Englishman Michael Powell and Hungarian-born Emeric Pressburger were filmmakers who collaborated in an unlikely partnership for nearly 20 years from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s. They made some outstanding, expressive, and emotional films, including a range of very differently styled productions throughout the Second World War. For 20 years after their creative partnership broke up, their work was largely forgotten until rediscovered by American filmmakers in the 1970s. One of these, Martin Scorsese, became an obsessive fan and, along with David Hinton as director, has produced a new feature documentary, Made in England, about their work.
Scorsese was one of the leading directors in what was called the ‘New Hollywood’ of the 1970s and 1980s. Movies including Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Goodfellas (1990), and a series of collaborations with Leonardo DiCaprio including Gangs of New York (2002) and The Aviator (2004), have won him an Academy Award, four BAFTAs, and, among other accolades, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute.
Scorsese was born in 1942 and grew up in the Little Italy district of New York. When he was just three years old, he developed asthma, and instead of playing sports like other boys, obsessively watched movies on the family’s small black- and-white television at home. At that time, the Hollywood studios were not selling their movies to the television companies, fearing competition, and so American television showed a lot of British films. Scorsese consequently developed a love of British cinema but most especially delighted in the visually powerful and emotional films of Powell and Pressburger. So great was this obsession that, when he came to Britain in 1974, Scorsese tracked down Michael Powell, then in his 70s and living in relative poverty in rural Gloucestershire. Scorsese invited him to New York, where Powell ended up living and where he married Scorsese’s long-term editor Thelma Schoonmaker.
