Previously (Step 1 ...) These Three! Merle Oberon’s swift rise to Hollywood stardom began here. Published in the Daily Herald on 25 October 1933, the photograph above was taken the previous night at the premiere of The Private Life of Henry VIII at the Leicester Square Theatre in London. Hailed in its time as the greatest British film ever made, the film turned Korda into the country’s most famous producer, won Charles Laughton an Academy Award, and gave Oberon a brief but

“I would like to see, Mr Craster, what you can do in the way of a little rewriting,” the ballet impresario Boris Lermontov tells the young composer in The Red Shoes. “Oh, you can take your time. There’s no hurry!” Emeric Pressburger, who wrote the screenplay for The Red Shoes, had a theory that scripts have to be left to mature. He believed that if you work an idea too hard, you risk losing creative energy. “But you keep it in a drawer for six months – better a year – and it

It was the oddest thing. I had been invited to contribute to a panel discussion of The Red Shoes at the Central Film School in Clapham. Worried that I might miss the beginning of the movie, which was going to be screened beforehand, I was hurrying along the Merton Road to South Wimbledon tube station, when, miraculously, I came upon the Ballet Boutique. A mother and her daughter (I assume) were coming out of the shop just as I approached it. The daughter gave her mum a hug

His romantic disposition made him very vulnerable. In 1917, it might have helped to explain the valour that won him the Military Cross....

It’s difficult to exaggerate quite how disappointing Michael Powell’s film The Queen’s Guards is. Made in 1961, it is an ode to the...

When Black Narcissus was released in 1947, only three members of the creative team who had made the film were named on the poster:...

A familiar theme in the various stories about Michael Powell is how unfairly forgotten he was before he was “rediscovered” in the 1970s. ...

Whenever Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell wanted to express the importance of giving an idea time, they would often remind each...

About thirty years ago I travelled to Italy to interview an old film-maker who lived in a small village near Pisa. His name was Charles Hassé. He was a director and editor who had worked at the Crown Film Unit and Ealing Studios during the war. Although he had been involved in the making of some films that I am very fond of (Christmas Under Fire, for example, which can be seen on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGK5EsGzKIg), the most striking story he had to tell me

It is an irony of Powell and Pressburger’s work that films which are timeless in their appeal belong so much to the circumstances of a...

Powell and Pressburger were at their most unfashionable in the 1960s. They struggled to adapt to a time that had put youth on a pedestal....

When The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp had its premiere at the Odeon, Leicester Square, on 10 June 1943, the title hero – or rather,...

A new documentary on Michael Powell has just been released on BFI Player: https://player.bfi.org.uk/subscription/film/watch-vision-dreams...

“THE ENTIRE PRODUCTION, Written, Produced and Directed by . . .” But who really did what? When asked about the division of roles, Powell commented, “As far as possible, we tried to share everything. Of course, directing on the floor – that was entirely my job. But as far as we could, we shared every decision.” Pressburger concurred: “On the whole, as a simple answer, I would say that Michael directed on his own, and I was more the writer.” But because he was more the write

Martin Scorsese’s recent film on Powell and Pressburger, Made in England , is a tribute that stands out for its intelligence, enthusiasm...