The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Reviewed by Robin Cross, a television documentary writer and historian who has written extensively on military history and World War II, including Warfare: A chronological history (1991) and Fallen Eagle (1995).
RATING: 9
UK, 1943
US titles The Adventures of Colonel Blimp and Colonel
Blimp
Director Michael Powell
Screenwriter Emeric Pressburger
Cinematography Georges Périnal
Music Allan Gray
Art direction Alfred Junge
Cast Roger Livesey (Clive Candy VC), Anton Walbrook (Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff), Deborah Kerr (Edith Hunter/Barbara Wynne/Angela ‘Johnny’ Cannon)
In the middle years of World War II, the biggest influence on British cinema was the documentary school of film-making, pioneered in the 1930s by John Grierson.
In a Britain fighting a ‘total war’, cinema became a key instrument of propaganda. The makers of feature films responded by abandoning the celebration of stiff-upper-lip heroics by toff-ish officer types to refocus on the ‘real’ lives of ordinary soldiers and war workers. This shift of emphasis can be seen in such films as Nine Men (1943), San Demetrio, London (1943) and Millions Like Us (1943) dealing with, respectively, an isolated infantry platoon in North Africa, merchant seamen in the Battle of the Atlantic, and factory workers in Britain’s industrial heartland.
Against the tide
Swimming determinedly against this powerful ‘documentary’ tide was the director-writer team of Michael Powell, a deeply conservative Englishman, and Emeric Pressburger, a Hungarian émigré. The idea for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp sprang from a scene that they had excised from one of their earlier films, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1941), in which the middle-aged rear gunner of a bomber crew reminds a younger airman that he too was hot-headed and idealistic in his youth.
This deleted scene was combined with the eponymous character of ‘Colonel Blimp’, created by the left-wing cartoonist David Low for the London Evening Standard. Low’s Blimp was a portly relic of Britain’s colonial past, bald-headed and blustering at the iniquities of the modern world from the steamy sanctuary of the Turkish bath in the Royal Bathers’ Club.
Bull walrus
In the hands of Powell and Pressburger, Blimp became Major-General Clive Candy VC (Roger Livesey), whose career is traced from his early days as a headstrong young subaltern to crusty old age as a Home Guard officer in World War II. Using an elegant flashback device, the film locates Candy in three different years: 1902, 1918 and 1942. In each one, his life intertwines with those of a German officer, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), and three women (all played by Deborah Kerr) with whom the romantic but reactionary Candy falls in love.
The film opens with Candy slumped like an old bull walrus in the Royal Bathers’ steam room, draped with towels, his bald pate drenched with sweat. In this refuge, he is surprised and ‘taken prisoner’ in a pre-emptive strike by an eager-beaver young army officer, his opponent in a Home Guard exercise.
‘The war begins at midnight!’ splutters the old tusker as he wrestles his nemesis into the pool. As they both disappear in clouds of steam, we are plunged back into Candy’s history and, by implication, into the history of Britain.
Sympathetic German
Candy VC is played with immense charm by Roger Livesey as a ‘dear old bumbler’ – warm-hearted, hidebound and suffused with the rigidly suppressed romanticism that often lurks below the bluff surface of professional military men. His co-star and ‘ideal woman’ is a young Deborah Kerr, with whom director Michael Powell had an affair during filming.
Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, who fights a duel of honour with Candy in the first segment of the film and becomes a refugee from Hitler in the third, is played with world-weary charm by Anton Walbrook and, for a British film at this stage in the war, provides an unusually sympathetic portrayal of a German. He chides Candy with the observation that the English upper-classes are ‘like boys playing cricket’, blind to the real nature of Nazism. There is more than a merely coincidental parallel between the Englishman and the German in the film and its High Tory director and émigré screenwriter.
‘Thug element’
Powell and Pressburger had originally cast Laurence Olivier in the part of Candy. The actor had wanted to play Blimp as a ‘slashing, cruel and merciless’ figure, a characterisation that would have unbalanced the film.
However, the War Ministry refused to release Olivier from service in the Fleet Air Arm. Pressburger’s screenplay sent entirely the wrong message, it said, focusing ‘attention on an imaginary type of army officer which has become the object of ridicule’, and ignoring the ‘thug element in our German foe’. It warned that the film might encourage defeatism.
Hostile reviews
Prime Minister Winston Churchill – many of whose own ideas were decidedly Blimpish – became involved in the row. In September 1942, he sent a memo to his minister of information Brendan Bracken asking if the production could be halted: ‘I am not prepared to allow propaganda detrimental to the morale of the army. Who are the people behind it?’
Churchill failed to ban the film. Nor could he stop the granting of an export order to the United States. The row throws a shaft of light on to the limits of ‘acceptable’ wartime propaganda, which were apparently determined in a characteristically British atmosphere of muddle and self-censorship.
When it was released in 1943, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp received hostile reviews. The Documentary News Letter castigated it for not portraying ‘one single person such as you may meet in the street or on the bus’.
The film’s status today
Surviving the threat of butchery by the ministries of war and information, the disapprobation of the Documentary News Letter and the potential disaster of Olivier in the title role, Colonel Blimp became one of the great British films of the war years. Blimp – in the Ministry of War’s opinion, a dangerous symbol of national obsolescence – is, in fact, placed by Powell and Pressburger at the heart of a living tradition in a densely layered ‘national epic’ that refuses to conform to the propaganda imperatives of the time. However, Powell and Pressburger’s characteristically quirky decision to stay ‘off message’ prompted both official and critical disfavour and baffled cinema-goers accustomed to the new realism.
Ironically, in its portrayal of a section of the European military caste in the first half of the 20th century, the film is entirely and scrupulously accurate. And while Michael Powell’s approach to the subject was knowingly calculated to cause a furore in the climate of 1943, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp has grown in stature with each passing year. Its lustrous Technicolor and measured and magnificent set-pieces – particularly the duel fought early in the film between Candy and Kretschmar-Schuldorff – mark it out as a masterpiece of British cinema.
For more information on David Low and the origins of Colonel Blimp, check out the website of the Political Cartoon Society and the article Colonel Blimp’s England by Professor Peter Mellini of Sonoma State University in California.
