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A journey through the films of Powell and Pressburger, courtesy of Scorsese and Schoonmaker

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A journey through the films of Powell and Pressburger, courtesy of Scorsese and Schoonmaker
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A journey through the films of Powell and Pressburger, courtesy of Scorsese and Schoonmaker

2024-07-15 21:43 Last Updated At:21:50

NEW YORK (AP) — Martin Scorsese has spent a sizeable portion of his life talking about movies he loves. He’s made documentaries about Italian cinema (“My Voyage to Italy”), Hollywood studio films (“A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies”) and individual filmmakers like Elia Kazan and Val Lewton. But when Scorsese talks about the movies of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, it means something different. It’s getting very close to something fundamental for him.

In the new documentary “Made in England: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger,” Scorsese recalls watching “The Red Shoes” as a child. He describes it as “one of the origins of my obsession with cinema, itself.”

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FILE - Director-producer Martin Scorsese, left, and editor Thelma Schoonmaker attend the Apple Original Film premiere of "Killers of the Flower Moon" at Alice Tully Hall on Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2023, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)

FILE - Director-producer Martin Scorsese, left, and editor Thelma Schoonmaker attend the Apple Original Film premiere of "Killers of the Flower Moon" at Alice Tully Hall on Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2023, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)

This image released by Cohen Media Group shows promotional art for the documentary "Made in England." (Cohen Media Group via AP)

This image released by Cohen Media Group shows promotional art for the documentary "Made in England." (Cohen Media Group via AP)

FILE - Film editor Thelma Schoonmaker poses at the 17th Annual WIF Oscar Nominees Party in Los Angeles on March 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

FILE - Film editor Thelma Schoonmaker poses at the 17th Annual WIF Oscar Nominees Party in Los Angeles on March 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

This image released by Cohen Media Group shows Martin Scorsese, from left, Michael Powell and Thelma Schoonmaker. (Cohen Media Group via AP)

This image released by Cohen Media Group shows Martin Scorsese, from left, Michael Powell and Thelma Schoonmaker. (Cohen Media Group via AP)

This image released by Cohen Media Group shows Emeric Pressburger, left, and Michael Powell on the set of "The Red Shoes." (Cohen Media Group via AP)

This image released by Cohen Media Group shows Emeric Pressburger, left, and Michael Powell on the set of "The Red Shoes." (Cohen Media Group via AP)

“The Powell-Pressberger films have had a profound effect on the sensibility that I bring to all the work I was able to do,” Scorsese says in the documentary. “I was so bewitched by them as a child that they make a big part of my films’ subconscious.”

“Made in England,” which rolls out in theaters this month, is a poignant crescendo in one of the great love affairs in movies. The films of Powell and Pressburger, the directing-screenwriting duo known as the Archers, has been an abiding polestar for Scorsese, who befriended Powell late in life. Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s longtime editor, married him, and since his death in 1990 has worked tirelessly to celebrate his legacy.

Together, Schoonmaker and Scorsese have restored eight of the films already, including Technicolor masterworks like “The Red Shoes,” “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” “Black Narcissus” and “A Matter of Life and Death,” along with the beloved black-and-white gem “I Know Where I’m Going!” and, most recently, “The Small Black Room.” Once Scorsese and Schoonmaker finish editing their own films, like last year's “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Schoonmaker turns to her other life’s work.

“I have the best job in the world and I have the best husband in the world. What more could you ask for?” Schoonmaker said in a recent interview by phone. “Working for Marty is just so fantastic. Every film is different, every film is a new challenge. And then we sit and talk about Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.”

As an expression of movie love — of the power of film to transfix you, to change your life, to live alongside you as you grow older — “Made in England” could hardly be more effusive. It’s playing as part of a Powell-Pressburger retrospective currently running at the Museum of Modern Art, with stops upcoming in Seattle, Chicago and at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles.

“The word ‘love’ is right, for all of us,” says David Hinton. He directed “Made in England” and first met Powell in for a 1980s British TV documentary on him. He was approached by Schoonmaker, who initiated the film. Hinton quickly realized the zeal of his collaborators.

“Scorsese and Thelma, they want to put in every good moment from every good Powell and Pressburger film,” Hinton says, chuckling. “Sequences were flying back and forth across the Atlantic. They didn’t want to take credit but a lot of what you see in the finished film is actually their work.”

Powell, the British son of a hop farmer, and Pressburger, a Hungarian Jew who had fled the Nazis to Britain, forged their collaboration during WWII. Together, sharing their credits on a single screen, they made 19 features together, many of which remain among the finest films ever made.

Schoonmaker believes she was in love with Powell before she met him. She saw the “The Red Shoes” when she was 12 and “Colonel Blimp” not long after.

“It devastated me, in a good sense,” Schoonmaker says. “I had no idea who had made it and no idea that I would later be introduced to the man who made it and marry him.”

When Schoonmaker met him, Powell’s career had petered out, a downfall exacerbated by the response to his disturbing and now widely celebrated 1960 film “Peeping Tom.” When Scorsese in 1974 was given an award by the Edinburgh Film Festival, he asked if Powell would present it to him. But few remembered him. Powell, he learned, was then nearly destitute, living in a cottage in Gloucester.

By the time Scorsese was preparing to make “Raging Bull” (1980), he and Powell had become friends, a relationship that reinvigorating the forgotten filmmaker. Powell later wrote he felt “the blood coursing through his veins again.”

At the same time, Scorsese kept sending Schoonmaker home with VHS tapes of the films. He indoctrinated others, too, like Francis Ford Coppola and Robert De Niro. The Powell and Pressburger legacy began to be revived. And a mutual filmmaking friendship blossomed.

“Michael gave to Marty too,” Schoonmaker says, recalling when Scorsese was considering abandoning “GoodFellas” over pressure to trim its drug scenes. “I read him the script and he said, ‘Get Marty on the phone.’ He said, ‘Marty, this is the best script I’ve read in 20 years. You have to make this movie.’ So Marty went back in one more time and got it made. That’s due to Michael. He was ferociously protective of Marty’s artistic freedom.”

A photo from their wedding day appears in “Made in England.” Schoonmaker ultimately spent 10 years with Powell before his death. She calls them “the happiest years of my life.”

“You know, he was an optimist,” says Schoonmaker. “He had me put on his gravestone ‘Film director and optimist.’ And he was. Living with someone who’s an optimist is quite extraordinary. He lived every second of every day.”

It’s hard not to see similarities between the partnerships of Pressburger and Powell and Scorsese and Schoonmaker, who’s edited every feature of his since “Raging Bull.” One of the most eye-opening sections of “Made in England” is a side-by-side comparison of some of the moments from Powell and Pressburger films that echo in theirs. The ballet performance in “The Red Shoes” influenced how Scorsese shot boxing matches in the ring in “Raging Bull.” In the Russian impresario Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) of “The Red Shoes,” Scorsese sees a model for Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). Their movements are eerily similar.

More than particular moments or characters, though, there’s also the deeper way that Powell’s marriage of imagery and music informs Scorsese’s. The hallucinatory 1951 opera “The Tales of Hoffman,” which Scorsese — not your average kid — watched obsessively as a 10 year old on TV, he says, “taught me pretty much everything I know about the relation of camera to music.” The famous “Layla” montage of “GoodFellas,” Schoonmaker says, was informed by the music-timed cuts in the feverish finale of “Black Narcissus.”

While such homage might not be possible for all lovers of the Archers, Scorsese's very personal reflections in “Made in England” effectively communicates the feelings Powell and Pressburger films stir in so many who encounter them. “They're romantics and idealists, Powell and Pressburger," Hinton says. “When I met Michael, that was so striking about him. He was still a romantic. He had this sparkle in his eye.”

For Schoonmaker, the work continues. A few films — notably the enchanting “A Canterbury Tale" and the WWII thriller “49th Parallel” — await possible restorations. And Schoonmaker continues to toil over Powell's diaries with the hope of publishing them some day. She's purposefully not read all the way through yet, though. They still, all these years later, have more to say to one another.

“I’m working chronologically so I’ve waited to read what he wrote about me until I get there,” Schoonmaker says. “I’m going to wait.”

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle at: http://x.com/jakecoyleAP

FILE - Director-producer Martin Scorsese, left, and editor Thelma Schoonmaker attend the Apple Original Film premiere of "Killers of the Flower Moon" at Alice Tully Hall on Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2023, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)

FILE - Director-producer Martin Scorsese, left, and editor Thelma Schoonmaker attend the Apple Original Film premiere of "Killers of the Flower Moon" at Alice Tully Hall on Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2023, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)

This image released by Cohen Media Group shows promotional art for the documentary "Made in England." (Cohen Media Group via AP)

This image released by Cohen Media Group shows promotional art for the documentary "Made in England." (Cohen Media Group via AP)

FILE - Film editor Thelma Schoonmaker poses at the 17th Annual WIF Oscar Nominees Party in Los Angeles on March 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

FILE - Film editor Thelma Schoonmaker poses at the 17th Annual WIF Oscar Nominees Party in Los Angeles on March 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

This image released by Cohen Media Group shows Martin Scorsese, from left, Michael Powell and Thelma Schoonmaker. (Cohen Media Group via AP)

This image released by Cohen Media Group shows Martin Scorsese, from left, Michael Powell and Thelma Schoonmaker. (Cohen Media Group via AP)

This image released by Cohen Media Group shows Emeric Pressburger, left, and Michael Powell on the set of "The Red Shoes." (Cohen Media Group via AP)

This image released by Cohen Media Group shows Emeric Pressburger, left, and Michael Powell on the set of "The Red Shoes." (Cohen Media Group via AP)

Donald Trump began his first day as the 47th president of the United States with a dizzying display of force, signing a blizzard of executive orders that signaled his desire to remake American institutions while also pardoning nearly all of his supporters who rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Here's the latest:

He pledged to remove more than 1,000 presidential appointees “who are not aligned with our vision.”

In a post on his TruthSocial platform, Trump dismissed chef and humanitarian Jose Andres from the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, Ret. Gen. Mark Milley from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, former State Dept. official Brian Hook from the board of the Wilson Center, and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms from the President’s Export Council.

“YOUR’E FIRED!” he wrote in a post just after midnight Tuesday.

Milley, the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under Trump, received a pardon from former President Joe Biden on Monday over concerns he could be criminally targeted by the new administration. His portrait in the Pentagon was also removed. Hook, who was Trump’s Iran envoy during his first term, had been involved in the Trump administration transition. No reasoning was given for his firing.

Former President Joe Biden also removed many Trump appointees in his first days in office, including former press secretary Sean Spicer from the board overseeing the U.S. Naval Acadamy.

Rep. Elise Stefanik is likely to face questions at her confirmation hearing Tuesday to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations about her lack of foreign policy experience, her strong support for Israel and her views on funding the U.N. and its many agencies.

Harvard-educated and the fourth-ranking member of the U.S. House, she was elected to Congress in 2015 as a moderate Republican and is leaving a decade later as one of President Trump’s most ardent allies.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “looks forward to working again with President Trump on his second term,” U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said Monday.

When she appears before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Stefanik is likely to be grilled about her views on the wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and elsewhere as well as the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs — all issues on the U.N. agenda.

▶ Read more about Elise Stefanik’s confirmation hearing

Scholz said at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday that “not every press conference in Washington, not every tweet should send us straight into excited, existential debates. That’s also the case after the change of government that took place in Washington yesterday.”

Scholz said the U.S. is Germany’s closest ally outside Europe and he’ll do everything to keep in that way.

He acknowledged that Trump and his administration “will keep the world on tenterhooks in the coming years” in energy, climate, trade and security policy. But he said “we can and will deal with all this, without unnecessary agitation and outrage, but also without false ingratiation or telling people what they want to hear.”

Scholz said of Trump’s “America First” approach that there’s nothing wrong with looking to the interests of one’s own country – “we all do that. But it is also the case that cooperation and agreement with others are mostly also in one’s interest.”

Speaking in the Oval Office Monday, Trump rejected Biden’s warning that the U.S. is becoming an “ oligarchy ” for tech billionaires, saying the executives supported Democrats until they realized Biden “didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.”

“They did desert him,” Trump added. “They were all with him, every one of them, and now they are all with me.”

Despite taking millions from the executives and their companies for his inaugural committee — and receiving more than $200 million in assistance from Musk in his presidential campaign — Trump claimed he didn’t need their money and they wouldn’t be receiving anything in return.

“They’re not going to get anything from me,” Trump said. “I don’t need money, but I do want the nation to do well, and they’re smart people and they create a lot of jobs.”

Some of the most exclusive seats at Trump’s inauguration on Monday were reserved for powerful tech CEOs who also happen to be among the world’s richest men.

That’s a shift from tradition, especially for a president who has characterized himself as a champion of the working class. Seats so close to the president are usually reserved for the president’s family, past presidents and other honored guests.

The mega-rich have long had a prominent role in national politics, and several billionaires helped bankroll the campaign of Trump’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

But the inaugural display highlights the unusually direct role the world’s wealthiest people will likely have in the new administration. In his outgoing address, Biden warned that the U.S. was becoming an oligarchy of tech billionaires wielding dangerous levels of power and influence on the nation.

▶ Read more about the billionaires at Trump’s inauguration

Outside the National Cathedral, just a few hours before the Interfaith Service of Prayer for the Nation, which both President Trump and Vice President JD Vance are expected to attend, the scene before was decidedly quiet.

At the Cathedral only a few dog walkers dotted the sidewalk and the police presence was low.

It was a far cry from yesterday when thousands lined up in downtown D.C. festooned in the red regalia of MAGA nation — or the security and foot traffic from earlier this month for the funeral service of former President Jimmy Carter where Secret Service vehicles could be seen at least a mile from the Cathedral.

The Senate quickly confirmed Marco Rubio as secretary of state Monday, voting unanimously to give Trump the first member of his new Cabinet on Inauguration Day.

Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, is among the least controversial of Trump’s nominees and vote was decisive, 99-0.

It’s often tradition for the Senate to convene immediately after the ceremonial pomp of the inauguration to begin putting the new president’s team in place, particularly the national security officials.

▶ Read more about Marco Rubio’s confirmation

All the living former presidents were there and the outgoing president amicably greeted his successor, who gave a speech about the country’s bright future and who left to the blare of a brass band.

At first glance, President Donald Trump’ssecond inauguration seemed like a continuation of the country’s nearly 250-year-long tradition of peaceful transfers of power, essential to its democracy. And there was much to celebrate: Trump won a free and fair election last fall, and his supporters hope he will be able to fix problems at the border, end the war in Ukraine and get inflation under control.

Still, on Monday, the warning signs were clear.

Due to frigid temperatures, Trump’s swearing-in was held in the Capitol Rotunda, where rioters seeking to keep him in power the last time roamed during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack. Trump walked into the space from the hall leading to the building’s west front tunnel, where some of the worst hand-to-hand combat between Trump supporters and police occurred that day.

After giving a speech pledging that “never again” would the government “persecute political opponents,” Trump then gave a second, impromptu address to a crowd of supporters. The president lamented that his inaugural address had been sanitized, said he would shortly pardon the Jan. 6 rioters and fumed at last-minute preemptive pardons issued by outgoing President Joe Biden to the members of the congressional committee that investigated the attack.

▶ Read more about Trump’s Inauguration Day

President Donald Trump signs an executive order to create the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, in Washington, as White House staff secretary Will Scharf watches. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

President Donald Trump signs an executive order to create the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, in Washington, as White House staff secretary Will Scharf watches. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

President Donald Trump speaks as first lady Melania Trump listens at the Commander in Chief Ball, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

President Donald Trump speaks as first lady Melania Trump listens at the Commander in Chief Ball, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

President Donald Trump signs an executive order on TikTok in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

President Donald Trump signs an executive order on TikTok in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

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