The Powell and Pressburger Collection [DVD]

NB: Having now gone through all the films in this box with a fine toothcomb I think it's helpful to know that although the quality of all the transfers is excellent, three films are now available in even finer transfers courtesy of Martin Scorsese. These are The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann. I have only seen the second of these and the quality is jaw-dropping. You will probably not be unhappy with the quality of the films in this box, but once you see the new transfers I'm sure you won't want to watch anything else!************************************************************************************************************It was François Truffaut who famously said, “To put it bluntly […] there [is] a certain incompatibility between the terms ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain’…” Well, no firmer refutation of this arrant nonsense can be found anywhere than in this superb box of 11 classic films from the celebrated pair Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The films all look absolutely terrific, are perfectly transferred and presented in two compact plastic boxes contained within a single well-designed cardboard container. Quite simply, this set is a mandatory acquisition for anyone who cares about film, especially at its absurdly cheap current price.Powell and Pressburger collaborated on 22 films in all including 1 short (The Volunteer [1943]) and 2 as producers only (The Silver Fleet [1942] and The End of the River [1947]). That means this box contains 11 of their 19 features. Missing are The Spy in Black (1939), Contraband (1940), “…One of Our Aircraft is Missing” (1942), The Small Back Room (1949), Gone to Earth (1950), The Elusive Pimpernel (1950), Oh…Rosalinda!! (1955), and The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972). Gloriously present though is the bulk of their best work produced between 1943 (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp) and 1948 (The Red Shoes). The 4 films present here which lie outside this timeframe are perhaps less good (The Tales of Hoffmann a shining exception), but they are all well worth looking at nevertheless. 9 of the films were made under the umbrella of ‘The Archers’, the production company Powell and Pressburger set up to ensure complete creative freedom. The remaining 2 are 49th Parallel (made for Alexander Korda) and They’re a Weird Mob made much later in Australia with Pressburger writing under the pseudonym ‘Richard Imrie.’ This might seem an eccentric oddity on first watch, but even this rewards close viewing.Now, how does one characterize the eclectic, extraordinary explosion of different elements contained within these wonderful films? Powell and Pressburger defy the apparatus of auteur criticism purely through the intensely collaborative nature of their work. Generally Pressburger would come up with the original story and then they would both work on the script (never in the same room). They would both act as producers, but Powell would do most of the directing with Pressburger always present on the studio floor in case of sudden re-writes. Pressburger would preside over the editing (his training as a violinist in Hungary helped him there) while Powell the showman would deal with the promotional side. Filmmaking is always a collaborative process of course, but where we can look into the personal lives of directors such as Mizoguchi Kenji, Robert Bresson, Andrey Tarkovsky and Carl Th. Dreyer and hook onto intensely personal themes that their films pursue closely, often obsessively, we search in vain for any such unifying worldview which we can ascribe to The Archers. Powell did make some films without Pressburger which revealed a lot about himself (The Edge of the World [1937] and Peeping Tom [1960] are two of them), but there’s nothing in their joint ventures which suggests any kind of deep thematic consistency which lends itself to easy auteurist reduction. No wonder Truffaut (celebrated critic of Cahier du Cinéma, the magazine responsible for the development of auteurism) dismissed them out of hand!Despite the way The Archers appear to resist pigeon-holing, perhaps we can detect certain patterns that appear in their work. Just keeping to the films in this box we can break them down into groups. Clearly 49th Parallel, The Battle of the River Plate and Ill Met at Moonlight are all propaganda war films designed to boost the war effort and further rapprochement across international boundaries with lashings of the old ‘stiff upper lip’. All three are well made, well above average for their type, but they lack the idiosyncratic stylized passion for life which sears through the best of The Archers’ work. The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann (we could also add Oh…Rosalinda!!, not included here) are about the relationship between life and the stage and are extraordinary riots of Romantic colour and emotion. A Canterbury Tale and “I Know Where I’m Going!” are primarily I think romantic celebrations of the British countryside, the rolling hills of Kent in the former and the wild Scottish Highlands of the latter replete with stories of lovers finding each other across a nature which seethes with a mystical cultural heritage. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death (in addition to the use of the same words in their titles) are in different ways historical love stories, the former cast as a story of lost love, but friendship gained; the latter cast as love found, lost and then found again across ‘the great divide’ which showcases a kind of historical pageant set within the cosmos of time and space. Black Narcissus stands alone in this box, but I’d pair it with the much later Peeping Tom, both stories being intensely Freudian and centered to extraordinary effect on sexual repression/obsession. In the first the subject is women cast as nuns in eternal denial of the real world from which they are in flight, while in the second the subject is the filmmaker (and film viewer) himself cast as pathologist psychotically obsessed with capturing (and watching) extreme pain and cruelty on film.The one thing that exists in all these films, the one thematic which resonates the strongest for me, is a central dichotomy between reality and fantasy with the two constantly blended together in a fascinating variety of situations likewise built out of binary opposite combinations. In the world of The Archers at their best reality is often as fantastical as fantasy is realistic and we are never totally sure where we are and what exactly we are looking at. The most obvious illustration of this is A Matter of Life and Death where ‘fantasy’ (Heaven) is depicted in b/w while ‘reality’ (Earth) is depicted in glorious Technicolor where one’s expectations would lead us to expect the opposite - where we expect to find reality we find fantasy and vice versa. In Black Narcissus the ‘fantasy’ lies in the nuns in denial attempting to establish a convent in a harem (there’s a binary opposite if ever there was one!) on top of a Himalayan mountain while the ‘reality’ lies in the recollections of their repressed pasts brought back to them by the presence of the phallic Mr. Dean. Conversely, the ‘reality’ of the convent is fantasy shot replete with stylized sets while their fantasies (their past recollections) are given the lush Gainsborough film treatment redolent of idealized ‘reality’. In The Red Shoes ‘reality’ starts off as the real world of impresarios, ballet dancers and musicians with ‘fantasy’ firmly fixed on stage for the performances, but as the love triangle escalates, the stage (the fantasy) becomes the reality for all three, or is it that reality becomes the fantasy? The ‘reality’ of both A Canterbury Tale and “I Know Where I’m Going!” has characters scurrying across the countryside in search of love only to bump into ‘fantasy’ in the shape of something else entirely which makes them aware of the spirituality that surrounds them as the land literally comes alive with the ghosts of a rich national heritage. The fantastical lies embedded within the realistic just as the realistic disseminates the fantastic. When The Archers are at their best, this blend of reality and fantasy is intoxicating and sweeps all before it in a delicious and entirely irresistible torrent of delirious emotion. This is heightened by the extraordinarily rich visual textures offered by fantastic sets, lighting and exquisite use of colour. Nobody took to Technicolor as quickly as The Archers, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus constituting the first truly great films made in the medium. Over 70 years on, in many ways their achievements still wait to be surpassed.The main contextualizing event that hovers over most of the films here is World War Two and this taken together with the international flavour of the partnership (Pressburger was an Hungarian emigre) leads into another key Archers ingredient which also extends this binary contrast through highly literate scripts underlining and contrasting national stereotypes to endlessly fascinating (and often hilarious) degrees. In 49th Parallel stranded German U-boat sailors are contrasted with representatives of all the allies from the British, French, Canadian and American characters they meet as they traverse a continent. The Battle of the River Plate and Ill Met By Moonlight also contrasts Germans (distinguishing good Germans from the Nazis) with the British soldiers, demonstrating that absolute respect on both sides of the war will prevail as if war were a game of cricket. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is centrally about a friendship between officers, one British and the other German, the latter stealing the love of the former, but with the friendship enduring nevertheless. In 1943 The Archers dared to show a good German much to Churchill’s chagrin, but history has shown who was right in the end. English/Scottish rivalry informs “I Know Where I’m Going!” while playful banter between an English ‘Land Girl’, an English officer and an American army sergeant forms the background of A Canterbury Tale. Russia (a ballet impresario) vies with England (a composer) for the hand of an English rose (a prima donna) in The Red Shoes while A Matter of Life and Death features a veritable United Nations debate in Heaven with Anglo-American relations vying with Anglo-French relations for importance in a script riddled with hilarious jokes at every nation’s expense. The ‘Black Narcissus’ of the film’s title is a perfume bought in a London Army & Navy Store by an Indian Prince who causes ruptures in (and causes the closure of) the convent when he runs off with a servant girl, an Anglo-Indian international relationship not destined for success (Indian Independence two years later probably wasn’t coincidental!). Finally, They’re a Weird Mob spends most of the time sending up Pommy-Ozzie relations with the central character an Italian immigrant fresh off the boat from Napoli and due for pratfalls galore in a lively series of visual and verbal gags. As bizarre and quaintly eccentric as anything in The Archers canon, the film sums up a career-long obsession with exploding national stereotypes.There’s no doubting that at the base of every successful Archers production is a superb script, witty, imaginative, highly literary and bursting with life. This fundamental ingredient can be adduced to Powell and Pressburger alone. We must also acknowledge J. Arthur Rank and his influential chain of cinemas who assured them absolute artistic freedom. This was especially apparent when Rank stood firm against the government who tried to prevent The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp being shown. Rank sent the bureaucrats packing and opened the door to the masterpieces that followed. These films deployed the talents of many people who appeared repeatedly for The Archers. Freddy Young, Erwin Hillier, Jack Cardiff and Christopher Challis all shot two or more films for them. In fact Challis shot all of them from The Small Back Room on. Other omnipresent names are Alfred Junge and Hein Heckroth who were production designers on everything from Blimp through to Oh…Rosalinda! Then there are the composers Allan Gray and Brian Easdale while David Lean and Reginald Mills provided the bulk of the editing (especially Mills). The same actors also appear repeatedly and members of this stock company included Esmond Knight, Cyril Cusack, Ralph Richardson, David Farrar, Googie Withers, Marius Goring, Pamela Brown, Laurence Olivier, Roger Livesey, John Laurie, Anton Walbrook, Conrad Veidt, Deborah Kerr, Eric Portman, Finlay Currie, Kathleen Byron, Léonide Massine, Robert Helpmann and Valerie Hobson. Yes, The Archers was truly a collaborative enterprise, one that was unique in the history of film and one which we will never see the likes of again.I intend to review all the films on their respective pages. Here I leave the basic release details:49TH PARALLEL (aka, The Invaders) ****(1941, UK, 117 min, b/w, English subtitles, Aspect ratio: 4:3, Audio: Mono)THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP *****(1943, UK, 157 min, colour, English subtitles, Aspect ratio: 4:3, Audio: Mono)EXTRA: Documentary incl. interviews with Jack Cardiff & Stephen Fry (25 min)A CANTERBURY TALE *****(1944, UK, 120 min, b/w, no subtitles, Aspect ratio: 4:3, Audio: Mono)“I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING!” *****(1945, UK, 87 min, b/w, English subtitles, Aspect ratio: 4:3, Audio: Mono)A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (aka, Stairway to Heaven) *****(1946, UK, 100 min, b/w & colour, English subtitles, Aspect ratio: 4:3, Audio: Mono)EXTRAS: Biographies, short film on Jack CardiffBLACK NARCISSUS *****(1947, UK, 96 min, colour, English subtitles, Aspect ratio: 4:3, Audio: Mono)THE RED SHOES *****(1948, UK, 128 min, colour, English subtitles, Aspect ratio: 4:3, Audio: Mono)EXTRAS: Biographies, stills gallery, theatrical trailer, documentary & featuretteTHE TALES OF HOFFMANN ****(1951, UK, 119 min, colour, English subtitles, Aspect ratio: 4:3, Mono: Mono)THE BATTLE OF THE RIVER PLATE (aka, Pursuit of the Graf Spee) ***(1956, UK, 114 min, colour, English subtitles, Aspect ratio: 4:3 Letterbox, Audio: Mono)EXTRA: Cast biographiesILL MET BY MOONLIGHT (aka, Night Ambush) ****(1957, UK, 100 min, b/w, English subtitles, Aspect ratio: 4:3, Audio: Mono)EXTRA: Theatrical trailerTHEY’RE A WEIRD MOB ****(1966, Australia, 107 min, colour, English subtitles, Aspect ratio: 4:3 Letterbox, Audio: Mono)

A superb collection of British classics

These are all iconic films

As fine a collection of British movies as you'll find, here are all the great classics from the Archers - no, not the Ambridge mob but the matchless directing/writing team of Powell and Pressburger. A round dozen films, each of them a gem of the skill and craft of film-making, each of them distinctive and exceptional in its look, its content and its style.What was it that made Powell and Pressburger so special? It would be easy to dismiss films like A Canterbury Tale or I Know Where I'm Going as dated sentimental tosh. Yet they are both anything but - moving, involving, strong on characterisation, visually stunning and evoking an intense sense of place (Rural Kent in the former, the Western Isles in the latter). 49th Parallel? Just blatant propaganda! But then there are those stunning Canadian landscapes, the moving characterisations superbly acted by Anton Walbrook, Leslie Howard and, at the other extreme, Eric Portman. Are Ill Met by Moonlight and Battle of the River Plate just a couple more British War Movies, typical of their period? No, both take a different slant on their reality-based material. In Plate, for example, the big battle scene is over before 2/3 of the film is done and yet the potentially anticlimactic scenes in Montevideo harbour and the final scuttling of the pocket battleship are just as exciting, just as fulfilling an ending as any shoot-`em-up finale. What's Black Narcissus but a high-camp melodrama about nuns going potty with sexual frustration in the Himalayas? No, as a study of women isolated by climate, culture and celibacy as well as topography, it's masterly. (OK, Kathleen Byron in scarlet dress, a slash of lipstick across her mouth and rolling eyes is a bit OTT - but I wouldn't swap her for the world.)Are these, then just comfortably and quintessentially British films? The truth is that there is much that is technically groundbreaking about their work. Kubrick's famous time-travelling jumpcut from bone to spaceship in 2001 was there a quarter of a century earlier in the cut from hawk to Spitfire in A Canterbury Tale. The integration of music and dance with narrative in The Red Shoes paved the way for much of Gene Kelly's best work, not least an American in Paris. Long before the days of CGI Powell and his technical team were conjuring magic on celluloid. Think of A Matter of Life and Death with its endless stairway to heaven or the amphitheatre court which is actually the Andromeda nebula - as well as all the tricks with colour, with freeze-frames and so on. The Himalayas of Black Narcissus are a glorious tribute to the masters of glass-painting and backdrops, to the imagination of set designers, to the physical skills of cameramen working with false-perspectives where an inch or two wrong on the camera can ruin the illusion - all shot on the soundstages of Pinewood!They also brought out the best in their actors. One of Niven's finest pieces of acting (at least before Separate Tables) in Matter of Life and Death: the endearingly human Roger Livesey in I Know Where I'm Going, Matter of Life and Death, but most of all as the wonderfully real, deep, touching Candy in Colonel Blimp. Anton Walbrook, too, touchingly proud then frail in that film as well as the strong Amish leader of 49th Parallel and the driven impresario in The Red Shoes. Eric Portman, so capable of conveying the ambiguities of Colpeper as well as the certainties of a Nazi U-boat captain. Leslie Howard, Wendy Hiller, Deborah Kerr, Peter Finch, Marius Goring, Raymond Massey and so many others produced some of their best work under Powell's demanding direction.No wonder the likes of Scorsese, de Palma and the rest rate Powell & Pressburger so highly and learnt so much from them. These elusive, tantalising, moving, talented men are worthy testimony to British movie-making at its best. My only gripe is that there wasn't room for The Small Back Room and especially Peeping Tom in this collection.

Powell & Pressburger made some of the finest films ever made in the UK. Intelligent, moving and thought-provoking.

At the current Amazon price of £26 this is a bargain (Feb 2019). Eleven films, some classics, a couple arguably classic, and a couple, well, not classic. So the choice is a bit arbitary, but what an oportrunity to see A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH/BLACK NARCISSUS/COLONEL BLIMP/A CANTERBURY TALE (the only film that has NO subtitles), and personally on a slightly lesser plane - RED SHOES and 49th PARALLEL with a towering performence from Eric Portman - watch his speech glorifying Nazism - and experience some great acting. Personally I could have done without THEY'RE A WEIRD MOB and ILL MET BY...But overall the set is a must for lovers of a different kind of movie making, long since disapeared. I must finish by saying that I would have been happier if some (any) restoration had been made. The prints are watchable, yes, but not 5 star. Sound for me was variable, but subtitles good. Some interesting Extras complete what is a bargain buy. (P.S. For fun - Ask yourself how many of the eleven films would you, whilst appreciating some are classics, would you go out of your way to watch Twice?? Again, for fun - Leave a comment?)

Just what I ordered. Perfect. Thanks 👍 Eleven movies for the price is just mad. Some these films are timeless classics! Great stuff.