TSPDT

Key Production Country: UK
Key Genres: Drama, War Drama, War, Romantic Drama, Musical, Period Film, Fantasy
Key Collaborators: Reginald Mills (Editor), Christopher Challis (Cinematographer), Brian Easdale (Composer), Alfred Junge (Production Designer), Hein Heckroth (Production Designer), Esmond Knight (Leading Character Actor), Allan Gray (Composer), Anton Walbrook (Leading Actor), David Farrar (Leading Actor), Roger Livesey (Leading Actor), Marius Goring (Leading Actor), Jack Cardiff (Cinematographer)

"As Britain’s most famous producing-directing team, Powell and Pressburger divided critical opinion between those who demanded social realism within cinema and those who supported an auteurist vision. With the rise of auteur theory in journals such as the UK-based Movie, the work of Powell and Pressburger received a more positive critical reevaluation. At the box office, the duo’s fantastical, mystical tales enjoyed great success… In 1943 they established their own production company called the Archers, for which they made a succession of popular and significant films." - Scott Henderson (Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, 2007)

"During the 1940s, Hungarian-born Pressburger and his partner Michael Powell - known as 'The Archers' - made a series of classic British films: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I'm Going! and Stairway to Heaven (both 1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). These films create a world of magic, humour, tenderness, passion and miraculous beauty." - The Movie Book, 1999

"They struggle with great, clashing virtues - with marvelous visual imagination (Powell) and uneasy, intellectual substance (Pressburger)... The great Powell and Pressburger films do not go stale; they never relinquish their wicked fun or that jaunty air of being poised on the brink." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)

"In their 18 years of creative partnership beginning 1939, the writer-producer-director team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – collectively known as The Archers – put together a formidable catalogue of films. Full-hearted and thoroughly British, loaded with ideas yet light and playful in execution, many of these pictures have long since been canonised as classics. The influence is still being felt, too: in the six decades-plus since the partnership dissolved, the work of Powell and Pressburger has bled into cinema at large… Keen explorers of the magical possibilities of film in their editing and use of special effects, The Archers also embraced the colour revolution early. With every inch of frame in their Technicolor films appearing as deliberate as strokes from a paint brush, it might almost seem like colour cinema was made for Powell and Pressburger." - Brogan Morris (BFI, 2021)

"The films that carry the unusual credit of "Produced, Written and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger" are eccentric, extravagant, witty fantasies. They contrast sharply with the realistic approach typical of British cinema of their period." - Ronald Bergan (Film - Eyewitness Companions, 2006)

"Powell and Pressburger have been most remarkable for their ability to break away from the usual, rather pedestrian mould of British cinema, and if their films are on occasion over-extravagant and even self-indulgent, they represent both colour and imagination in a field where both are only too often absent." - Roger Manvell (The International Encyclopedia of Film, 1972)

"One of the most imaginative writer/directors in the British cinema. Powell lensed comedy (Colonel Blimp, 45), fantasy (Stairway to Heaven, 46), homespun drama (I Know Where I'm Going, 47), psychological studies (The Small Back Room, 49), war stories (One of Our Aircraft is Missing, 42), and even films of ballet and opera (Tales of Hoffmann, 51). Powell had an energetic camera style and a sense of color few of his contemporaries shared." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)

“In 1942 Powell and Pressburger established their own production company, The Archers, and set out to write, produce, and direct an extraordinary succession of remarkable films, noted for their vivid imagery and exceptional beauty.” - The Film Encyclopedia, 2012

"Art is merciless observation, sympathy, imagination, and a sense of detachment that is almost cruelty." - Michael Powell

"I think that a film should have a good story, a clear story, and it should have, if possible, something which is probably the most difficult thing - it should have a little bit of magic." - Emeric Pressburger