It’s a Saturday night during the New York Film Festival, and Martin Scorsese is holding court at Lincoln Center, the undisputed king of this temporary film nerd castle.
Actually, “king” doesn’t do Scorsese—arguably the most influential director of our time—justice. He’s probably more like a god. Case in point: he helped resurrect Gone to Earth, the Technicolor film made in 1950 by British filmmaking team Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, perhaps better known as The Archers.
You’ve likely never heard of it. Set in the dramatically pastoral English county of Shropshire, the film’s famously controlling producer, David O. Selznick, significantly re-edited and re-shot the film once he received their cut. Then, he released it under the new title of Wild Heart, ensuring the intended version of Gone to Earth was, well, gone from Earth.
It was Scorsese who decided it was finally time for Powell and Pressburger’s original cut to see the light of day. His nonprofit, The Film Foundation, saves and restores old films in danger of being lost forever. After tracking down an extremely, extremely rare version of the original Gone to Earth held in the British Film Institute’s archive, the Film Foundation spent a year fixing it up, and along with Rolex, screened it in front of a packed theater at NYFF. (Scorsese is a Rolex Testimonee.) In the world of cinema, that’s some Jesus-raising-Lazarus type stuff.
After the Gone to Earth premiere—the first time Powell and Pressburger’s original version has been shown to such a sizable audience—Scorcese and his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, sat for a Q&A. It felt like two old friends intimately discussing the film of third, because it was: Powell was a mentor to Scorsese, who later introduced Powell to Schoonmaker—and the British filmmaker and the editor fell in love. They remained married until Powell’s death in 1990.
