As I try to figure out my top DVDs for 2008, a must for my 2009 list has already arrived. Hot on the heels of its excellent “Collector’s Choice” edition of Randolph Scott Westerns directed by Budd Boetticher, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, which made welcome strides with Columbia’s back catalog last year, has issued “The Films of Michael Powell.” The two-disc set features one of the great works of his partnership with co-writer, co-producer, and co-director Emeric Pressburger, the much-requested A Matter of Life and Death (1946), and his last, little-seen picture, Age of Consent (1969), where the beauties of Australia are upstaged by the debut of 23-year-old Helen Mirren in all her natural splendor.
My introduction to “The Archers,” as Powell and Pressburger billed themselves, came through my aunt, who told me that The Red Shoes (1948) was her favorite film. It quickly became one of mine. The subject is ballet, and the ambition and romantic yearnings that course through one aspiring ballerina, and their technique dances. Like most of the pictures made in the course of their partnership, it’s an evergreen, blazingly alive in Technicolor, and though we’ve come a long way, baby, since the life and career choices the heroine is forced to make (or have we?) it’s a timeless cinematic achievement. The Archers’ logo was a bulls-eye, and they rarely missed their target.
I hadn’t seen A Matter of Life and Death in some time till the DVD arrived, and the restoration of the image, which switches from monochrome to color, is breathtaking. So is the storytelling, with one knockout twist toward the end that managed to catch me off-guard. I think it was the hellish orange of the destructive flames in the scene that really reinforced what was happening, as a major character makes a transition that allows the celestial trial at the center of the plot to begin. The cinematography, which will vibrate off your monitor, is essential to the picture. The film was shot by Jack Cardiff, who, at age 94, supervised its transfer to DVD. (The story goes that he asked Sony’s technicians to go for a more “lemony cast” in one scene, which they tried but couldn’t do. Frustrated, they reported back to Cardiff, who replied, “Neither could I.”) (more…)
