It's hard to describe the scene here as tension mounts by the minute.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger closed out their longtime partnership with a pair of war films, the first of which was 1956's The Battle of the River Plate (retitled Pursuit of the Graf Spee when it was first shown in America). It tells the true story of a German surface raider that caused havoc with merchant ships in the opening months of World War II and the trio of British vessels that set out to stop it. Made with the cooperation of the navies of several countries, it has a cast of hundreds (maybe even thousands if you count all the extras), with a number of familiar faces thrown in like Peter Finch (as the noble captain of the Graf Spee), Bernard Lee (as the captain of the merchant vessel that's sunk at the beginning of the film -- and the recipient of the grand tour that shows us what the British forces are up against), Patrick Macnee (as a commander who scuttled his own ship rather than let it be taken), Donald Moffat (as the lookout on the commodore's ship), John Le Mesurier (as the padre on board the Exeter, the first ship to be knocked out of the battle), and Christopher Lee (as a Uruguayan club owner who gets greedy when the Graf Spee docks in neutral Montevideo to lick its wounds).
Like Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, which was made the same year, this film was shot in the widescreen format VistaVision, but unfortunately TCM chose not to present it letterboxed, so I missed out on some of the effect. According to the IMDb, it was the Archers' most financially successful film. After one more collaboration, though (1957's somewhat uninvolving Ill Met by Moonlight a.k.a. Night Ambush), the two of them went their separate ways. Would Powell not have made the career-killing Peeping Tom if he had still been working with Pressburger? It's entirely possible, but I'm still glad that Peeping Tom got made. It's probably the Michael Powell film I've seen the most over the years and I'm looking forward to watching it again very soon.