Their films ran the gamut of commercial and critical success. The Red Shoes (1948) was both a box office smash and a Best Picture Oscar nominee. Their follow-up, Hour of Glory (1949), was BAFTA-nominated as Best British Film, but met a bleak reception at theaters. Oh... Rosalinda!! (1955) was a flop with both in all regards.
Whether the movie was a drama or a fantasy, or a commercial success or failure, films by The Archers found a new audience a generation later with a tight group of young American filmmakers, circa-1970. Among those up-and-coming directors was Martin Scorsese, who grew up watching Powell-Pressburger films on television.
Once Scorsese had established his career as a director, his interest in Michael Powell took him to England to track him down. He found Powell in good spirits, but retired and living in near-poverty.
The now-successful young-gun American directors soon brought Powell to America, where he worked as an advisor at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios. Scorsese introduced his film editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, to the twice-widowed Powell. Despite a 35-year age gap, the two married in 1984. Powell died in 1990.
Although uncredited as such, Scorsese clearly wrote the screenplay for the present documentary. He also narrates the film, which is dominated by the sound of his voice and by film clips from The Archers productions.
Powell was a gregarious, upbeat fellow who got along well with actors. He had less luck with producers, eventually alienating J. Arthur Rank, David O. Selznick, and Alexander Korda. Powell sought to make films in lavish technicolor with fantasy elements and flamboyant art direction. Pressburger was more practical, and encouraged less ambitious productions.
Eventually the two parted ways. Powell struggled to continue his career as a director, though only Peeping Tom (1960) has attracted any interest. The strange and lurid Peeping Tom was scalded by British critics upon release, but over time became an influential cult film.
How others will see it. David Hinton is credited as director for Made in England, but Scorsese and Schoonmaker are executive producers, as is Michael Powell despite being dead since 1990. Ostensibly made for screening at the Berlin Film Festival, the film actually appears to be a work of admiration by Scorsese and Schoonmaker for Michael Powell. The sentiment for its subject is reminiscent of The Great Buster (2018), a documentary about Buster Keaton made by director Peter Bogdanovich (who also wrote and narrated), although there was probably no personal connection between Keaton and Bogdanovich.
Today at imdb.com, Made in England has a lofty 8.0 (out of 10) user rating, though its esoteric subject ensures a low user vote total. There are a surprising number of user reviews, most highly positive and none particularly negative. The user reviews note Scorsese's admiration for (and friendship with) Powell as a driving force behind the documentary.
How I felt about it. Although the film's title, as well as The Archers productions, equally billed Powell and Pressburger, it is clear that Powell was the more dominant figure in the making of their films. They made 15 to 20 features together, with the higher number including such movies as They're a Weird Mob (1966) outside The Archers, and films such as The Silver Fleet that were produced by The Archers, but written and/or directed by others.
Most of those 20 films are not particularly good. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), and The Red Shoes (1948) are generally considered masterpieces, though I personally consider The Red Shoes overripe.
That trio is followed by a larger number of The Archers films that are well regarded despite their hammy acting and eccentricity. Chief among them are Black Narcissus, I Know Where I'm Going, and A Canterbury Tale, all made during their prime decade of the 1940s. To that list we will add Peeping Tom, a sans-Pressburger film which has both alienated and fascinated audiences in ways that the preceding films did not.
There were also movies such as Night Ambush (1957) that satisfied no one, but it would be wrong to judge a director by his biggest failures. Because those are the films that nobody watches. In my list of top directors, I don't deduct points from a director's score for making a bad film.
Still, Powell's best movies are well below the level of the top films of, for example, Alfred Hitchcock, or Akira Kurosawa. Powell encouraged over-acting, and his passion to incorporate the high arts (e.g. ballet and symphony music) into film could result in strange, stilted scenes.
But even Powell's failures were often glorious failures, with Peeping Tom as perhaps the best example. When it's not good, at least it is interesting, and something different.
Made in America doesn't often try to explain what worked, and what didn't work, with The Archers films, apart from praising Powell for his daring. Some film clips are shown two or even three times, such as the duel scene in Colonel Blimp, or the death scene of L´onide Massine in The Tales of Hoffman. Scorsese tries to show evidence of direct Powell influence in Scorsese's own movies, though we are unconvinced.
But what Made in America has going for it is the spellbinding narration of Martin Scorsese, and his obvious affection for Michael Powell. Scorsese writes his own material and makes it personal. And he has mastery of the subject, having seen the best Powell films untold times over the years.