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Martin Scorsese has spent a sizeable portion of his life talking about movies he loves. He’s made documentaries about Italian cinema (“My Voyage to Italy”), Hollywood studio films (“A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies”) and individual filmmakers like Elia Kazan and Val Lewton. But when Scorsese talks about the movies of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, it means something different. It’s getting very close to something fundamental for him.
In the new documentary “Made in England: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger,” Scorsese recalls watching “The Red Shoes” as a child. He describes it as “one of the origins of my obsession with cinema, itself.”
“The Powell-Pressberger films have had a profound effect on the sensibility that I bring to all the work I was able to do,” Scorsese says in the documentary. “I was so bewitched by them as a child that they make a big part of my films’ subconscious.”
“Made in England,” which rolls out in theaters this month, is a poignant crescendo in one of the great love affairs in movies. The films of Powell and Pressburger, the directing-screenwriting duo known as the Archers, has been an abiding polestar for Scorsese, who befriended Powell late in life. Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s longtime editor, married him, and since his death in 1990 has worked tirelessly to celebrate his legacy.
Together, Schoonmaker and Scorsese have restored eight of the films already, including Technicolor masterworks like “The Red Shoes,” “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” “Black Narcissus” and “A Matter of Life and Death,” along with the beloved black-and-white gem “I Know Where I’m Going!” and, most recently, “The Small Black Room.” Once Scorsese and Schoonmaker finish editing their own films, like last year's “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Schoonmaker turns to her other life’s work.
“I have the best job in the world and I have the best husband in the world. What more could you ask for?” Schoonmaker said in a recent interview by phone. “Working for Marty is just so fantastic. Every film is different, every film is a new challenge. And then we sit and talk about Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.”
As an expression of movie love — of the power of film to transfix you, to change your life, to live alongside you as you grow older — “Made in England” could hardly be more effusive. It’s playing as part of a Powell-Pressburger retrospective currently running at the Museum of Modern Art, with stops upcoming in Seattle, Chicago and at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles.
“The word ‘love’ is right, for all of us,” says David Hinton. He directed “Made in England” and first met Powell in for a 1980s British TV documentary on him. He was approached by Schoonmaker, who initiated the film. Hinton quickly realized the zeal of his collaborators.
“Scorsese and Thelma, they want to put in every good moment from every good Powell and Pressburger film,” Hinton says, chuckling. “Sequences were flying back and forth across the Atlantic. They didn’t want to take credit but a lot of what you see in the finished film is actually their work.”
Powell, the British son of a hop farmer, and Pressburger, a Hungarian Jew who had fled the Nazis to Britain, forged their collaboration during WWII. Together, sharing their credits on a single screen, they made 19 features together, many of which remain among the finest films ever made.
Schoonmaker believes she was in love with Powell before she met him. She saw the “The Red Shoes” when she was 12 and “Colonel Blimp” not long after.
“It devastated me, in a good sense,” Schoonmaker says. “I had no idea who had made it and no idea that I would later be introduced to the man who made it and marry him.”
When Schoonmaker met him, Powell’s career had petered out, a downfall exacerbated by the response to his disturbing and now widely celebrated 1960 film “Peeping Tom.” When Scorsese in 1974 was given an award by the Edinburgh Film Festival, he asked if Powell would present it to him. But few remembered him. Powell, he learned, was then nearly destitute, living in a cottage in Gloucester.
By the time Scorsese was preparing to make “Raging Bull” (1980), he and Powell had become friends, a relationship that reinvigorating the forgotten filmmaker. Powell later wrote he felt “the blood coursing through his veins again.”
At the same time, Scorsese kept sending Schoonmaker home with VHS tapes of the films. He indoctrinated others, too, like Francis Ford Coppola and Robert De Niro. The Powell and Pressburger legacy began to be revived. And a mutual filmmaking friendship blossomed.
“Michael gave to Marty too,” Schoonmaker says, recalling when Scorsese was considering abandoning “GoodFellas” over pressure to trim its drug scenes. “I read him the script and he said, ‘Get Marty on the phone.’ He said, ‘Marty, this is the best script I’ve read in 20 years. You have to make this movie.’ So Marty went back in one more time and got it made. That’s due to Michael. He was ferociously protective of Marty’s artistic freedom.”
A photo from their wedding day appears in “Made in England.” Schoonmaker ultimately spent 10 years with Powell before his death. She calls them “the happiest years of my life.”
“You know, he was an optimist,” says Schoonmaker. “He had me put on his gravestone ‘Film director and optimist.’ And he was. Living with someone who’s an optimist is quite extraordinary. He lived every second of every day.”
It’s hard not to see similarities between the partnerships of Pressburger and Powell and Scorsese and Schoonmaker, who’s edited every feature of his since “Raging Bull.” One of the most eye-opening sections of “Made in England” is a side-by-side comparison of some of the moments from Powell and Pressburger films that echo in theirs. The ballet performance in “The Red Shoes” influenced how Scorsese shot boxing matches in the ring in “Raging Bull.” In the Russian impresario Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) of “The Red Shoes,” Scorsese sees a model for Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). Their movements are eerily similar.
More than particular moments or characters, though, there’s also the deeper way that Powell’s marriage of imagery and music informs Scorsese’s. The hallucinatory 1951 opera “The Tales of Hoffman,” which Scorsese — not your average kid — watched obsessively as a 10 year old on TV, he says, “taught me pretty much everything I know about the relation of camera to music.” The famous “Layla” montage of “GoodFellas,” Schoonmaker says, was informed by the music-timed cuts in the feverish finale of “Black Narcissus.”
While such homage might not be possible for all lovers of the Archers, Scorsese's very personal reflections in “Made in England” effectively communicates the feelings Powell and Pressburger films stir in so many who encounter them. “They're romantics and idealists, Powell and Pressburger," Hinton says. “When I met Michael, that was so striking about him. He was still a romantic. He had this sparkle in his eye.”
For Schoonmaker, the work continues. A few films — notably the enchanting “A Canterbury Tale" and the WWII thriller “49th Parallel” — await possible restorations. And Schoonmaker continues to toil over Powell's diaries with the hope of publishing them some day. She's purposefully not read all the way through yet, though. They still, all these years later, have more to say to one another.
“I’m working chronologically so I’ve waited to read what he wrote about me until I get there,” Schoonmaker says. “I’m going to wait.”
