David Vining's Blog, page 33

A Matter of Life and Death

This is a film of such warmth and imagination that it sweeps me into its alternate reality of contrasting deep and bright Technicolor sights with its sumptuous black and white in equal turns. A tale of love in war, facing against death itself and bridging cultures, A Matter of Life and Death is a wonderful experience showing The Archers at some of their highest technical points while combining it with their innate narrative and dramatic skills. It honestly feels like the kind of film that ki...

I Know Where I’m Going

Reportedly, Emeric Pressburger wrote this script in four days. The plan was to film A Matter of Life and Death, but The Archers couldn’t get their hands on a Technicolor camera for months. So, they threw together a movie quickly, returning to the remote parts of Scotland (this time the western island region) to film a sweet romance that the pair imbued with wonderful specificity and beautiful imagery. It honestly makes up a lot for the fact that the actual story is kind of, you know, very fo...

A Canterbury Tale

Inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer but filtered through a sense of innocence that the original tales don’t quite share (Pasolini was closer in terms of straight recreation in his adaptation), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale is a gentle tale of grace in the English countryside where war is a reality but still very far away. Centered around the investigation of a fairly harmless crime in a quiet community just over the hill from the famous endpoint of many pilgrimages, it’s...

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Still in the midst of WWII, Powell and Pressburger took a cut line from One of Our Aircraft is Missing at the suggestion of their editor, David Lean (yes, that one), and built a movie around it, choosing to physically model their main character and name the film after a popular contemporary comic strip character, Colonel Blimp. The end result is a touching, human, and wonderful look at the life of a man getting older, The Archers’ own Ikiru in glorious Technicolor.

The film begins with a ...

One of Our Aircraft is Missing

So begins The Archers, one of the most important directing partnerships in cinema history when Michael Powell shared directing, writing, and producing credit with Emeric Pressburger for the first time. They largely focused on different aspects of production, though one was never completely removed at any time except, maybe, the editing phase when Pressburger took over, but Powell insisted for the rest of his life that they were equal creatives on their films despite the tendency of some peop...

49th Parallel

This is an interesting view into how the needs of propaganda and drama are in opposition to each other. The former requires rhetoric and polemic while the latter requires subtlety. Michael Powell and his new, regular writing partner Emeric Pressburger made the most of the dictates of the Ministry of Information to create a film that portrayed the Nazi way of life as violent and brutal while the Western, mostly British-inspired life to be peaceful but hiding great strength. Essentially broken...

Contraband (or, Blackout)

The second collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger as his writer before becoming his co-director, Contraband is another English effort at replicating Hitchcockian suspense after the master of suspense left for America. It’s got an everyman walking into a nest of spies and finding his way out, all while a little romance gets to play out at the same time. It’s also extremely timely, its American title (Blackout) making it more obvious than its British title, and it ends up ...

The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

The film Michael Powell was in the middle of making (though, reportedly as the second director Korda had hired for the production) when WWII broke out, requiring Alexander Korda to move production from England to Hollywood. This left Powell behind to make the bit of propaganda, The Lion Has Wings, while Korda hired Tim Whelan to take over production (though, reportedly there are five directors who worked on the film, though only three are credited). This manic approach to scheduling ends up ...

The Lion Has Wings

Michael Powell was in the middle of production of The Thief of Bagdad when war broke out between England and Germany upon Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Falling back on an agreement with the government, producer Alexander Korda gave whatever resources he could to the British government to help the war effort and moved the production to Hollywood. That left Powell in England to make this, The Lion Has Wings, a propaganda piece of which he made, maybe, 15% of the final product. The rest is made ...

The Spy in Black (or, U-Boat 29)

Mostly notable as the first time that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger worked together, this time with Pressburger only as writer, not as codirector, The Spy in Black exists in this interesting pocket of film history. Made in 1938, less than a year before war broke out between Britain and Germany, a British film came out centered around a German U-boat captain in WWI that made him a rounded, almost sympathetic character, even as he plots to sink dozens of British warships. It’s a mostly...