The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (U.)
1943. Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
Starring Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrock, Deborah Kerr and John Laurie. 163 mins.
Colonel Blimp is the finest film ever made in this country and the finest British movie, perhaps because it’s as clear about our failings as our virtues. It takes a caricature of British failings – David Low’s cartoon figure of a blustering, aristocratic, reactionary officer – and from it creates a rich and moving celebration of our national character. And it did it when this country was fighting for its very existence.
The film opens in the middle of the Second World War with our Blimp, Col Clive Candy (Livesay) a bloated, out-of-touch figure, charged with organising the Home Guard. From there the film flashes back across his career from his return from the Boar War at the start of the century, through the First World War and his great friendship with a German officer (Walbrook) and love for recurring incarnations of the same woman (Kerr.)
This is a wartime propaganda film, but a wartime propaganda film that has a profundity beyond its situation. The patriotic message, which is delivered by a German character, is that faced with the absolute evil of Nazism, the country must relinquish any notions of chivalry or fair play. An unarguably position but one which the film delivers with melancholic reluctance – it extols a win-at-all-costs position while showing what will be lost in doing so.
The film looks magnificent in Technicolor and the three central performances are national treasures. Like Hitchcock, Powell’s best films seem remarkably modern – the attitudes, pacing and visual effects may not be what we are accustomed to but in every other respect this 69-year-old production isn’t dated at all. Rather it seems more vigorous, more active and more alive to the possibilities of its medium than anything out there at the moment.
It’s a feast for head and heart - funny, inventive, intimate, epic and desperately moving. Blimp is remarkable for the scale of its ambitions and the lightness with which it fulfils them. It swells the chest with national pride and then gently breaks your heart. The final scene has an almost Proustian sense of lose; but a Proust written in short, sensible, unfussy, thoroughly British sentences.
Tales of Hoffmann
Red Shoes
1943. Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
Starring Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrock, Deborah Kerr and John Laurie. 163 mins.
Colonel Blimp is the finest film ever made in this country and the finest British movie, perhaps because it’s as clear about our failings as our virtues. It takes a caricature of British failings – David Low’s cartoon figure of a blustering, aristocratic, reactionary officer – and from it creates a rich and moving celebration of our national character. And it did it when this country was fighting for its very existence.
The film opens in the middle of the Second World War with our Blimp, Col Clive Candy (Livesay) a bloated, out-of-touch figure, charged with organising the Home Guard. From there the film flashes back across his career from his return from the Boar War at the start of the century, through the First World War and his great friendship with a German officer (Walbrook) and love for recurring incarnations of the same woman (Kerr.)
This is a wartime propaganda film, but a wartime propaganda film that has a profundity beyond its situation. The patriotic message, which is delivered by a German character, is that faced with the absolute evil of Nazism, the country must relinquish any notions of chivalry or fair play. An unarguably position but one which the film delivers with melancholic reluctance – it extols a win-at-all-costs position while showing what will be lost in doing so.
The film looks magnificent in Technicolor and the three central performances are national treasures. Like Hitchcock, Powell’s best films seem remarkably modern – the attitudes, pacing and visual effects may not be what we are accustomed to but in every other respect this 69-year-old production isn’t dated at all. Rather it seems more vigorous, more active and more alive to the possibilities of its medium than anything out there at the moment.
It’s a feast for head and heart - funny, inventive, intimate, epic and desperately moving. Blimp is remarkable for the scale of its ambitions and the lightness with which it fulfils them. It swells the chest with national pride and then gently breaks your heart. The final scene has an almost Proustian sense of lose; but a Proust written in short, sensible, unfussy, thoroughly British sentences.
Tales of Hoffmann
Red Shoes
