Emeric Pressburger

I've just watched a tape I found which I'd made years ago of a Channel 4 documentary, made by Kevin McDonald (director of The Last King of Scotland and Touching the Void among much else), about the early life of his grandfather, Emeric Pressburger. Pressburger life pretty much typified that of many central Europeans. Born in 1902 in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he found himself to be living in Romania after the First World War had redrawn the boundaries of much of Europe. This radically changed everything as his hitherto comfortable and prosperous Jewish family life was now heavily circumscribed by Romanian law. He moved to Germany and worked for UFA, the revolutionary film studios which flourished in Weimar Germany, then, of course his life changed yet again as the Nazis gained power. Anyway, like many emigres he landed in Britain, thankfully long before war broke out, and, , after sleeping rough for a while, he found shelter in a block of flats in Marble Arch which was entirely occupied by emigres.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, he met Michael Powell, the film director, and the rest is history. The pair, with Powell directing, and Pressburger's scripts, called their partnership the Archers, and were responsible for several landmark British films, such as A Matter of Life and Death, I Know Where I'm Going, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Black Narcissus, among many others.
McDonald's film focused on his early life, and how he found sanctuary in Britain, eventually developing a deep love of Britain and becomeing 'more British than the British'. Many of his films, notably Colonel Blimp, touch on this theme, and Anton Walbrook, who plays the German soldier who flees Nazism in the Thirties, embodies the deep affection for, and admiration of, British culture which Pressburger learned to love so much. Walbrook played another gentle German in the Archers' 49th Parallel, and this was a theme that recurred throughout their films, that of the almost mystical love of Britain by foreigners, which was intensified in the crucible of war.
Anyway, a fascinating film, and one which had a special resonance in the week in which the BBC explored the impact of the torrent of immigration, notably from Eastern Europe, on British society, in their White Season.