I was privileged to act as consultant on David Hinton’s Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, enthusiastically reviewed by Peter Bradshaw from the Berlin film festival (21 February). As welcome as Martin Scorsese’s heartfelt tribute and Bradshaw’s response are, it’s also important to challenge the claim that Michael Powell “had become an un-person in British cinema during the 60s”, after Peeping Tom.
Critics may have professed their shock, as they did about many provocative films of the era, but the truth is that Powell wanted to make films that went against the grain of the decade. Projects such as the kind of artistic experiments that Ken Russell was able to make for television – a first-person biopic of the composer Richard Strauss; a Kensington love story with Paul Scofield, based on a novel by William Sansom. And when he set his heart on a surreal adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the 1970s, it’s hardly surprising that he could find no backers.
