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| Images courtesy of Janus Films |
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s originally began in
1934 via cartoonist David Low’s satirical cartoon Colonel Blimp in the Evening
Standard newspaper. Characterized by
his oversized belly, walrus mustache, distinctly British personality with a
tendency towards pomposity, irascibility and jingoism, the caricature was a
satire on politics of the British establishment. While something of a cliché and recurring figure
throughout mainstream media including literature and the graphic novel series The
League of Extraordinary Gentleman, the notion of a Colonel Blimp was
finally canonized in 1943 when Powell & Pressburger sought to not only bring
this caricature to flesh-and-blood life but to tell their own distinctive story
with the premise. The resulting film The
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is something of a contradiction in that the
character neither actually dies nor is he referred to as Blimp which nevertheless
becomes something of a progenitor to Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard for
its portrayal of a Sicilian prince who finds himself becoming outdated over the
course of shifting social mores and the logistics of warfare.
Opening on the present day, Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy
(Roger Livesey) is first introduced as the stereotypical ‘Colonel Blimp’ when
he is ‘captured’ in a Victorian Turkish bathhouse by the British army as part
of a training exercise. Getting into a poolside
fistfight with the young Lieutenant leading the exercise, we’re thrust into an
extended feature-length flashback beginning in 1902 where Clive is on leave
from the South African War having earned the Victoria Cross when he receives a
plea for help from Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr) who is working in Berlin. Venturing to Berlin to try and thwart
anti-British propaganda against his superiors wishes, Clive meets with Edith and
proceeds to confront a German man named Kaunitz when he inadvertently insults
the Imperial German Army, sparking a duel between himself and Theo
Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook).
Both sustain injuries but become lifelong friends while also sharing
mutual feelings for Edith.
Entrenched in the first World War, Clive who is now a brigadier
general meets and marries a nurse named Barbara Wynne (again played by Deborah
Kerr) due to her striking resemblance to Edith.
Down the line he finds his friend Theo at a British POW camp where he is
rebuffed only for him to apologize later to Clive, informing him his own wife
Edith has also passed away. Meanwhile
Theo meets Clive’s new MTC driver Angela “Johnny” Cannon (our third Deborah
Kerr) as Clive returns to the army as a major general and is tasked with giving
a speech on the BBC radio regarding the decision to withdraw from Dunkirk. As he begins speaking on preferring the
methods of the British army to resorting to the tactics of the Nazis to win the
war, he’s abruptly cut off with his friend Theo trying to encourage him to
accept the reality of the enemy fighters.
Coming up to the film’s opening prologue that sets our saga in motion,
we find the aged Clive finding himself being ousted and outdated by his fellow
British military who have changed tactics and no longer have much more need for
Clive’s way of warfare. He’s lived a
full life of military action which landed him unlikely friendships and romantic
relations yet is now finding himself discarded into the past as though he never
existed.
A sweeping, sumptuously photographed wartime character study
that at once satirizes the British military as well as trying to get inside the
headspace of the caricature of Colonel Blimp, Powell & Pressburger cited
not the titular comic strip itself but a deleted scene from their own previous
film One of Our Aircraft is Missing in which an elder tells a young
soldier ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be old’. Brought about by then-editor (soon director)
David Lean who suggested the exchange was worth further exploration, Powell
& Pressburger found actually making The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp into
a feature to be something of an uphill battle.
Prompted by Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s naysaying who actually at
one point tried shutting production on the film down, Powell & Pressburger
prevailed after screening the film for the Ministry of Information and War
Office officials.
Shot over a period of four months at Denham Film Studios, making
the picture was affected by then-wartime shortages and a self-imposed ban by
Churchill on loaning out military personnel and/or equipment in the film. Despite this, Powell remarked the film was a
multinational multicultural production featuring creative participants from all
over the world free of frontiers. Much
like the titular Colonel Blimp himself, the film installed a military adviser,
Lt. General Douglas Brownrigg who himself fought in WWI before retiring
following Dunkirk and then took a senior role in the Home Guard. Visually the Technicolor exercise lensed by
French cinematographer Georges Périnal is dripping with splendor including a
wild overhead shot during a duel that ascends through the ceiling out into the
winter snowy night, a special effect with fantastical wonderment. The score by Allan Gray (Polish born Józef
Żmigrod) is sumptuous and marks an extensive working relationship with Powell
& Pressburger across much of their oeuvre.
Performance wise, Roger Livesey makes the multiple phases of
Clive Wynne-Candy from dashing young gentleman to walrus mustached bald-headed
heavyweight from years of military training and service palpable and
realistic. Though we’re initially
introduced to the comic-strip caricature, over the course of the film Clive is
fully humanized and we share with him his grievances over his gradual foray
into obsoletion. Deborah Kerr, taking on
three screen roles here which are designed to echo one another’s characters for
Clive, is something of a tour-de-force here predating the kind of multiple
screen roles played by actresses decades later like Tilda Swinton’s trio in
Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria. Anton
Walbrook, himself an Austrian born actor who moved to the United Kingdom and
started a tenure with Powell & Pressburger, is fantastic in the role of
Theo who like the actor himself is trying desperately to get out from under the
German military umbrella. Much of the
rest of the ensemble cast come and go through these principal actors’ screen
time as the story continues to revert back to the plight of Clive Wynne-Candy.
Released in England in 1943, the film initially was heavily
attacked because of the character of Theo, a sympathetic German officer whose
character is more grounded than Clive’s, at a time when all Germans were
frowned upon as Nazis during wartime.
Moreover, right-wing sociologists of the obscure Sidneyan Society dubbed
it ‘the most disgraceful production that has ever emanated from a British film
studio’. These comments didn’t stop the
film from becoming a top contender at the British box office, sharing alongside
Casablanca and In Which We Serve, though in the US it wasn’t
released theatrically until 1945 in black-and-white form while removing the
flashback wraparound narrative. It wasn’t
until 1983 that the first 163-minute British theatrical version was restored to
the original running time before thirty years later Martin Scorsese and his
editor (and Powell’s widow) Thelma Schoonmaker oversaw a complete digital
restoration by the Academy Film Archive to its present 4K digital master.
Looking at it now, like much of Powell & Pressburger’s
filmography, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is at once a film of
the moment in time it was produced and a timeless character study of a complex
man who finds himself becoming a relic of the past. Simultaneously a rich human drama full of
lush Technicolor vistas, powerful performances from the principal cast members,
the film is now regarded widely as perhaps the most distinctly British or
Britannia film ever made. A film about
what it means to be British and a study of how people entrenched in warfare get
chewed up and spat out by the powers engaged in the war machine, The Life
and Death of Colonel Blimp endures still today as one of British cinema’s
most beloved silver screen characters.
It what could’ve been a simplistic lampooning of the Colonel Blimp
caricature, Powell, Pressburger and actor Livesey have fashioned a fully
realized person whose personal struggle with increasing irrelevance in the battlefield
speaks to all of humankind as a universal obstacle no matter what field of work
we find ourselves in.
--Andrew Kotwicki
