Emeric (Imre) Pressburger, born into a Jewish-Hungarian family in the northeast Hungarian city of Miskolc in 1902, won fame across Britain in the 1940s when, based in London and working with English director Michael Powell, their output entertained millions whose lives were otherwise dominated by war and austerity.
“I think the thing that fascinates me about the Powell and Pressburger canon, their films, is that they seem to get better with time. Most films get worse with time,” British filmmaker Kevin Macdonald told a conference on Pressburger in the city of his birth on Sep. 10.
The event, a highlight of this year’s Miskolc film festival, attracted a 60-plus international audience, eager to learn more about the city’s cinematic offspring.
Macdonald, as Pressburger’s grandson, is not exactly an unbiased commentator, but along with his brother Andrew, himself a film producer (“Trainspotting,” 1996, “The Beach,” 2000), the pair, deftly moderated by cinema historian Charles Drazin, set out to offer a more intimate, yet considered assessment of their ancestor than distant critics.
Drazin, describing “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” one of the Powell-Pressburger team’s most cited productions, as “a fantastic example of how to structure a movie,” set the ball rolling.
For the Macdonald siblings, Colonel Blimp has more personal connections and meaning.
“This is a film about the 40 years in Emeric’s own life. He was born in 1902, and he was writing this film 40 years later. So, in some ways, this film is autobiography. Certainly, Andrew and I, when we watch the film and see the Anton Walbrook character, we feel like he is a stand-in for our grandfather,” Kevin interjects.
“I feel very pleased to focus on Emeric Pressburger, who I feel is often overlooked in the Powell-Pressburger team, when in fact, he was essential to the output.” Film historian Charles Drazin, speaking to the BBJ after the conference.
Walbrook, who plays Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, an anti-Nazi German seeking refuge in Britain, delivers a passionate speech about how he has fallen in love with England that mirrors Emeric’s own life journey.
“You know, he [Emeric] loved so much all the strange rituals of being English. His favorite person in the whole world, in all of history, was Winston Churchill. He loved Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, all of these sorts of things,” Kevin recalled.
And yet, as brother Andrew remarked: “To us, as young children, he was very exotic, he was very, very Hungarian. He had a very thick accent. […] I don’t remember him talking about Miskolc, but he’d talk about his life in Central Europe, in Prague, Stuttgart, Berlin. For young boys growing up in Scotland, that was kind of incredible. Nobody else we knew had a grandfather like that.”
For Kevin, Colonel Blimp is important for many reasons, not least because of the Kretschmar-Schuldorff character.
“It is unique, I think, in British wartime cinema that somebody made films where Germans are never just bad guys. It seems simplistic now to say this, but it was a really brave thing to have good German characters in all his films.”
Again, this reflects Pressburger’s own experience: in London, where he befriended exiled German film producer Günther Stapenhorst.
“Stappi, as Emeric called him, was a man of great principle, one of the rare, successful German film people who was not Jewish, but who took a moral stand and left Nazi Germany because of Hitler. I think he’s a model for the character in Colonel Blimp,” says Kevin.
(As an aside, Pressburger and Stappi learned English traveling together around the country following Arsenal soccer club at away games before the outbreak of war.)
Colonel Blimp, too, is typical of Pressburger’s “very eccentric, idiosyncratic, individual approach to screenwriting,” which Kevin contemplated may have been “very Hungarian, or very Hungarian-Jewish,” when it comes to storytelling.
And yet, as he himself admitted, he cannot detect this in other filmmakers, such as Michael Curtis or Alexander Korda. “So maybe it was just specific to him. I don’t know,” he mused.
Perhaps the world owes something to Michael Powell here, Drazin suggested, because it was common for directors to look down upon scriptwriters, Pressburger’s principal strength.
“There was something in Emeric, the quality of his mind and in his filmic imagination, that he [Powell] must have recognized as being invaluable. It was an extraordinary thing to give up half his directing credit to him in a day when writers were [held] in very low status, as you say,” Kevin responded.
Inevitably, with peace in Europe, tastes changed, and by the mid-1950s, Powell and Pressburger found their star waning. Indeed, by the 1960s, according to Kevin Macdonald, their films were even reviled, particularly in Britain.
“Obviously, around Europe, there was the New Wave, a turning towards naturalism and realism in film. And their films are anything but naturalistic. Their films were not shown ever. They were disrespected,” he says.
Somewhat bizarrely, it was in North America where the duo again began to be noticed, with filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and Brian De Palma variously paying homage to their cinematic predecessors.
“These ‘movie brats’ in the ’70s recognized them as something really different. Martin Scorsese made an early film, “Boxcar Bertha,” which Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger named on the end credits,” Kevin said with a smile.
The interest lives on. As he related, doing a Q&A session on Colonel Blimp in Culver, Los Angeles, in early September before a special screening, “There was an audience of 200 people, some young, not all old. People are still taking inspiration from these older films.”
As their last joint contribution to cinema, the Powell-Pressburger team produced “The Boy Who Turned Yellow” in 1972 for the U.K.’s Children’s Film Foundation.
As Kevin Macdonald described, “The last thing either of them ever did in film was this children’s film, which was made for like a thousand pounds or something. It’s a children’s story, and it’s very unsophisticated, shot on 16 mm [film]. And they loved doing it; they loved working together. And Emeric was always very proud. [At home], he had his Oscar and his BAFTAs, and then he had this award for the best children’s film of the year from the Children’s Film Foundation. It was made by a child, out of old egg cartons and some whatever.
“And he loved it. And I remember Michael [Powell] saying something about ‘we were never professionals. We were only amateurs.’ And I think that’s so true. They loved what they did, and they did it from love. But I think when that love went away, when it became a job, they were not good at it anymore.”
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of September 18, 2026.
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