Powell & Pressburger

Powell and Pressburger were a British film-making partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, also known as The Archers. They made a series of influential, and sometimes successful, films in the 1940s and 1950s. They are now regarded as two of the most significant figures in British cinema.

Their collaborations were mainly written by Pressburger, with Powell directing. Unusually, the pair shared a writer-director-producer credit for most of their films.

"He knows what I am going to say even before I say it — maybe even before I have thought it — and that is very rare. You are lucky if you meet someone like that once in your life." – Pressburger on Powell

"He'd stood the story on its head, he'd turned a man into a woman and a woman into a man, he'd altered the suspense, he'd rewritten the end... I was rejoicing that I was going to be working with someone like this." – Powell on first meeting Pressburger

Early films

After Powell had made two further films for Korda, he was reunited with Pressburger for Contraband (1940). It was the first in a run of Powell & Pressburger films set during the current war. The second was Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941), which won Pressburger an Academy Award for Best Story. Both are Hitchcock-like thrillers made as anti-German propaganda.

Birth of The Archers

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The pair nicknamed themselves The Archers, and cemented their partnership by adopting a joint writer-director credit for their next film, One of our Aircraft is Missing (1942), which they also produced. From now on they would begin each film with a distinctive archery target logo.

In 1943 they formed their own production company, Archers Film Productions. The company gave them new independence and allowed them to assemble a stable and capable crew around themselves. It would also release their most successful collaborations.

In a letter to Deborah Kerr, asking her to appear in Colonel Blimp, Pressburger explicitly set out 'The Archer's Manifesto'. Its five points express the pair's intention to make original, relevant and successful films:

1. We owe allegiance to nobody except the financial interests which provide our money; and, to them, the sole responsibility of ensuring them a profit, not a loss.
2. Every single foot in our films is our own responsibility and nobody else's. We refuse to be guided or coerced by any influence but our own judgement.
3. When we start work on a new idea we must be a year ahead, not only of our competitors, but also of the times. A real film, from idea to universal release, takes a year. Or more.
4. No artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for other reasons than her nakedness.
5. At any time, and particularly at the present, the self respect of all collaborators, from star to prop-man, is sustained, or diminished, by the theme and purpose of the film they are working on.

Powell & Pressburger also coproduced a few films by other directors under the banner of The Archers: The Silver Fleet (1943), based on a story by Emeric Pressburger, and The End of the River (1947).

The classic war films

The remainder of the war saw them release a series of remarkably inventive films:

• The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
• The Volunteer (1943) a short propaganda film
• A Canterbury Tale (1944)
• I Know Where I'm Going (1945)
• A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
  

  Post-war success and decline

• Black Narcissus (1947)
• The Red Shoes (1948) --- their most commercially successful film.
• The Small Back Room (1949)
• The Elusive Pimpernel (1950)
• Gone to Earth (1950). A substantially re-edited version was released in the US as The Wild Heart (1952) by coproducer David O. Selznick, after a court battle with Powell and Pressburger. The film was fully restored by the British Film Archive in 1985.
• The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)
  

  End of the partnership

• Oh... Rosalinda (1955)
• The Battle of the River Plate (1956)
• Ill Met by Moonlight (1957)
  

  Later collaboration

• They're a Weird Mob (1966)
• The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972)
  

  Critical opinions

From the 1970s onwards, British critical opinion began to revise this lukewarm assessment, with their first BFI retrospective in 1970 and another in 1978. They are now seen as playing a key part in the history of British film, and have become influential and iconic for many film-makers of later generations, such as Martin Scorsese.

Regular cast & crew

Powell and Pressburger had a habit of reusing actors and crew members in a number of films. The Archers were always much more than just Powell and Pressburger themselves, they were a group of some of the most talented film makers around at the time. Some of the actors that made several appearances were: