POWELL PRESSBURGER and MERCHANT IVORY : two documentaries

[Chris Knipp]

POWELL PRESSBURGER and MERCHANT IVORY : two documentaries


MICHAEL POWELL, EMERIC PRESSBURGER AS COLLABORATORS

DAVID HINTON: MADE IN ENGLAND: THE FILMS OF POWELL AND PRESSBERGER (2024)

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England's great movie dream weavers of the Forties, described by Martin Scorsese

Scorsese's shut-in status as an asthmatic youth led him to spend many hours in the 1950's in front of the family's black-and-white TV watching movies, soaking up images that would forever stay with him and influence his own filmmaking. David Hinton's new documentary narrated by Martin Scorsese, Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger reads a little bit like a film school lecture, but the material is essential film history, the films are delightful, and the lecturer is, after all, one of America's great living directors, and this story is part of his artistic formation.

It seems Hollywood didn't like selling rights to TV back then but the Brits did. Scorsese's favorite English film company became The Archers, the trademark name of the totally collaborative films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger They were billed as written, produced, and directed by this team - most unusual. It meant that Pressburger, a Hungarian Jew who emigrated to England, came up with ideas and wrote the screenplays, he and Powell collaborated on the dialogue, Powell directed, and Pressburger also produced and worked on the music.

The partners' first successes came during World War II, when eventually all British films were war films. The masterpieces of that early period may be The Thief of Baghdad (1940), a technicolor Arabian Nights-inspired fantasy about a muscular boy (Sabu), and the classic wartime parable, both satirical and patriotic, The LIfe and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). The team's biggest later classics, gorgeous multi-art extravaganzas, are The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffman (1951) . Scorsese says it might seem odd he, as a boy, was so enamored of a movie of an opera (Hoffman) - perhaps also of a ballet (Red Shoes). But Tales of Hoffman hypnotized me at thirteen as well. The film stresses that in their best work Powell-Pressburger managed to be both popular and also subversive and excitingly creative. Movie magic to give delight in the grand movie houses of the day.

There are many other Powell Pressburger films, but the team stopped working together in 1957, though remaining lifelong friends. Powell came to America and, in 1984 married Thelma Shoonmaker, Scorsese's longtime editor and he and Marty were friends till Powell's death in 1990. Scorsese's coverage of the duo's filmmaking career is doggedly thorough, but its precision provides space for the director's legendary attention to detail of which Fran Lebowitz has liked to speak. It's shown in the rigorous appropriateness of clips, and the detail provided by early photos of little Marty watching TV by himself; going to the movies with his father and brother; as a film student just beginning to direct; rare footage of the team even to an image of Pressburger spotted in the corner of an odd film still before he had left Hungary. It's a great story, just a bit exhaustive. It may serve as an introduction to Powell & Pressburger, but it's a hybrid, always also very much about the early development of young Scorsese's cinematic imagination, which owes to much to these early spinners of dreams.

It's also to note that the Powell-Pressberger collaboration - unlike Merchant Ivory's, fizzled out, and their kind of work later went out of fashion. When Scorsese found him in England in 1975, Powell's recent films had not been very successful and he couldn't pay to heat his own house. His 1960 shocker of a film Peeping Tom, made by himself, had alienated the industry and the public. A job in Hollywood changed all that, and Powell had a rewarding late-life career, but most memorable are a few moments of the Englishman and his Hungarian collaborator showing their harmonious relationship years earlier, and Scorsese's account of how his cinematic imagination was formed watching British movies on his parents' 16-inch black and white TV as a kid. Now let's see another film about how Marty went from asthmatic shut-in to powerhouse American filmmaker. Meanwhile, we have this.

In his review Armond White says he thinks the Powell Pressberger films share something more subtle and peculiarly English that Hinton and Scorsese miss: an emphasis on "their era’s British eccentric tradition: the Sitwells, the Mitfords, Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Sickert." "The Archers style," he concludes, "fits Edith Sitwell’s description of 'that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation.'"

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, 131 mins., debuted at the Berlinale Feb. 21, 2024, also Toronto (Hot Docs), Munich (Doc fest); Sidney, Tribeca. US release Jul. 12, 2024. Metacritic rating: 84%.



ISMAIL MERCHANT, RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA, AND JAMES IVORY, 1993

STEPHEN SOUCY: MERCHANT IVORY (2024)

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Masterpieces on a shoestring

This documentary is as essential as Martin Scorsese's new one about Powell-Pressberger, and more fun. Marty's knowledgeable run-through of the earlier filmmaking team's most important pictures (The Red Shoes, Tales of Hoffman) is informative and enlightening, as he always is when he talks about movies but, in spire of a fascinating portrait of his own artistic development, a little dry; sometimes quite a bit like a film class lecture. There is nothing dry about this gossipy account of the team formed by this openly gay couple, the volatile and impetuous Indian Ismail Merchant and the calm and collected American-born James Ivory, who eventually wound up making a lot of good movies together, some, but not all, with a British setting.

"Merchant Ivory," who met in New York and clicked right away, remained a couple for four decades, with lovers on the side (Ivory had a fling with the cult writer Bruce Chatwin). The two of them, a yin-and-yang combo, were intense and often had shouting fights: a few of them we glimpse. And their shoestring productions, held together before the money came by Merchant's sheer energy and "con man" ability (the words used here) to charm film teams to go on working without being paid, combined with the "family" atmosphere they created with that team, make for a charming, lively story - while we're learning about, or being reminded of, a long stream of fine films, some of which arguably are masterpieces, including seminal works of queer cinema.

Stars of the films still around to tell the story include Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, Hugh Grant, Vanessa Redgrave, Rupert Graves, Simon Callow, Sam Waterston and James Wilby, all on form and frank, and lots more. Also present is James Ivory himself.

The Merchant Ivory team got the bad rap that stuck from director Alan Parker that they're "Laura Ashley movies" that were posh, bland, unchallenging stuff of the PBS "Masterpiece Theater" sort. First of all, some "Masterpiece Theater" TV has been fabulous. Consider the 1981 "Brideshead Revisited" miniseries, with its superb writers and cast. It's not technically "Masteriece Theater" but it's in that posh British literary vein. But it's also some of the best television has yet had to offer.

Yes, the Merchant Ivory films are posh and gorgeous and three of their adaptations are of works from the discreetly repressed E.M. Forster and three (The Europeans,The Bostonians and The Golden Bowl) are from Henry James. But there is a very high success rate in producing adaptations of high quality. I'll quote the Wikipedia article, "Merchant Ivory Productions": "Their body of work is celebrated for its elegance, sophistication, literary fidelity, strong performances, as well as its complex themes and rich characters." It has been the mistake of detractors not to perceive the whole package beneath Merchant Ivory films' pretty exterior. Their complexity is like the pattern of their scores by Richard Robbins, another story here (he was involved with both Ivory and Bonham Carter) and a key part of their creative team, which often provide a soothing highlight theme, with a surging undercurrent of unease flowing beneath it. Under the Merchant Ivory eye candy, you find intellectual heft and emotional depth. (See also the defense against the "Laura Ashley" claim by David Rooney in his Hollywood Reporter review.)

To add punch, there is an early queer sensibility openly displayed in the Merchant Ivory oeuvre, three of whose most important films are A Room with a View (1985), Maurice (1987) and Howards En, (1992), all of which pack an emotional wallop along with the visual beauty and period elegance. The Remains of the Day (1993) in the opinion of many is their last great literary adaptation,- by Jhabvala, from Kazuo Ishiguro, with career-crowning performances by Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, a jewel in the Merchant Ivory Crown with a subtly profound emotional effect.

The documentary has interesting things to say also about several movies made after this, in the twilight of the Merchant Ivory career, Jefferson in Paris and The Golden Bowl. One thing watching this film does is make you want to re-watch the Merchant Ivory films you're seen and catch up o some of the others in the 44-film-long list. And a result of doing so is a sense that this is work that has not gone out of date and probably ins't going to.

Only James Ivory remains of the original triumvirate. But Ivory is vigorous enough for a running interview to anchor the film, and to have been perhaps the oldest person to win an Oscar, for Best Adapted Screenplay, long after the death of Ismail and the folding of the production company. It was his adaptation of André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name, a through-the-roof successful film (Metacritic rating 94%) when he was 89. It's hard to calculate how important that film felt when seen at the New York Film FEstival. It is comparable as a widely accessible gay film to Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain made from Larry McMurtry's adaptation of the A. Annie Proulx story. Ivory is an impressive exemplar of creative maturity, and to have him anchoring this richly rewarding documentary is an essential treasure. Through him, one of modern movies' most vibrant creative and personal partnerships lives on.

If director Stephen Soucy's narration isn't the strongest part of the film (while Scorsese's is almost too strong), he deserves enormous credit for assembling so many good interviews. Soucy has has found ways of organizing all this great material around the giddy early development of this production team, some of the main contributors, and highlights of the most important of the films.

It's hard to overestimate how good all the elements of this film are. The interviews are star-studded and piquant. The film clips are beautiful and colorful. All are tied together with lively stories of the founding couple and details of the polished, yet shoestring, productions they created. Particularly notable is the company's longtime composer, Richard Robbins, and the costume team of Jenny Beavan and John Bright, the latter with 12 Academy Award nominations and 3 Oscars.

In the early days the latter were a team of three who dressed a crowd of a hundred people in period costumes to mill about in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. All this was with Merchant keeping the shoot going and Ivory's eagle eye, which could spot one person with the wrong haircut. This is a lesson in dream filmmaking that we will want to come back to. We can look at the films and see it can be done. Soucy promises in a recent interview that the DVD will have a bonus package with expanded interviews. An enticing prospect.

Merchant Ivory, 112 mins., debuted Mar. 17, 2024 at BFI Flare London LGBTQIA+ Film Festivall also shown at Miami Apr. 13; Berkshire Jun. 1; also San Francisco; Seattle. Now distributed by Cohen Media Group, it releases in US cinemas Aug. 30, 2024. The film will will debut at the Quad Cinema in New York and several theaters in Los Angeles including Laemmle Royal.


ISMAIL MERCHANT AND JAMES IVORY IN THE SIXTIES