I thought I would open a discussion of the Powell and Pressburger films and British film in general, if anyone wishes to broaden the discussion. I also wanted to follow up on Mark’s perceptive comments in the previous post on 49th Parallel being “intended as WWII propaganda to help coax the US into the war, illustrating just what total bastards the Nazis are and how you can't ignore them...”
I was going to write about the significance of WWII in these films but it started to get endless so I gave up. I thought it was interesting that in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), there was a sympathetic German character, so there was an effort to avoid portraying the German people as evil en masse. The liberation of the death camps in 1945 meant that any future film made about the war would have to acknowledge that incredible evil. But to make it even more complex, as soon as we learned about the Holocaust, the Germans themselves could not be portrayed as completely evil because we needed West Germany as our ally in the looming Cold War against the USSR. So we again had to be more nuanced and separate Germans from Nazis.
BTW, if anyone is interested in a French twist on this, take a look at the novel Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky. It covers the German invasion of France in 1940 and the first year of the occupation. The story behind this novel is quite incredible. I recommend reading the novel before reading the intro or any biographical info. A film is coming out this year.
This is list of 1940’s P & P films:
Contraband (1940)
49th Parallel (1941)
The Volunteer (1943)
A Canterbury Tale (1944)
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
Black Narcissus (1947)
The Red Shoes (1948)
The Small Back Room (1949)
I've seen these - 49th Parallel (1941) The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) A Matter of Life and Death (1946) Black Narcissus (1947) The Small Back Room (1949) --All but Black Narcissus are about the war on some level.
I have A Canterbury Tale (1944) and The Red Shoes (1948) on hold at the library so it shouldn't be more than a week or so before I’m able to talk about them.
Here’s some comments on I Know Where I’m Going from Wiki.
"I've never seen a picture which smelled of the wind and rain in quite this way nor one which so beautifully exploited the kind of scenery people actually live with, rather than the kind which is commercialized as a show place." – Raymond Chandler
"The cast makes the best possible use of some natural, unforced dialogue, and there is some glorious outdoor photography." – The Times, 14 November 1945
"I reached the point of thinking there were no more masterpieces to discover, until I saw I Know Where I'm Going!" – Martin Scorsese
The film critic Barry Norman included it among his 100 greatest films of all time.
