Emeric Pressburger Movies

Based on a popular Australian novel, this comedy was produced Down Under in 1966. Nino Culotta Walter Chiari is an Italian journalist who is lured by his brother into coming to Australia to work for his paper there. But when Nino arrives in Sidney, he finds out that there is no paper; his brother has taken off with the investors' cash. Left in the lurch was his brother's business partner, Kay Kelly (Clare Dunne). Nino vows to pay off his brother's debt and gets a job as a bricklayer to do so. He also tries to woo Kay, but he is repeatedly rebuffed, with humorous results. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide

By 1964, it was possible for a major studio to make a film touching upon the Spanish Civil War without having to answer to some senate investigating committee or other. Based on Emeric Pressburger's novel A Mouse on Sunday, Behold a Pale Horse stars Gregory Peck as a war veteran who continues waging a one-man offensive years after hostilities have officially ceased. Exiled to France, Peck is lured back to Spain by vengeful police captain Anthony Quinn. Priest Omar Sharif advises Peck that he's being tricked, but Peck is determined to return to Spain to bid farewell to his dying mother Mildred Dunnock. Halfway through, the film bogs down into ponderous preachifying and moralizing, but overall the film is worth a glance. In 1966, Behold a Pale Horse was scheduled to be telecast on a major American network, but was cancelled at the last minute, reportedly at the behest of the Spanish government. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Eschewing the Shakespearean original title (it's a quote from A Midsummer Night's Dream), the British Ill Met by Moonlight was released stateside as Night Ambush. This superb Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger concoction is set during World War II on the island of Crete. Dirk Bogarde and David Oxley play Major Paddy Leigh Fermer and Captain Billy Stanley Moss, two British officers whose job it is to kidnap Nazi general Karl Kreipe (Marius Goring) and spirit him off to Cairo. The motive of this mission is to weaken German morale on Crete and to provide hope to the enslaved locals. With the help of a group of resistance fighters, Fermer and Moss manage to trap the general; now they must transport their captive back to their own lines, avoiding German patrols every inch of the way. Originally 104 minutes, Ill Met by Moonlight was cut to 93 minutes by its American distributor. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The ever-adventuresome Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are responsible for the British musical farce Oh, Rosalinda! Set in postwar Vienna, the film stars Michael Redgrave as Colonel Eisenstein, a military officer who because of a little legal misunderstanding must serve a few months in prison. While sitting alone in her sumptuous house, the colonel's wife Rosalinda (Ludmilla Tcherina) is romanced by American officer Alfred Westerman (Mel Ferrer). When the guard assigned to escort Rosalinda to prison marches in, Westerman, hoping to save Rosalinda from disgrace, claims that he's her husband, and winds up in the pokey himself. Later on, Rosalinda attends a costume ball, where she flirts outrageously with her own husband. Sound familiar? It should: Oh, Rosalinda is a modernized version of Johann Strauss' comic opera Die Fledermaus. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Most baby-boomers are familiar with the Powell-Pressburger production of the Offenbach opera Tales of Hoffman only through the full-color stills from the film which were reproduced in the "Motion Picture" section of The World Book Encyclopedia. If this is your only memory of the film, we advise you to seek out a copy of this lengthy but visually enthralling picture as soon as possible. Metropolitan opera star Robert Rounseville plays Hoffman, a university student who is spectacularly unlucky in affairs of the heart. Each of his love affairs with Olympia (Moira Shearer), Giulietta (Ludmilla Tcherina) and Antonia (Ann Ayars) is doomed to failure due to circumstances far beyond our hero's control (Olympia, for example, turns out to be nothing more than a life-sized mechanical doll). As in the previous Powell-Pressburger collaboration The Red Shoes, the film's best moments are its ballet sequences, choreographed by Jane Ashton. Offenbach's score is given a splendid rendition by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of the legendary Sir Thomas Beecham. Most prints of Tales of Hoffman run 118 minutes, eliminating the closing "Tale of Antonia" sequence; the laserdisc version has been restored to 127 minutes, while the search goes on for the complete 138-minute negative. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this costume adventure set in France during the Reign of Terror, a mysterious man known only as the Scarlet Pimpernel rescues noblemen from the guillotine and leads them to safety across the English Channel. Chauvelin (Cyril Cusack) is determined to unmask the Pimpernel and bring him to justice. When evidence begins to suggest that the hero is actually foppish Sir Percey Blakeney (David Niven), Chauvelin blackmails Percey's wife, Marguerite (Margaret Leighton), into cooperating on the threat that he'll expose the criminal activities of her brother Armand (Edmund Audran). However, Marguerite doesn't much care for her husband, hardly believes he could be the heroic Pimpernel, and is startled when she finds out that he truly is the masked vigilante. The Elusive Pimpernel was originally shot in color as a musical, but the musical numbers were cut before the film was released, and the picture's American distributor chose to make only black-and-white prints (though the current home-video release is in color). ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's influential musical tragedy set the stage for the climactic dance ballets that became a staple of the Arthur Freed-MGM musicals (An American in Paris, Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon) of the early 1950s. Hans Christian Andersen's tragic fairy tale forms the basis of this film about betrayal, love and art. The story begins as struggling composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring) attends a performance of the Lermontov Ballet Company and recognizes his own score in the production of "Hearts of Fire." Julian protests to ballet company director Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) about the unauthorized use of his music. Impressed by Julian's talent, Boris hires him to compose the score for his next ballet -- a dance version of "The Red Shoes." Boris also hires an attractive young dancer, Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), to perform in the ballet. When the lead ballerina announces that she plans to get married, Boris, in a pique over being abandoned, casts Victoria in the starring role. As Julian works on the score and Victoria struggles to perfect her dance technique, the two fall in love. When "The Red Shoes" ballet is premiered -- seen in a stunning and glorious fifteen-minute sequence -- it is a raging success and it makes Victoria a star. But when Boris learns that Julian and Victoria have fallen in love, Boris, who is secretly in love with Victoria, in a fit of rage forces Julian to leave the ballet company; Victoria leaves with him. Since Boris owns the rights to "The Red Shoes" ballet, he forbids Victoria to perform the dance and she becomes unemployable. Time passes and Julian and Victoria are now happily married. Julian's compositions have made him an international success. One day, with Victoria disembarking from a train in Paris, she meets Boris, who implores her to do one performance of "The Red Shoes" in Monaco. Victoria agrees as Julian cancels an engagement in London to travel to Monte Carlo in order to convince his wife not to perform the ballet. But Victoria goes on with the performance, with tragic results. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger once again deliberately courted controversy and censorship with their 1947 adaptation of Rumer Godden's novel. Deborah Kerr and Kathleen Byron play the head nuns at an Anglican hospital/school high in the Himalayas. The nuns' well-ordered existence is disturbed by the presence of a handsome British government agent (David Farrar), whose attractiveness gives certain sisters the wrong ideas. Meanwhile, an Indian girl (Jean Simmons) is lured down the road to perdition by a sensuous general (Sabu). While Kerr would seem most susceptible to fall from grace --we are given hints of her earlier love life in a long flashback--she proves to have more stamina than Byron, who delivers one of moviedom's classic interpretations of all-stops-out, sex-starved insanity. The aforementioned flashback was removed from the US release version of Black Narcissus so as not to offend the Catholic Legion of Decency. While the dramatic content of the film hasn't stood the test of time all that well, the individual performances, production values, and especially the Oscar-winning Technicolor photography of Jack Cardiff are still as impressive as ever. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Anne Fielding (Dulcie Gray), a shop clerk, meets Jack Williams (Derek Farr), a bus conductor, on the London Underground. She's delayed by the train for a meeting with her friend Victor Colebrooke (Eric Portman) at Hampstead Heath; the two of them take a liking to each other while she's trying to find Victor. She finally locates him and they leave at virtually the same moment that a young woman is found strangled -- the latest in a series of six stranglings in London. The police investigate anyone who might have been with the victim -- that includes Jack, who was seen leaving in a fury late in the evening, and Victor, whose handkerchief was found in the vicinity of the body by a derelict. In a neatly Hitchcockian twist, however, the police soon get on to the right man, but between the ineptitude of one officer and sheer bad luck, Scotland Yard is unable to make an arrest or even secure a search warrant. A bizarre cat-and-mouse game ensues as Inspector Conway (Roland Culver) tries to pressure the killer into tipping his hand, which puts Anne in deadly danger. It all comes down to a race against time through London as all of the threads draw together, but around whose neck? ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

This WW II espionage drama chronicles the efforts of Nazi spies who go undercover to Britain. One of them is disguised as a member of the RAF and tries to bomb a Belgian burg so as to make it appear as if the Allies are blowing up civilians. Fortunately, underground Allied agents capture him and try to send him to England. Now the wicked German agent finds himself pursued by both the Allies and his own Nazis. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's much-lauded epic Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which satirizes British traditionalism, stirred up impassioned hostilities and indignations among the Brits when released in 1943. It so infuriated Winston Churchill, in fact, that he refused to allow its exportation to other countries, particularly the U.S. When Blimp finally did premiere in the States in 1945, it screened in a drastically cut version. The sweeping story covers several decades. It begins at the tail end of the Boer War, when handsome young British officer Clive Candy, recently back from the battlefront, is infuriated by his discovery that Deutschland papers have played up the British atrocities in South Africa, propagandistically. He grows so irate, in fact, that he travels to Germany to address the problem. Once there, he meets an attractive British educator, Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr) who spends her days teaching English as a second language to German students. They grow close, but Candy so aggravates the local indigenes that he winds up in a duel with a German officer, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook). The men wound each other and are sent to the same hospital, where they become friends. Candy - who doesn't yet realize he's fallen in love with Edith -- senses that Theo and Edith are attracted to one another, and encourages the couple's marital union. Candy subsequently returns to England, then falls for and marries Barbara (again played by Kerr), a nurse who bears a strong resemblance to Edith. She later dies, but Candy meets a third woman during WWII, Johnny (Kerr a third time), assigned to drive him from one locale to another during his campaigns. Meanwhile, Theo - disgusted by Nazi atrocities -- absconds to England, where he reencounters his old friend, now a prattering old shuffler rapidly approaching the end of his career and raving continuously about Nazi conduct (or lack thereof) in battle. Powell and Pressberger adapted Colonel Blimp from a comic strip; it became one of the hallmarks of their careers. ~ Sidney Jenkins, All Movie Guide

Emeric Pressburger was one of the scenarists on the big-budget British seafaring saga Atlantic Ferry. The film is a romanticized recounting of the first-ever steamship crossing of the Atlantic in 1837. Michael Redgrave and Griffith Jones star as the MacIver brothers (the film is based on a story by one of the MacIver progeny). The siblings battle both the Atlantic and (whenever a woman is involved) each other, but they achieve their goal, making shipping lanes safe for steam power. Inasmuch as the film was made at the outbreak of World War 2, the filmmakers contrive to rabbet a bit of anti-German propaganda into the proceedings. "Has considerable gusto" was the New York Post's pithy critique of this morale-boosting film. The huge cast includes such British-movie stalwarts as Valerie Hobson, Bessie Love, Frederick Leister and Felix Aylmer. Atlantic Ferry was distributed in the US by Warner Bros. under the title Sons of the Sea. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide