawork that he felt somehow went inside the head of Victoria Page when she danced in The Red Shoes, to try something similar in Raging Bull during Jake La Motta’s fights.)  In making these links, Scorsese isn’t egotistical.  He makes clear his debt to Michael Powell and never implies that he surpassed him.

    Scorsese’s major involvement in Made in England (he’s also an executive producer) makes it inevitable that Powell will, as usual, come across as the dominant figure in the P&P partnership.  In footage from an interview with the two men together when both were in their eighties, Pressburger succinctly summarises their respective contributions – he wrote, Powell directed and ‘we produced together’.  (Powell, off camera, can be heard murmuring assent to this.)  It’s intrinsically more difficult, of course, to realise a writer’s contribution on screen, compared with a director’s:  even when we hear Pressburger’s lines, they’re mediated through actors being directed by Powell.  Besides, it was with Powell rather than Pressburger that Scorsese, in the mid-1970s, formed an enduring personal friendship.  (Powell’s widow, Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited every Scorsese feature since Raging Bull in 1980, is another of Made in England’s executive producers.)  Just as their film-making roles were defined, so Powell and Pressburger developed distinct attitudes towards the studio heads that held the purse-strings for their collaborations – notably Alexander Korda, J Arthur Rank and David O Selznick.  Scorsese describes P&P as ‘experimental film-makers working within the system’; the creative constraints of doing so were, for Powell rather than Pressburger, increasingly intolerable.  (Powell refused to work with Rank again in light of the latter’s lack of enthusiasm for The Red Shoes and the studio’s consequently half-hearted promotion of the film.)  The narrative describes well how the Archers grew apart and, more in sorrow than in anger, went their separate ways, after Ill Met by Moonlight (1957).

    The narrative doesn’t, though, make clear that they reunited for late-career curiosities, They’re a Weird Mob and The Boy Who Turned Yellow (which aren’t mentioned at all) – and there are more frustrating omissions.  Powell pays tribute to the genius of production designer Alfred Junge but it would have been good to hear more about other key members of the P&P team.  Scorsese is oddly inconsistent in naming actors:  Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook feature in several clips but aren’t acknowledged – unlike not only the big star names (Deborah Kerr, David Niven) but also, say, Kathleen Byron and David Farrar.  Scorsese’s references to ‘the English culture and spirit’ that he thinks are captured in the Archers’ films, are vague but it’s hard to mind.  His vast knowledge of, and real love for, their work is infectious, even when you disagree with his estimation of particular pictures (overrating The Red Shoes and Gone to Earth, underrating Ill Met by Moonlight).  David Hinton, whose previous work as a documentary director includes a 1986 South Bank Show profile of Powell (clips from it included here), takes a back seat to Scorsese, as well as to Powell and Pressburger, but does an unobtrusively good job.  His title is probably a nod to English-culture-and-spirit thinking yet it seems right enough – never mind that Emeric Pressburger was born and educated in Hungary or that Michael Powell supposedly loved Scotland even more than his native Kent.  Hinton’s film is thoroughly enjoyable.  The emotional power of plenty of the excerpts – from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale and I Know Where I’m Going!, especially – is something else.

    16 May 2024

  • Camille

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Cukor (1936)

    There had been four or five films made of Alexandre Dumas fils‘ La Dame aux Camélias before George Cukor’s Camille.  (It’s five counting a 1926 short.)  But this MGM adaptation – released a few weeks after the death of its producer, Irving Thalberg – was the first Camille of the sound era and is more famous than any other screen version, before or since.  That is thanks to Greta Garbo.

    Cukor’s Camille is entertaining, if a bit longer (109 minutes) than it needs to be.  The screenplay, by Zoe Akins, Frances Marion and James Hilton, includes plenty of sharp dialogue and skilfully conveys the economics of the Paris demi-monde in the mid-nineteenth century, where famed courtesan Marguerite Gautier (Garbo), aka Camille, makes her living.  The action, indoors and out, is sometimes visually fluid to an extent that, rightly or wrongly, I didn’t expect from this director:  around a dinner table or in a gambling club; in the countryside, as Marguerite and her inamorato, Armand Duval (Robert Taylor), run happily through a meadow and across a little bridge that leads to their love nest; elsewhere at the Duval country home when a swarm of bees causes a stir for the household.  Given that Camille is a premier Hollywood melodrama, Herbert Stothart’s score is rather discreet – or, at least, is discreetly and effectively used.

    This story stands or falls, though, on the actress playing the doomed heroine – Marguerite is dying of consumption – and the Thalberg-Cukor Camille is in no danger of falling.  Watching Greta Garbo now, she doesn’t strike you as an actress ahead of her time (as her close contemporary Barbara Stanwyck often does).  Yet Garbo is so unusual for her time that she stands outside it.  The husky voice somehow never fails to surprise when you first hear it again.  Her face – the huge eyes with their deep-set lids, a nose larger than the Hollywood 1930s norm – is far more powerfully beautiful than a set of perfect features could be.  She turns emotions on and off at lightning speed.  Those emotions are often extreme but, because they seem thoroughly felt, not performed, they often transcend their melodramatic context.

    It has to be said that Garbo is made even more outstanding by the various acting going on around her.  There’s an enjoyable, theatrically busy turn from Laura Hope Crews as the dressmaker who’s also Marguerite’s procuress.  There are decent contributions from Henry Daniell, as the haughty aristocrat whose deep pockets are in opposition to less wealthy Armand’s deep devotion; Jessie Ralph, as Marguerite’s loyal maid; and Rex O’Malley, as a dandy with a heart of gold.  But Robert Taylor, handsome as he is and hard as he tries, is a very weak partner for Garbo.  In her smart, well-prepared introduction to this screening, BFI programmer Ruby McGuigan intentionally majored in female contributions to Camille, on both sides of the camera, and described the character of Armand as ‘rather insipid’.  Taylor’s acting, alas, makes that an understatement; he’s remarkable only for his almost luminous teeth (the film is in black-and-white, of course).  More surprising is that Lionel Barrymore makes a hash of the small but key role of Armand’s father.  Monsieur Duval’s crucial encounter with Marguerite – in which he pleads with her to break off her affair with his son, and she reluctantly agrees – has nothing like the impact it should have.  Still, the last scene, in which Marguerite dies in Armand’s arms, is worth waiting for.  In the closing shots, George Cukor wisely keeps the camera on Greta Garbo.  Even playing dead, she breathes life into Camille.

    8 May 2024

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