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The Powell and Pressburger Collection [DVD]

 Parental Guidance   DVD
4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
Price: £17.49 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
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The Powell and Pressburger Collection [DVD] + David Lean Collection [DVD] + The Best of Ealing Collection [DVD]
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Product details

  • Format: Box set, PAL
  • Subtitles: English
  • Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe. Read more about DVD formats.)
  • Number of discs: 11
  • Classification: PG
  • Studio: ITV Studios Home Entertainment
  • DVD Release Date: 20 Nov 2006
  • Run Time: 1239 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B000HRLWR6
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 4,979 in Film & TV (See Top 100 in Film & TV)

Reviews

Product Description

Collection of eleven classic films from influential filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. 'The Battle of the River Plate' (1956) tells the true story of the famous 1939 naval battle. Hans Langsdorff (Peter Finch) is captaining the crack German battleship Graf Spee through the South Atlantic, unaware that a small number of lightweight British battle cruisers are hot on his trail. When the British cruisers manage to trap the powerful German ship in the Uruguayan harbour of Montevideo, they attempt to trick Langsdorff into believing that an entire battle fleet is waiting to destroy his vessel at sea. In 'A Canterbury Tale' (1944), a British sergeant, a land girl and a United States Army officer arrive at a Kent village on the same train. The newcomers are brought face to face with the bizarre menace causing bewilderment in the tight-knit community: someone is pouring glue onto the hair of girls who dare to venture out at night with visiting servicemen. Powell and Pressburger offered this 'propaganda' piece as their contribution to the war effort, but the authorities were unsure how its oddball tone would go down with the Allies. In '49th Parallel' (1941), Laurence Olivier and Leslie Howard are among the stars who try to prevent Nazi sailors, from a sunken U-Boat, reaching neutral USA through Canada in this classic war film, which was intended to persuade America to join World War II. Pressburger won an Academy Award for the story and the film was directed by Powell. In 'I Know Where I'm Going!' (1945), a woman (Wendy Hiller) has always known what she wanted in life, and now she is about to marry a millionaire. But when she ends up stranded on a Hebredian island due to a storm, she begins to see things a little differently. 'Ill Met By Moonlight' (1957) was the final film created by Powell and Pressburger together. Set on the island of Crete during the Nazi occupation, the film stars Dirk Bogarde and David Oxley as British officers assigned to kidnap the German commander-in-chief General Kreipe (Marius Goring) and spirit him back to Cairo. If successful, the morale of the Germans would be weakened and the resistance would be stronger. But once he is captured, the British officers have to get him past German patrols at almost every turning. In 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp' (1943), stuffy ex-soldier Clive Candy (Roger Livesey) recalls his career which began as a dashing officer in the Boer War. As a young man he lost the woman he loved (Deborah Kerr, who plays three roles) to a Prussian officer (Anton Walbrook), whom he fought in a duel only to become lifelong friends with. Candy cannot help but feel that his notions of honour and chivalry are out of place in modern warfare. The film's title comes from 'Evening Standard' cartoonist David Low's satirical comic creation, Colonel Blimp. In 'The Red Shoes' (1948), ballet impressario Boris Lermontov (Walbrook) hires up-and-coming ballerina Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) and talented young composer Julian Craster (Goring) to work with him on a new ballet, an adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen story 'The Red Shoes'. The show is a great success and Victoria and Julian fall in love, but Boris is jealous and makes moves to spoil their happiness. 'A Matter of Life and Death' (1946) is a classic wartime propaganda movie, commissioned by the Ministry of Information, but turned into a fantastical allegory by the Archers, aka Powell and Pressburger. David Niven plays an RAF pilot who is ready to be picked up by the angels after bailing out of his plane. But an administrative error in Heaven leads to a temporary reprieve, during which he must prove his right to stay on Earth. A tribunal in heaven ensues to decide the case. In 'They're a Weird Mob' (1966), Nino Culotta (Walter Chiari) is an Italian immigrant who arrives in Australia with the promise of a job as a journalist on his cousin's magazine, only to find that when he gets there the magazine has folded, the cousin has done a runner and the money his cousin sent for the fare was borrowed from the daughter of the boss of a local construction firm. 'The Tales of Hoffman' (1951) is an adaptation of Jacques Offenbach's opera and follows Hoffman's (Robert Rounseville) tales of his love for the doll Olympia, the courtesan Giuletta (Ludmilla Tcherina) and the frail diva Antonia (Anne Ayars), and of how his quest for the eternal woman was always thwarted by evil. Finally, in 'Black Narcissus' (1946), a group of British nuns are sent into the Himalayas to set up a mission in what was once the harem's quarters of an ancient palace. The clear mountain air, the unfamiliar culture and the unbridled sensuality of a young prince (Sabu) and his beggar-girl lover (Jean Simmons) begin to play havoc with the nuns' long-suppressed emotions. Whilst the young Mother Superior, Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), fights a losing battle for order, the jaunty David Farrar falls in love with her, sparking uncontrollable jealousy in another nun, Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron).

Product Description

This Dvd Box Set Is Brand New & Sealed - Another Dvd Is Now Becoming Very Collectable & Sought After. This Dvd Is In Stock And Will Be Posted From The UK - Region 2 - 11 Disc Box Set


Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
150 of 155 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars THE BEST OF BRITISH FILM-MAKING 16 Mar 2007
By Klingsor Tristan TOP 1000 REVIEWER VINE™ VOICE
Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase
As fine a collection of British movies as you'll find, here are all the great classics from the Archers - no, not the Ambridge mob but the matchless directing/writing team of Powell and Pressburger. A round dozen films, each of them a gem of the skill and craft of film-making, each of them distinctive and exceptional in its look, its content and its style.

What was it that made Powell and Pressburger so special? It would be easy to dismiss films like A Canterbury Tale or I Know Where I'm Going as dated sentimental tosh. Yet they are both anything but - moving, involving, strong on characterisation, visually stunning and evoking an intense sense of place (Rural Kent in the former, the Western Isles in the latter). 49th Parallel? Just blatant propaganda! But then there are those stunning Canadian landscapes, the moving characterisations superbly acted by Anton Walbrook, Leslie Howard and, at the other extreme, Eric Portman. Are Ill Met by Moonlight and Battle of the River Plate just a couple more British War Movies, typical of their period? No, both take a different slant on their reality-based material. In Plate, for example, the big battle scene is over before 2/3 of the film is done and yet the potentially anticlimactic scenes in Montevideo harbour and the final scuttling of the pocket battleship are just as exciting, just as fulfilling an ending as any shoot-`em-up finale. What's Black Narcissus but a high-camp melodrama about nuns going potty with sexual frustration in the Himalayas? No, as a study of women isolated by climate, culture and celibacy as well as topography, it's masterly. (OK, Kathleen Byron in scarlet dress, a slash of lipstick across her mouth and rolling eyes is a bit OTT - but I wouldn't swap her for the world.)

Are these, then just comfortably and quintessentially British films? The truth is that there is much that is technically groundbreaking about their work. Kubrick's famous time-travelling jumpcut from bone to spaceship in 2001 was there a quarter of a century earlier in the cut from hawk to Spitfire in A Canterbury Tale. The integration of music and dance with narrative in The Red Shoes paved the way for much of Gene Kelly's best work, not least an American in Paris. Long before the days of CGI Powell and his technical team were conjuring magic on celluloid. Think of A Matter of Life and Death with its endless stairway to heaven or the amphitheatre court which is actually the Andromeda nebula - as well as all the tricks with colour, with freeze-frames and so on. The Himalayas of Black Narcissus are a glorious tribute to the masters of glass-painting and backdrops, to the imagination of set designers, to the physical skills of cameramen working with false-perspectives where an inch or two wrong on the camera can ruin the illusion - all shot on the soundstages of Pinewood!

They also brought out the best in their actors. One of Niven's finest pieces of acting (at least before Separate Tables) in Matter of Life and Death: the endearingly human Roger Livesey in I Know Where I'm Going, Matter of Life and Death, but most of all as the wonderfully real, deep, touching Candy in Colonel Blimp. Anton Walbrook, too, touchingly proud then frail in that film as well as the strong Amish leader of 49th Parallel and the driven impresario in The Red Shoes. Eric Portman, so capable of conveying the ambiguities of Colpeper as well as the certainties of a Nazi U-boat captain. Leslie Howard, Wendy Hiller, Deborah Kerr, Peter Finch, Marius Goring, Raymond Massey and so many others produced some of their best work under Powell's demanding direction.

No wonder the likes of Scorsese, de Palma and the rest rate Powell & Pressburger so highly and learnt so much from them. These elusive, tantalising, moving, talented men are worthy testimony to British movie-making at its best. My only gripe is that there wasn't room for The Small Back Room and especially Peeping Tom in this collection.
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59 of 61 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars The Greatest British Films ever? 14 Feb 2009
Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase
If you look through listings when any of these films are shown on TV you will see five stars more often than not. In this box are eleven critically-acclaimed masterpieces from the greatest production/direction/writing team in the history of cinema. There is more wit, intelligence and visual & verbal inventiveness in five minutes of one of these films than in an entire year of CGI blockbusters from the Hollywood Hype Machine.
Please don't be put off if the only P & P film you have seen is "The Red Shoes". As special as this film undoubtedly is, it is also a rather dated melodrama that has tended to deflect attention from many finer films by this team. To give just one example: Imagine you are a film maker in the middle of a major European war. You set yourself the task of exploring the questions: "What does it mean to be "British"? What exactly are we fighting to preserve? How is it different for each of us? How important is it?" P & P approach this in an oblique and personal way that you just couldn't anticipate. I could watch "A Canterbury Tale" every day for a week and still feel that I had not exhausted its funny, touching intricacies or its evocation of an era.
One or two "obvious" choices are not included and there are some that are not quite up to the stratospheric standard of the greatest. Nevertheless, the films chosen are all very fine and at least six of them are unequivocal masterpieces. I would rather see a second rate film from Michael Powell than a first rate film from almost any film-maker working today. Not only that, but the price for which this set is being offered on Amazon is astonishing.
To make a more complete collection, I would add "One of Our Aircraft is Missing", "The Small Back Room" and "The Edge of the World".

A few individual comments:
49th Parallel - As a wartime propaganda piece it ought to be outdated but remains a marvellously watchable thriller as Eric Portman and his fellow Nazis, survivors of a torpedoed U-boat, try to make their way out of Canada and into (at that time) neutral USA. Eric Portman has the unenviable job of making the "evil Nazi" a credible character and does so with great skill. There are some surprisingly awful performances as well as some wonderful ones. Anton Walbrook, as a Hutterite farmer, has the difficult task of delivering the only overt ideological attack on the Nazis and manages to do it with total conviction but most of the message is slipped in elliptically around the story. We also get a fine musical score by RVW and atmospheric black & white filming. (The set-bound interiors sometimes sticking out like sore thumbs alongside lovely location shooting).
A Canterbury Tale - I'd forgotten the awful performance by the American airman that nearly scuppers the film for me. He's particularly unfortunate because those around him (Portman, Price and virtually all the major and minor characters) are so good. Even the small boys act him off the screen. What were they thinking of? Even so, this is a film that transcends one minor irritation. A very fine, low contrast B&W print with good sound. This is a very special film and I found myself moved to tears at the end.
A Matter of Life and Death. Famous for it's high concept and the meticulous attention given to the medical details. The technicolor Earth sections tend to bleed a little when panning and there are some odd artefacts in the B&W "Heaven" section at the end. Even so, the overall visual imagination here is very special and the three main leads give perfectly judged and very affecting performances.
I Know Where I'm Going - A touching romance filmed in fine B&W that evokes the Scottish landscape and the character of its people in a marvellous way. There's a sharpness to its wit and a message that still seems remarkably modern. I love this film and challenge anyone not to be affected by its tone and a great and satisfying ending that feels really earned.
Black Narcissus - A wonderful technicolor print and the perfect demonstration of the brilliant skills of the great Jack Cardiff (Cinematographer). What a terrific film. All the cast are very good but Kathleen Byron's role could so easily have been ridiculous or unbelievable. Instead, it's terrifying because of her stunning performance and the wonderful writing in the earlier scenes that lays the groundwork with perfect pacing and tension. The whole cast is stellar (even the normally-dreadful acting of Sabu seems to fit).
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp - One of the greatest films made in England; this picaresque, rambling, philosophically subtle film has the best perfomances of their lives from Livesey and Walbrook. Deborah Kerr is also suberb as the three women in Blimp's life. Deftly differentiating them without overdoing the contrasts. All of this glows within Jack Cardiff's superb technicolor filming.
The Tales of Hoffman - A complete unknown to me before buying the box and a revelation. No real attempt is made to synchronise voices and actors but the story is illuminated with visual tableaux of striking boldness and the colourful, stylish presentation is arresting. Musically, with Sir Thomas Beecham at the helm, the standard is as high as you could wish. Moira Shearer gives a tour-de-force as Olympia. Probably the most brilliant dancing I've seen on film and, having only seen The Red Shoes previously, a great discovery. A fine colour print.
The Red Shoes - I have a slight problem with this one because I think that it has worn less well than some other P&P films and is dragged up regularly as if it was the only worthwhile picture that the pair made. I find Walbrook and Goring rather unconvincing here but Shearer is marvellous as both actress and dancer. I have to admit that the film looks fantastic and the long dance sequence remains a cinematic landmark. Another fine colour print.
Ill Met by Moonlight - The sort of early WWII story trotted out on daytime television that you would probably ignore. This would be a mistake. A cracking script and performances, especially from Dirk Bogarde, are married to a real tension and a tone that will seem startlingly modern to many unfamiliar with the film. It's worn remarkably well. The location B&W filming is atmospheric and the true story is told with great style.
Battle of the River Plate - Another one of those remarkable wartime stories that P&P seemed able to imbue with a self-deprecating (and very British) wit. Fantastic performances from a large cast of some of our greatest actors. The script sticks pretty closely to the facts and is surprising if you are unfamiliar with the details. Can anyone tell me of a better wartime Naval story?
They're a Weird Mob - Absurd that Michael Powell had to withdraw to Australia to continue making films after the critical opprobrium heaped on to "Peeping Tom". (In what way was "Peeping Tom" more shocking or tasteless than "Psycho"?) In truth, this film is more of an extended Soap and rather lightweight. Even so, it's examination of the classic "fish out of water" foreigner in a strange new country has an easy going charm and a light touch. The eccentric Italian visitor is taken to the heart of the locals and proves to be a fine chap indeed but the tone is sufficiently sharp to puncture accusations of sentimentality and is played with skill by a fine cast. Rather sweet but not too sickly.
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48 of 52 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Powell & Pressburger 19 Feb 2009
Format:DVD
First came across Powell & Pressburger films when I watched 'A Matter of Life & Death' and I only watched it because I am a fan of David Niven. I loved everything about the film not just Niven and started to look for more 'A Canterbury Tale' was the next one I tracked down, again absolutely brilliant. I bought this collection because it contained their better known absolute classics as well as a few I'd not seen or heard of. If you like black & white movies which are quirky,intelligent,entertaining, beautifully filmed and acted you'll love these.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars perfect
perfect, even if I would have like subtitles on all movies. Great films anyway, and great directors ! I love English movies !
Published 16 days ago by Anna
5.0 out of 5 stars Oh this is just so heartwarming
Others have given you any details you may need so I'll concentrate on telling you that this is a brilliant bargain buy of 9 great films from the influential duo of Powell and... Read more
Published 1 month ago by foodcymru
3.0 out of 5 stars DVD
Can not review as ordered in error and returned. Arrived on time though if I had wanted it! Thanks anyway.
Published 2 months ago by Sarah Moretti
5.0 out of 5 stars Oldies and goodies
A fine selection of old films both black and white and colour. Films to watch while snuggled up in a comfortable bed with a warm soothing drink.
Published 3 months ago by Shahriar
5.0 out of 5 stars WOnderful Collection
Here is a collection of British movies from the 40s onwards reflecting the times and passing world incidentally to the stories they recount. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Keith C. Armstrong
5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect collection
Perfect collection of films. I watched almost all of them and they are very nice films films in very good quality. Worth buying.
Published 8 months ago by Sonofsun
4.0 out of 5 stars Happy customer
I bought this as a present for a colleague. She was delighted with it. Good value and some classic movies in the set.
Published 12 months ago by IKB 2
1.0 out of 5 stars Defective product
I haven't watched all the movies in the collection yet, but Kind Hearts and Coronets is a defective DVD. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Ma Bones
5.0 out of 5 stars Impressive Body of Work
This is an excellent set of virtually all the movies made by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Read more
Published 19 months ago by Nicholas Casley
4.0 out of 5 stars Powell and Pressburger boxset
There are some fantastic films in here so it is worth the money to to get those. Some I haven't seen yet but I'm sure they are all worth watching.
Published on 18 April 2011 by Janey C
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