David Herman
The Genius of Emeric Pressburger

David Herman - The Genius of Emeric Pressburger

- Hello again. It’s lovely to be back with you all. We’re going to be talking about, well, today and then next Sunday, two great, great Romanian writers, but who are neither of whom are ever thought of as Romanian. And one of the sort of strange things is that Romanian writers, perhaps, especially Jewish Romanian writers, are not well, as well known as they should be. And they’re certainly not well known as Romanians. And one reason is that so many became refugees or immigrants and became best known in other countries and in other languages, such as Norman Manea, who settled in the United States and became a very good friend of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Herta Muller, who received the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature. And she came to West Berlin in 1987 and wrote in German. The playwright Eugene Ionesco, who wrote mainly in French. Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of Dadaism, born Sammy Rosenstock, spent the first world war in Switzerland and then moved to France just after the first World War and he was Romanian. Elie Wiesel of course, was born in the Carpathian Mountains in Romania in 1928 and after spending some time in Auschwitz, settled in Paris where he wrote “Night.” And then in 1955 he moved to the United States. Hal Salam was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Bukovina, a region then part of Romania, and moved to Paris after the war where he drowned himself in the Seine in 1970 and he became perhaps the greatest poet in the German language in the 20th century.

And Emil Cioran was a Romanian philosopher, aphorist and essayist who published works in both Romanian and French and studied in Berlin and then left for France in 1937. And a second reason, as we shall see, is the parts of Romania moved from one empire or country to another. So the odd thing is it’s not just these writers moved, it’s also the country around them that moved and the various parts of the country. So next Sunday, I’ll be talking about one of the greatest Israeli writers Aharon Appelfeld, born in Bukovina. But today I’ll be talking about one of the greatest screenwriters of the 20th century Emeric Pressburger, as in Powell and Pressburger. In 1967, the playwright, the British playwright, Michael Frame, was taken by Michael Powell, the famous film director to meet his longtime collaborator, Emeric Pressburger. It was, Frame said, as if Cross were introducing one to Blackwell. They were a British institution, became a British institution. They were one of the great partnerships in the history of cinema. Between 1939 and 1956, Powell and Pressburger wrote and directed 17 films including masterpieces like “The Red Shoes,” “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” “A Matter of Life and Death” and “Black Narcissus” all made within five years of each. British cinema has seen nothing like them. World cinema has seen nothing like them. It’s not just that they produce so many outstanding films. These films increasingly ran against the grain of British cinema and indeed British culture. In a culture which valued realism and naturalism, they championed art, expressionism and romanticism.

So some of their greatest films were about music and ballet. “We were storytellers, fantasists,” writes Michael Powell in his autobiography, “A Life in Movies.” “Documentary films started with poetry and finished as prose,” he wrote. “We storytellers started with naturalism, and finished with fantasy.” Starting with black and white films grounded in the reality of the second world war. They moved towards colour, fantasy and extravagance. Pressburger was born in 1902 as Imre József Pressburger. He was the only child of Kálmán Pressburger, the manager of an aristocrats estate and his wife Gizella. The Pressburgers were originally from Pressburg. Now Bratislava, capital of Slovakia. And Emeric was born in North Hungary, small trading town with a population of 17,000 Jews. Almost 17,000 Jews were later deported to Auschwitz in the autumn of 1944. He grew up on the estate where his father worked and the family were quite itinerant and moved around the area. He started out at a Jewish elementary school in a place called Subotica, and then moved to the secular gymnasium, the town’s main school. The family then moved again near Temeswar, which is now in Romania and the Eastern most metropolis of the Hapsburg Empire. This was before the first world war, so of course it was still this whole area was part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire.

In 1914, World War I started, “I was a schoolboy of 16 when World War I ended,” he later wrote. The Austria-Hungarian Empire collapsed like a chocolate souffle struck by the icy wind of defeat. And for almost two years, his hometown was occupied by the Serbs who were on the other side in the first World War. Then in 1920, between 1919 and 1920, there were a series of peace treaties, which redrew the map of Europe, especially in East Europe. Versailles, of course, is the most famous of these treaties, but there was also a smaller treaty called Trianon, which assigned Transylvania, which was the part of Hungary that Pressburger grew up in to Romania. Temeswar became Timisoara. And Romanian was enforced as the city’s official language. All Hungarian speaking institutions, including schools were closed. Imre was now a Romanian, a foreigner in his own country. He never lived in Hungary again and spent the rest of his life as an emigre. And really between the first World War and second World War, he was almost constantly on the move, learning new languages, working in different countries. In 1920, he couldn’t study in Budapest because the Romanian government forbade Romanian students to attend Hungarian universities. So he moved briefly to Prague and tried to get a German visa to study in Germany, but he couldn’t afford to return after the second year. In 1926, his father died and that curtailed his studies for good. And in 1927, the following year, he left Romania for good and he started off in Germany and he went to Berlin, penniless, down and out.

He got a job extraordinarily in cinema. He wrote, “I decided to become a writer, I wrote furiously and everywhere in stations, on park benches, and mainly in post offices. In warm post offices, I wrote on the back of Telegram forms and sent my handwritten efforts to newspapers and magazines.” And he bombarded as part of this great effort. He bombarded the script department at UFA with ideas. UFA was the great German production film production company, the greatest film production company in Europe and it was based in Berlin. And he got his first break and changed his name from Imre to Emeric, but Emeric with an H. He later dropped the H when he tried to Anglicise his name, although not that Emeric is a very Anglicised name, but it was an attempt. In 1930, he got involved with his first film set in a Berlin boarding house about ordinary Berliners. And it was filmed in 10 days, and it was among the first batch of sound films to be made in Germany. And he was employed by UFA, which employed 5,000 people at the time. That’s how big a company it was. And in, in 1930 to 32, he worked on nine other films and worked with people like Erich Kastner, who wrote, whose most famous for “Emil and the Detectives.”

Max Ophuls, one of the great film directors of the time of the 20th century. Billy Wilder, Alan Grey, not so well known, but he wrote the music for nearly all the Powell and Pressburger films as a refugee later. Erich Korngold, who went to Hollywood and became a famous composer there and the actress Luise Rainer. And he lived in a luxurious apartment on Kurfurstendamm in Berlin. But then he was sacked in 1932 by UFA, probably presumably because of anti-semitism, which was already on the rise in Germany, and in 1933 on May the first, he left Berlin for good. And like many Germans, especially those in the film business, he moved to Paris. So he is been so far in Hungary, in Romania, in Prague, briefly in Stuttgart in Berlin. And now he’s in Paris. And he wrote about leaving Berlin. “I sat in my flat among the billowing sheets of newspapers that proudly proclaimed the recent calamities like a duck still alive, but plucked of all its feathers.” So from 19, in 1933, he arrives in Paris and he lives in cheap lodgings around the quarter, corner from the hotel, Ansonia where Billy Wilder, Peter Lorre and his wife, and the great composer, Franz Waxman, great composer in Hollywood, all were living and four of Pressburger’s German scripts were now made into French versions. So he had a reputation in France and he worked on a number of films. And it’s quite interesting, these films, very interesting actually. Let’s say, let’s boost it up a bit. The Emigres presented the world with an extreme representation of mythic romantic Paris. No matter that they themselves had seen the myth exposed by grubby experience. It was far from the very poor, desperately poor, boarding houses and small hotels that they were mostly living in.

But they created an image of Paris as this great romantic city that’s sort resonated with French film goers. And in 1935, he goes to London to work on an English language script and arrives with a stateless passport. And from then on for the rest of his life, he lives in England. And perhaps what’s more extraordinary is he doesn’t just live in England, he becomes an odd mix of a central European Jew and a quintessential Englishman fascinated by Englishness. As we will see, that becomes one of the great subjects of his film, the films that he made with Michael Powell, who was a quintessential Englishman, born and brought up in Kent, and spoke with a very English accent. And yet this odd combination of the Hungarian stroke Romanian Jew and the Kent Englishman went on to make these films which were so un-English and in other ways very English. And this becomes really the heart of Pressburger’s art for the rest of his career. In January, 1937, he visited his mother. She had now moved to Miskolc in Hungary, and he never spoke about this brief visit. It was the last time that he ever saw her, and he later denied that he’d ever visited her after 1933. And in later life, he was consumed with guilt that he had not taken her with him to England when he had the opportunity to do so. And consequently, she ended up in a death camp and died as a victim of the Nazis. In 1938, the following year, he made his first British film and he and Powell had one of many extraordinary strokes of luck. They came under the wing of another refugee, another Hungarian refugee, the famous Alexander Korda, who was one of the great British film producers of the mid 20th century.

And he took to them, and they took to him. And because he was a Hungarian, he had a whole network of Hungarian and German refugees working for him as composers, as cameramen, as actors. And that might have helped Pressburger get his feet under the table with with Korda. And at this time, he anglicised his name to Emeric and he’s hired by Korda and he meets Michael Powell. Korda initially gave him two weeks work and then asked him to work on a film that was going to be called “The Spy in Black,” to create a role for Conrad Veidt, a German refugee film actor. And he meets Powell, and Powell said, “a marvel, a screenwriter who could really write, I was not going to let him get away in a hurry. I’d always dreamt of this phenomenon, a screenwriter with a heart and mind of a novelist who would be interested in the medium of film and who would have wonderful ideas, which I would turn into even more wonderful images and who only used dialogue to make a joke or to clarify the plot.” And their first film was indeed in 1939, “The Spy in Black” with Conrad Veidt, and it was their first collaboration. And the cast also included Valerie Hobson and Marius Goring, probably not so well known now, but at the time, major stars. And it was a sort of sub-bucanesque espionage chase set on Orkney in World War I concerning a German attempt to blow up the British fleet. And in 1940, so that by then by 1940 of course, the war had begun, and they start making a series of war films either about German soldiers stranded in North America or British soldiers stranded in Europe, which again sort of fits in with Pressburger’s theme or the theme in Pressburgers’s life and work of being an outsider and also an insider, an Englishman who was born in East Europe.

And it, what’s interesting about these very early films is that they demonstrate just how at home Pressburger was in the most English of 1930s genres, the comedy thriller. You may have seen Alfred Hitchcock’s great film, “The Lady Vanishes,” or “The 39 Steps” based on the John Buchan novel. Somehow these two took to this genre like ducks to water, although this was a sort of starting point, and very soon, as we shall see, they moved onto very, very different kinds of genre. And they started a company called The Archers. And if you’ve ever seen a Powell and Pressburger film, you’ll know that the beginning of every Powell and Pressburger film, all the great films during their hype, the high point of their career begins with an arrow thudding into a target. And that became their symbol. And also there was something else very striking about the end credits of their films, which always say written, produced, and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Now, of course, Pow, or Pressburger did the writing, Powell did the directing, and together they shared the producing. So it wasn’t strictly speaking true, but nevertheless, that’s what the credits always said. And then they make their next film, “The 49th Parallel,” their third film, edited by David Lean, as in Doctor Zhivago Lawrence of Arabia with the music by Ralph Vaughan Williams. And it starred Lawrence Olivier, Anton Walbrook, who was another German refugee, and Leslie Howard, two quintessentially English actors, Olivier and Leslie Howard, and one quintessentially central European refugee actor, Anton Walbrook.

And it won Pressburger the Oscar for best original story, and he was nominated for best screenplay. So it was his first big moment of recognition in Hollywood, and it was the biggest ever grossing British film in the US up to that time, “The 49th Parallel.” And the film shows Germans causing mayhem in America’s backyard. The survivors of a German U-boat stranded in Canada and their adventures subsequently and 1942 during the war was arguably the height of his achievement. Certainly at this point, he has just been nominated for three separate Oscars and he wins one of them. There are three films which he’s involved with being shot at Denham, Britain’s most prestigious studio. All were written by him. He probably has more authority over his productions than any other screenwriter in the world. Not bad for a Jewish refugee from Hungary stroke Romania stroke Berlin stroke Paris. By 1941, he’d arrived, and for the next 15 years, he was going to be more or less on a plateau, a very, very successful plateau, producing his best work, married happily for a second time, and settled down to an affluent and contented family life with a huge mansion on Redington Road in Hampstead. He was doing alright. This next film, also edited by David Lean, was called “One of Our Aircraft Is Missing,” and it was the first film to show the archer’s famous target on the screen, and he was nominated for an Oscar for best screenplay for that. And it’s essentially “The 49th Parallel” in reverse. A group of Britains this time are stranded behind enemy lines and try to escape out. Then comes their first great masterpiece, arguably, and I don’t wish to offend “Red Shoes” fans then their greatest single film, “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” which started at almost three hours and was later cut to two hours.

And it was their first film in technicolour, which is a sort of rather gorgeous kind of colour. And it starred Anton Walbrook, German refugee, buried in Hampstead, Roger Livesey, a wonderful British actor who plays Clive Candy and the actress Deborah Kerr. And it’s about Englishness, as embodied by Candy, played by Roger Livesey, but it’s also about Europe, because you have the character Theo, who is a German officer, and it’s about friendship and rivalry. Theo is a good German and becomes a refugee like Pressburger. So it’s sort of an echo of the relationship between Powell and Pressburger, the Englishman, and the central European refugee who become very, very close friends. And so the nearest Pressburger comes to the experience of a central refugee, a central European refugee from Italy in one of his films. And Candy, played by Roger Livesey, represents Old Britain. He’s based on Robert, on Low’s cartoon character, Colonel Blimp, sterile, obsessed with class, stupid and somewhat static, empty, ineffectual. He’s so, he, he appears in the first World War, can’t speak French, can’t find his way, can’t interrogate prisoners of war. He’s a fool. Uncomprehending, lost in a world of women and foreigners. It’s rather unclear who he finds most strange and difficult to deal with, women or foreigners. But that’s essentially what he is. But he is also enormously sympathetic and enormously likeable and represents the very aspects of Britain, which Pressburger personally most admired. Fairness, the sense of humour, the endlessly fascinating manners and morays.

Pressburger went and buried himself in the London Library, studying books about duals in the late 19th century and early 20th century. He was absolutely fascinated with this kind of old Englishness, convention, clothes, and almost anthropological attention to the way men talk, move and pass the port. And it’s a sort of curious thing that this word anthropological, because it’s been used often to describe many refugees, how fascinated they were by British and also by American, depending on where they ended up, habits and the details. And they sort of picked up on these. And for a film writer, of course, it was absolutely, absolutely perfect. And it’s also a film of loss. And perhaps this is where some of Pressburger’s, he didn’t yet know about his mother’s fate, but I think he probably had a sense by then of what was happening in central Europe to the Jews of Central Eastern Europe. And in the film, it’s a nostalgia for lost youth, for a world that died in the mud of the Western front. It’s a tragedy of lost love, lost family, lost opportunity, both for Clive and for his refugee friend or who becomes a refugee friend, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, and he comes back to an empty house, Clive Candy, that’s never quite home, the club that is more home-like than home, while actually recalling the ambience of public school. The war office shown like a headmaster’s study.

There’s an acute sense that he’s never held onto anything, perhaps never really experienced anything. So what starts as a film, is a film about a sort of bluff, quintessentially English military man, becomes a study of loss that could probably only have been written by a central European refugee. Both Clive and Theo lose their, lose their wives and remain alone. Clive never has any children and Theo has children, but ends up apart from them as a refugee. And three of the characters in the film, interestingly, include, including Theo, die in a foreign country. And yet there is also these incredible moments of Englishness, which fill Pressburger’s career. There’s a rural opening in a village with a farm and a barn. There are shots of scenes in Piccadilly and London’s clubland. There are, there’s the army, there’s the war office, there’s golf clubs, there’s a country home in Yorkshire. There’s a very quintessentially English landscape at one point, described by Theo in the film, the next film they make 1944 “A Canterbury Tale.” And Powell later said, “We were explaining to the Americans and to our own people the spiritual values and the traditions we were fighting for.” It couldn’t be more different from Blimp because there isn’t that sense of Europe and loss. It’s much more like Olivier’s film at the time during the war, also made during the war of “Henry the Fifth.” It’s about England and what the English and the British are fighting for and also what the Americans are fighting for by 1944. So it’s sort of saying to an American audience, join us. We’re delighted you are joining us in the war against Hitler.

This is who we are. And yet it’s Hungarian, Romanian Jewish refugee who is telling the Americans what the British are. And there are two films made around this time, “A Canterbury Tale,” and “I Know Where I’m Going!” And they’re both celebrations of the oddities, the quirks, the mysteries of British life. They’re very intimate, they’re stories of self-discovery about individuals finding the correct values to live by. They’re not about winning the war, but they’re about the moral health of the country. They were asking the population to remember the values they’d fought for and to think about what sort of brave new world they would like post-war Britain to be. So the next film, 1945, “I know Where I’m Going!” is the story of a young girl who knows exactly what she wants from life or thinks she knows, Joan has caught herself a very rich, but rather old, husband who’s planning a no expenses spared wedding in the highland island of Kiloran. And when she reaches Mull to catch a boat to Kiloran, a storm prevents her crossing. She has to wait for a week and falls in love, of course, with a younger man, a naval officer, who explains to her all the traditions and values of this Scottish island she’s ended up with. And in the end, she decides to stay there and learn the values of the community and it stars Wendy Hiller, Roger Livesey again, who played Colonel Blimp, and captures a tremendous sense of place and of mysticism and of human values. There’s a particular line, that Pressburger writes there, “kindness rules the world, not money.”

And again, it’s about somebody who’s displaced and she has ended up on island she’s never been to on a remote Scottish island and falls in love with it. Rather like Pressburger, came to England, somewhere he’d never been to before, didn’t speak the language, fell in love with it, quirks and all. And then at the end of World War II, he spends a week with his old friend from Berlin and Paris, Billy Wilder, as in “Double Indemnity,” “Some Like it Hot,” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. One of the great directors of the 20th century, just immediately after V Day. And Wilder wrote later, “we wondered where we should really go now that the war was over. None of us, I mean the Emigres really knew where we stood, should we go home? Where was home?” And of course for her, for Wilder, home was now Hollywood. And for Pressburger, home was London. And then there’s the Holocaust. Emeric had heard nothing from his 73 year old mother since a three line Red Cross note in 1942. And after the war, he learns that nearly all of his hometown’s Jewish population had been sent to the death counts in the summer of 1944. And Emeric’s family were among them, decimated of the 20 or so cousins, uncle, uncles and aunts, only three survived. And his father, of course, had already died in the 1920s, and his mother died in the camps.

And interestingly in Michael Powell’s two-part autobiography, none of this is mentioned. Pressburger now becomes a British citizen and they make one of their next great films, “A Matter of Life and Death” with David Niven, Kim Hunter, Marius Goring again, and our old friend Roger Livesey, who played Colonel Blimp. And again, it’s filmed in technicolour and it is famous for the gorgeous colours of, of, of the film. And the first draught of the story was by Pressburger, was full of fantasy, lighthearted miracles, mysterious appearances and disappearances, roses that turn from colour to black and white, moments of frozen time, a staircase that connects Earth and heaven. And here we have the definitive shift in the careers of Powell and Pressburger, not just to technicolour, but also to fantasy and to a kind of lush visual world that was very different from directors like the young David Lean or other British filmmakers of the 1940s and then the 1950s. And Powell later wrote, “we’d been waiting to get technicolour back into our cameras.” Of course this is all interrupted by the war. “And now we had it with superb experience in every department. We were going to play with technicolour on the screen in a way that nobody had ever played.” The fact that “A Matter of Life and Death,” “Black Narcissus” and “The Red Shoes” are still regarded as three peaks of achievement in colour photography speaks for itself. And if we’re thinking of the legacy of Powell and Pressburger, one of the great areas of legacy was this extraordinary look of these films, the beautiful colours, the lush photography.

Many of the key figures in their productions were themselves German refugees, the composer Alan Grey, the set designer, Hein Heckroth, major, major figures from central European cinema who found a foot in British cinema through Powell and Pressburger in the 1940s and, 1940s and fifties. And when people like Martin Scorsese, who’s currently producing a 90 minute plus documentary about Michael Powell, and in fact Martin Scorsese’s films are, later films are all edited by Michael Powell’s second or third wife. Third wife, I think. So what drew Scorsese to this lifelong admiration of Powell and Pressburger films was precisely the colour. And the second great legacy was this un-English englishness, if you like. In 1947 comes “Black Narcissus.” Again, extraordinary colours, won three Oscars, interestingly, for colour cinematography, art direction, set decoration, stars Deborah Kerr and Kathleen Byron, a film about nuns in a lonely remote convent in in North Indian Himalayas. And, but it was shot in a studio. They never went anywhere near India or the Himalayas. As Michael Powell later wrote, the two main actresses in the film, Deborah Karr and Kathleen Byron were both mistresses of his. One was an ex mistress, one was the current mistress, and were both working for them, on the same picture she rather liked. And then 1948 comes, I suppose, their most famous film, “The Red Shoes.” Marius Goring, again as the young composer, Julian Craster, Anton Walbrook as the demonic Boris Lermontov of the Great Ballet Impresario, somewhat like Diaghilev, and Moira Shearer of course has the Ballet Dancer Victoria Page.

It went nearly 200,000 pounds over budget, which in those days was an astonishing something to go over budget. Not that that wasn’t the budget, that was how much they went over budget. They shot for 24 weeks and the film cost a staggering 551,000 pounds. And it was the high point you could say of their romantic, their flirtation, their affair with romanticism. The message of the film was art. Nothing mattered, but Art. Lermontov, there’s a great scene where Lermontov says to Vicky, Vic, Vicki the dancer, why do you want to dance? And Vicky says, why do you want to live? That’s the kind of mad romanticism of the film, which can only end in one way. And there was an extraordinary sense of experimentation and collaboration, working with the same people, team of people again and again and again. Many of them, as I say, European refugees. And most of the characters are Russian or European. And the two main British characters are oddly the outsiders. And the viewpoint of the storyteller was from the outside looking in. Pressburger makes a cameo appearance, wearing a blue short sleeved shirt as the train bringing Vicky to a reconciliation with Lermontov pulls into Cannes station. And it was perhaps the high point of their careers. Arguably, I personally prefer Colonel Blimp, but you know, it’s a matter of taste. And in the space of five or six years, therefore, Pressburger, the enemy alien, who scraped a precarious living on the fringes of the film industry, had turned into a prosperous, internationally renowned independent producer.

And it’s at this moment that he moves from Hendon, a sort of suburban Jewish part of North London to 72 Redington Road, where people who went to the house remember it as having a very European feel, thirties minimalism. He had a special room for his Hungarian salamis, which he adored. His neighbours included Zoltan Korda, brother of Alexander Korda, and Anton Walbrook. The staff was of continentals. His close circle of friends was nearly all Hungarians and Germans and his, and he had a rich lifestyle by now. Shirts from Solca, shoes from Lob in Piccadilly, private blends of coffee from an Italian deli in Soho. His shirts were laundered in Paris, his own, he had his own box at Coffin Garden at the Royal Opera House. He holidayed in Switzerland, Italy, and Monte Carlo. And in France, he was a great gourmet. He would drive to France for, for two weeks. He would plan every single meal of every single day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and make sure that he arrived at each restaurant on time for each meal. And then the archers were reunited at this point with Alexander Korda, dear friend, the Hungarian. And they make series of films, “The Small Back Room,” “Gone to Earth,” “The Elusive Pimpernel” about the, based on the Scarlet Pimpernel with David Niven again, who’d been in “A Matter of Life and Death,” and the famous Jack Hawkins as the Prince of Wales.

And then comes their next great ballet film and musical film, “Tales of Hoffman” in 1951, which won the special jury prize at Cannes and stars Moira Shearer from “The Red Shoes,” Robert Helpmann, Pamela Brown, another former lover of Michael Powell, Frederick Ashton, a great figure from English Ballet at that time, Léonide Massine and Ludmilla Tchérina. And again, the use of colour is striking, and it was such a meticulously composed film. Scenes were staged, designed, constructed in pursuit of a film that was inspired by the music, colour was given a narrative function, creating moving paintings. And then sadly, from 1952 came the wilderness years. But between 1951 and 55, no films appeared by 1956, 57, they had broken up. They had problems with producers, David Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, and problems with Alexander Korda, who they eventually broke up with. They had problems with the critics who said they were too clever, too arty, too continental, too puzzling. They had problems with audiences who found the films similarly baffling. And they sadly had problems with each other and Powell became increasingly impossible and refusing to compromise and they had personal problems. Powell’s father died and Pressburger’s marriage broke up and his daughter was taken to America by his wife, first wife, to be educated, leading to a long custody battle.

And he never really recovered from the loss of contact with this daughter. They went on to make other films briefly, “The Golden Years” based on a biopic of Richard Strauss. But things sort of fell apart from them both personally and professionally. And Korda died in 1956 and they went back to war films, but again, not with great success. And both in their personal lives had one hammer blow after another, both in terms of critical reception, in terms of disastrous films. And he went through a kind of, Emeric, went through a kind of crisis of identity, and his behaviour began to change. It was a kind of breakdown, whether it was a breakdown, people being very evasive and elusive about that. And, and then what happened was Pressburger wrote a few novels “Killing A Mouse on Sunday,” which was later filmed by Fred Zinnemann who made “High Noon” and a novel called “The Glass Pearls.” It was republished last year. But what was peculiar was that in the last years of Pressburger’s life, Powell underwent tremendous revival of interest. He was discovered, as I say, by Scorsese and a number of other young, young star movie directors. There were seasons of his films at Museum of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in London. There were fellowships at prestigious cinematic institutions. But interestingly it, the emphasis was always on Powell, not on Pressburger and Pressburger in 1978, towards the end of his life, he wrote to Dilys Powell, the film critic of the Sunday Times, who’d written of the late Emeric Pressburger.

And there was the BBC ran a season of the Archers Films trailed as a season of Michael Powell films. And the odd thing was, I suppose looking back on their career, their joint career, they were, I think the only guests ever to appear on a pro, a radio programme in Britain called Desert Island Discs, where they were both invited on together. And I think that’s the only time that’s ever happened in the very, very long history of a programme, which is not just a radio programme, but has real institution, British life. And I suppose looking back on their legacy, the paradoxical thing about it was how, how Pressburger, a foreigner, boy was he a foreigner, tried to be English while Powell, so very English, tried so hard to be foreign. And then in 1985, Colonel Blimp was restored and re-released and suddenly hailed by the critics. It was now sadly, too late for Pressburger. He was seriously ill in 1987 and died in 1988, buried in a village church in East Anglia. And Powell was unable to come and say farewell, a star of David was engraved on his gravestone. And below it are the words from their film, “A Matter of Life and Death,” “Emeric Pressburger, novelist and screenwriter, 1902 to 1988,” followed by these lines from Walter Scott, from this film, “love rules the court, the camp, the grove, this world below and heaven above the love is heaven and heaven is love.” So I hope that works as some kind of introduction for some of you to Emeric Pressburger or a reminder for others who’ve seen many of the films of what an extraordinary figure was behind some of these masterpieces. And so if you, let me see if there are any questions. Yes, there are. We’ll just, I’ll just quickly run through these.

Q&A and Comments:

For Judith Demetrio. Wow, here’s an interesting question. Maybe you mentioned, and I missed Mihail Sebastian, very well known in Romania where I lived until the age of 30. And Norman Manea, that is who is now in the USA. Well, I did mention Norman Manea, very briefly, friend of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and championed by them, Bellow had to one of his many wives as Romanian. So maybe that was the point of contact with Manea. Manea is a fantastic writer. And Mihail Sebastian also a great writer, tragic end to his life, died tragically young, has recently been rediscovered. So I’m sorry for not mentioning him. And you are absolutely right to point out that I should have mentioned him.

And Yahudith Wade says, memorable work by the Israeli poet, Dan Pagis born in Bukovina, died too young in Israel. Yes, absolutely. I’m sorry. I mean, the thing is, it is a, Romanian writers, especially Romanian emigre and refugee writers, it’s just an extraordinary treasure house, many of whom are now only now being rediscovered like Mihail Sebastian and like, well Dan Pagis is well known in Israel, but perhaps less well known in Britain or America. But it is an extraordinary list of people. And I’m sorry for any omissions.

Frieda Bier says, I was under the impression that Leslie Howard was in fact a Hungarian Jew, and I can’t remember if that is the case or not, but what is certainly the case is that he was one of these actors who became known as a sort of quintessential Englishman and whatever his origins were and I’m ashamed to say, I don’t know, they were well hidden and well concealed.

And Alice Lovel says Leslie Howard was Jewish with I think Hungarian roots. So there we are. And I think those are the only questions, and I’m sorry I’ve done a rather botched job of answering them. I will look up about Leslie Howard and next Sunday I will report back on my findings. So if you do have any more questions in the next moment or so, do please send them in.

Q: Susan R, why do you think Pressburger was not credited by critics of media at the end of his life? Could it be because he was a foreigner?

A: Susan, I’m a, I’m really sad to say. I think it was. The other thing is, of course Powell was the director and from Andrew Sarris in the late 1950s when he came up with, famous American film critic, who came up with the auteur theory, the director, not anybody else was the great figure behind great films like John Ford and Billy Wilder and so on and so forth. You know, critics for the next generation really began to think of the director as the key figure. Powell was the director, Pressburger was the writer. So I think partly because he was a foreigner with a strange name, but I think also because he was the writer, essentially. So even despite their joint credit produced, written, directed by, he was, Powell was the director. And that at that time, and therefore I think when fashions changed, an auteur theory rather fell by the wayside, you know, therefore, it was only later that he began to get more credit. There was a wonderful biography by his nephew, Kevin Macdonald, a great documentary maker, which I absolutely recommend to anybody. There’s also a very fine book by the film historian, Ian Christie, a British film historian called “Arrows of Desire” about the Archers. And he also wrote a wonderful book for the British Film Institute, called, on “The Life in Times of Colonel Blimp.”

Q: Yana and Julie Fisher. Why did he end up in a Christian cemetery? We’ve visited the grave twice and put stone, a stone on it. What do you know about the friendship between Kessler, Mikes and Pressburger?

A: Well, all I know about Kessler and Pressburger is that they both ended up in East Anglia, which is somewhat strange. They Kessler and Pressburger also both had very nice places in South Kensington in a very posh part of London. So it may well be that they got to know each other in South Kensington and then continued their friendship in in Suffolk. But that is pure speculation. I should also add that Pressburger’s country cottage was called the Shoemaker’s Cottage, with a reference to, of course, “The Red Shoes.” Sarah Adler cast more light on the Leslie Howard debate. Leslie Howard, born Steiner. There we are.

Q: Barbara Shaw. How could he write English screenplays when Hungarian, when, when he was Hungarian?

A: This is the question at the heart of his achievement, I would say, is that he managed to pick up languages wherever he went. I don’t think he learned Romanian, but he started off with Hungarian. He then learned German, obviously in Germany and wrote screenplays in German. He then wrote screenplays in French in almost no time at all. And then he wrote screenplays in English in almost no time at all, possibly the greatest screenplays ever written in for British cinema. So it’s a very good, he just obviously had an extraordinary gift for languages, as did Billy Wilder. Billy Wilder, his friend, said that when he came to America, he learned English by listening to baseball commentary on the radio. And he learned English incredibly quickly. These people just had extraordinary gifts for learning languages.

Q: Arthur Clouden asks, did Pressburger convert?

A: Well not to my knowledge, but he was buried in a Christian cemetery. So it’s an interesting question. On the other hand, there was a star of David strange thing to find in on a grave in a Christian cemetery. So not as far as I know. But it’s interesting that his nephew who wrote this wonderful biography does not go near any of these kind of questions, which is very, very strange.

And Melvin says, the orchestra in “Tales of Hoffman” was conducted by Thomas Beecham, who also appeared very briefly in the film. Well, thank you. And it is an astonishing thing about their music films that they included so many great figures from British Ballet and and the music, classical music world at the time in the 1950s, and which partly adds to this quality of both the dancing and of course of the music. So Beecham’s appearance is not unique in these films, particularly in “The Red Shoes” and particularly in “Tales of Hoffman.” And they were both passionate about music and made, as I mentioned, a biopic about, of Strauss. But there were, there were also one or two others and two great, two masterpieces about ballet. Sorry, let me just speed through here. Back to the Leslie Howard debate.

Rita Canerick, I hope I pronounced your surname correctly. Howard was born Leslie Howard Steiner to a British mother, Lilian nay Blumberg, and a Hungarian Jewish father, Ferdinand Steiner in Upper Norwood, London. So there we go. I think that is the definitive answer to all this.

Q: And somebody else, Yana has asked any known connection between Pressburger and George Mikes?

A: Not that I came across in any of the books about Pressburger or about Powell and Pressburger.

Nanette from Spain says, I lived in Switzerland and Israel and was going to New York next, but got stuck in London waiting for my visa and still love it here, would not live anywhere else. Right. And even Wena, Wina, Wena, I’m attending a lecture by Howard Lanning on his love affair with British cinema. Any connection, this is at JW three, I’m not quite sure who the connection might be with, but Myrna was swept away, totally swept away by “The Tales of Hoffman.”

Alice Lovell, I think “A Matter of Life and Death” was the Royal Command performance. It was indeed. And this was, you know, at the high point of their careers, their recognition, the recognition they received in terms of Academy Awards, which perhaps matters to the most. But the Royal Command performance, particularly in the 1940s and fifties, was a hugely prestigious thing.

So that is, that is very important, was a very, I’m sure, a very important moment in their careers. That is finally it. I think we’ve come to some kind of resolution about the Leslie Howard mystery. We haven’t come to a resolution about the mystery of George Mikes and his friendship with Pressburger, if there was one. That is it. Thank you so much for your time, for all your patience, for all your fascinating questions.

Next Sunday, a couple of hours later, at 7:00 PM UK time, 12 midday and oh 2:00 PM, 2:00 PM US time. And I don’t know where in other countries, that another strange and unlikely Romanian, Aharon Appelfeld, one of the great writers of the postwar period, certainly one of the great Israeli writers who did write great deal, two extraordinary books about his origins in Romania and his childhood during the Holocaust. I do very much hope you can join me then.

And in the meantime, thank you so much for all your time and for all your fascinating questions.