griggs's - Powell & Pressburger Ranked List

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This Powell and Pressburger classic is widely considered to be one of the greatest films ever made.

Vicky Page (Moira Shearer), a young ballerina, becomes torn between her love for composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring) and artistic devotion to her profession, which is dominated by impresario Lermontov.

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Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) leads a group of Anglican nuns to a remote Himalayan range of mountains, there to set up a mission in an abandoned harem.

This is her first position of authority and she finds both her physical and her spiritual limits being taxed as she has to maintain order and discipline in a claustrophobically hostile environment. Slowly but surely, however, the privations and hardship they must endure, the extremes of climate and the peculiar amorality of the local natives all combine to slowly corrupt the women's faith, pushing them further into jealousy, anger and madness...

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Mark (Carl Boehm), a focus puller at the local film studio, supplements his wages by taking glamour photographs in a seedy studio above a newsagent.

By night he is a sadistic killer, stalking his victims with his camera forever in his hand trying to capture the look of genuine, unadulterated fear - an obsession that stems from his disturbing and terrifying childhood at the hands of his scientist father. Mark slowly becomes enamoured with Helen (Anna Massey), who lives with her blind mother (Maxine Audley) in the flat downstairs, but how long before he turns the deadly gaze of his camera towards her?

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From the legendary filmmaking duo Powell and Pressburger, 'The Small Back Room' is the story of the troubled love affair between a tormented back room scientist and a beautiful secretary, told against a background of ministerial intrigue and empire building.

Sammy Rice (David Farrar) was the army's finest bomb disposal officer until he was injured in the war and left with a false foot. Now part of a specialist 'back room' team, he dismantles the booby-trapped devices being dropped by Nazi bombers. He falls in love with Susan (Kathleen Byron), a colleague, and the two begin a secret affair. However, embittered by life, he feels inferior; inferior as a lover, inferior as a man unable to wear uniform; inferior in his work for, although a brilliant scientist, he allows himself to be exploited by his power-hungry boss. Haunted by his past, he drowns his sorrows in whiskey. Sammy's life is descending into disarray when the news comes; a bomb has exploded with catastrophic consequences, and another has been found. Faced with the biggest challenge of his career, Sammy must confront his demons and take his own life in his hands to solve the mystery of the bomb's lethal mechanism.

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Roger Livesey brilliantly portrays a British officer, Clive Candy, through the trials and tribulations of three wars, three lovers and a lifelong friendship across enemy lines. During the Boer War, candy is sent to Berlin to trap a German spy.

There he befriends a German officer, Theo (Anton Walbrook), who marries the girl (Deborah Kerr) Candy is in love with. During the First World War, Candy marries a girl who resembles his lost love and helps Theo - now a POW - to get repatriated. Candy comes back in the Second World War as Brigadier General and once again encounters Theo. On joining a Home Guard exercise, Candy is captured, however, and the two are forced to either aid or betray each other.

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A powerful and important piece of Second World War propaganda, which controversially takes the Nazi's point of view. Asked to make a flag waver by the Ministry of Information, Michael Powell elected to set the action in Canada and, like Casablanca, called for an end to the USA's isolationist policy.

The film features a stellar cast, who all waived their fees in the interests of the war. A Nazi U-boat is sunk by the Canadian Air Force and all the crew are lost except six men who had been sent ashore before the attack. They stumble across a village where Scott, Peter and his servant Martin live. The Allies send an S.O.S plane, and it is the intention of the Nazis to hijack it and fly to neutral America.

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November 1939: crack pocket battleship, Admiral Graf Spee patrols the South Atlantic.

Captained by Hans Langsdorff (Peter Finch) - one of Germany's most brilliant naval officers - Graf Spee, with her superior speed, appears and disappears, sinking ship after ship and threatening to cut off crucial Allied supplies. But the net is tightening round the German killer as the last ship sunk by her managed to radio her position before she went down. Three British cruisers, posing as a naval task force, are charged with setting the trap...

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Wendy Hiller stars in Powell and Pressburger's classic romantic comedy about a young woman who discovers the true meaning of wealth. Joan Webster has her life mapped out, beginning with marriage to a rich industrialist.

Her plans go wrong when she finds herself stranded on the way to a remote Scottish island and falls in love with a penniless young sailor.

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It's night over Europe, the night of 2nd of May 1945. A crippled Lancaster Bomber struggles home across the English Channel, all crew dead save for the young pilot desperately scanning the radio for signs of life.

His prayers are answered, June (Kim Hunter), a young radio operator, picks up his signal, and in the final moments of the young flyer's life, a special bond is formed. The next morning washed up on an English beach, Squadron Leader Peter Carter (David Niven) is alive. He finds June, and the two fall in love. Somehow he survived. It's a miracle...or is it? Peter Carter should have died that night; a heavenly escort missed him in the fog above the Channel, and now he must face the celestial court of appeal for his right to live.

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On Nazi-occupied Crete, British officers Fermor (Dirk Bogarde) and Moss (David Oxley), aided by local patriots, are assigned the job of kidnapping the German commander-in-chief General Kreipe (Marius Goring). The operation, if successful, will be an incredible propaganda coup for the Allies.

While the abduction goes smoothly, the chase across the rocky Cretan landscape proves anything but.

Their re-working of Chaucer's epic fourteenth century tale, largely set in wartime Kent, centres on American army sergeant John Smith, British soldier Dennis Price and landgirl Shiela Sim who, before making a modern-day pilgrimage to Canterbury, solve the bizarre mystery of a man who pours glue over the hair of village girls at night.