‘The Small Back Room’ (1949)
Scorsese is a noted fan of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the British filmmakers behind a series of extravagant technicolor films across the ’40s and ’50s; he was famously friends with Powell — the husband of his editor Thelma Schoonmaker — during the last few years of his life. In 2024, Scorsese and Schoonmaker collaborated with The Film Foundation on a restoration of their 1949 drama ‘The Small Back Room,’ which stars David Farrar as a disabled, alcoholic research scientist hired by the government to advise on a project handling land mines dropped by the Germans on British beaches.