Through their production company The Archers, they together wrote, produced and directed a series of classic British films, notably The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I'm Going!

His controversial Peeping Tom (1960), which was so vilified on first release that it seriously damaged his career, is now considered a classic, and possibly the earliest "slasher movie".

[2][3][4][5] Many renowned filmmakers, such as Francis Ford Coppola, George A. Romero, Brian De Palma, Bertrand Tavernier and Martin Scorsese have cited Powell as an influence.

[6] In 1981, Powell and Pressburger received the BAFTA Fellowship, the highest honour the British Academy of Film and Television Arts can bestow upon a filmmaker.

Soon he progressed to other work such as stills photography, writing titles (for the silent films) and many other jobs including a few acting roles, usually as comic characters.

Returning to England in 1928, Powell worked at a diverse series of jobs for various filmmakers including as a stills photographer on Alfred Hitchcock's silent film Champagne (1928).

[11] Nonetheless, Powell was brought in to save a film that was being made as a vehicle for two of Korda's star players, Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson.

In the silent days, the top [American] screenwriters were technicians rather than dramatists ... the European cinema remained highly literate and each country, conscious of its separate culture and literature, strove to outdo the other.

"[11] Working together as co-producers, writers and directors in a partnership they dubbed "The Archers", they made 19 feature films, many of which received critical and commercial success.

[13] Thomson writes that Powell and Pressburger "struggle with great, clashing virtues—with marvelous visual imagination and uneasy, intellectual substance.

I Know Where I'm Going is a genuinely superstitious picture; 49th Parallel is a strange war odyssey, with escaping Germans wandering across Canada—naïve, very violent, at times unwittingly comic, but possessed by a primitive feeling for endangered civilization; an interesting sequel is One of Our Aircraft is Missing—English fliers getting out of Holland; A Matter of Life and Death is pretentious in its way, yet very funny and absolutely secure in its dainty stepping from one world to another ...

"[10] Although admirers would argue that Powell ought to rank alongside fellow British directors Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean, his career suffered a severe reversal after the release of the controversial psychological thriller film Peeping Tom, made in 1960 as a solo effort.

he was in America a good deal at that time: teaching for a term at Dartmouth; as director emeritus with Coppola's American Zoetrope, as treasured Merlin in the court of Scorsese; and in his marriage to the editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.

It is all the more agreeable now to see Michael's influence spreading: the ardent antirealist has inspired so many people; the man in love with color, gesture, and cinema helped to educate viewers as well as filmmakers—not lest in the two volumes of his autobiography, A Life in Movies ...

The great Powell and Pressburger films do not go stale; they never relinquish their wicked fun or that jaunty air of being poised on the brink.

I do not invoke the figure of Merlin lightly: Powell was English but Celtic, sublime yet devious, magical in the absolute certainty that imagination rules.