Powell and Pressburger - Early Films

Early Films

Michael Powell was already an experienced director, having worked his way up from making silent films to the First World War drama The Spy in Black (1939), his first film for Hungarian émigré producer Alexander Korda. Emeric Pressburger, who had come from Hungary in 1935, already worked for Korda, and was asked to do some rewrites for the film. This collaboration would be the first of nineteen, most over the next 18 years.

After Powell had made two further films for Korda, he was reunited with Pressburger in 1940 for Contraband, the first in a run of Powell and Pressburger films set during the Second World War. The second was 49th Parallel (1941), which won Pressburger an Academy Award for Best Story. Both are Hitchcock-like thrillers made as anti-Nazi propaganda.

Read more about this topic:  Powell And Pressburger

Famous quotes containing the words early and/or films:

    Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.
    C. John Sommerville (20th century)

    If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.
    Andy Warhol (c. 1928–1987)