Less Sophistication at the second showing
Richard Combs: Critics on Powell
The Listener 17th October 1985
[When the restored version of Blimp was released]
During the recent revival of interest in veteran British film director Michael
Powell, critics have, almost without exception, enthusiastically expressed
admiration for his work. Richard Combs wonders how clear-sighted this reappraisal
is.S
Michael Powell was a problem for his time, and he remains one for ours.
'What is it really about?' the vexed critic of the Observer,
C.A. Lejeune, asked about The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in
1943. The query is echoed in responses, a year later, to Powell and Pressburger's
A Canterbury Tale: 'Their besetting weakness - lack of coherent purpose
in their stories - is more pronounced than ever' (News Chronicle); '...
in effect an elaborate, beautiful and often witty piece of muddle' (
Sunday Times). All that, of course, is behind us now. The Life
and Death of Colonel Blimp, handsomely reminted and reissued recently,
has received ecstatic reviews; A Canterbury Tale, part of the BBC's
season to celebrate Powell's 80th birthday, is now accepted as one of his
and Pressburger's crowning achievements.
But there is something wrong here, something strangely misapplied, even
wilfully wrong-headed, disingenuous and obscurantist about the recent celebrations
of Powell. How far, for, instance, do the new reviews of Colonel Blimp
go towards answering Lejeune's question? There has been a bewildering
variety of answers, depending on whether one takes Powell's Blimp figure,
Clive Candy (Roger Livesey), to be the butt of the film's criticism or the
embodiment of its ideals. Compare and contrast: 'The film's message, that
calcified respect for tradition and hierarchy (the values for which Britain
was ostensibly fighting) was in fact standing in the way of our winning
the war, did not find favour with High Command 1 or government' (Guardian
); 'Blimp's crime is to abide by the rules of the game, to want to wage
war honourably. He complains about Germans bombing children in our streets;
no wonder Churchill, who was to authorise precisely that at Dresden within
a year [sic], was queasy] about the finished film' (Sunday Times)
.
In the first instance, Candy is the representative of a military
establishment whose fuddy duddy ways are frustrating a realistic defence
against the Nazis; in the second, he is the representative of a military
order whose honourable codes are an embarrassment to a government
establishment whose realpolitik is prepared to condone Nazi methods of warfare.
Not only does Candy switch roles here between fool and hero, but the question
of who, in a larger sense, is responsible for Britain's misconduct of the
war (and in what way it is being misconducted) is very confusing. Neither
of the above interpretations could be called wrong, because the film allows
ample room for both these and other points of view - including the dissolution
of all issues to do with the war, the military and the English character
in a kind of chivalric splendour, 'a heraldic tapestry of an eccentric figure
on a horse, at once aptly evoking Bayeux, St George, Quixote and Blimp'
(Financial Times).
Whether the film's ample contradictions might be considered productive or
not, the curious thing about these recent reviews is that they scarcely
acknowledge that there is any contradiction. Colonel Blimp's curious
amalgam of epic storytelling, pamphleteering abuse of a nebulously defined
Establishment, and rather schoolboyish exaltation of the English character
distinct from all its establishments, is treated as a perfectly consistent
account of how we fought the Second World War (and even further back, the
First World War and the Boer War). That the film is both serious and penetrating
is often assumed from the government opposition (particularly and personally
from Churchill) to its making, though the opposition (except from Churchill)
faded away once the film was shown, probably because any potential subversiveness
is thoroughly defused by its contrariness.
But the film cannot really be accounted for without its contradictions being
taken into account. And although many reviews have explicitly or implicitly
pooh-poohed C.A. Lejeune's complaint, none of the recent encomiums to
Colonel Blimp have come close to answering it. A slightly more sophisticated
tack has been to deny that the question has any validity, because it is
based on assumptions about the film ('about what British cinema may permissibly
be') which are not applicable. These assumptions have to do with realism,
with the well-made film and the well-ordered narrative, which Colonel
Blimp, as a fantasy, runs athwart, shimmering instead with paradoxical
images of history, of England and Englishness, of character type and cultural
meaning. In the best overall account yet of Powell, Powell, Pressburger
and Others (BFI Publishing 2.95), Ian Christie has written: 'Blimp is an
epic in several rather different senses of the term: while its scope and
dramaturgy recall Brecht's epic theatre, it also functions as a "national
epic", incorporating its authors, its audiences (then and now), their history,
their culture.'
But this may be allowing Colonel Blimp enough rope, if not to hang
itself, then to drift unreasonably free of its immediate concerns. The film
is not just a context, it is also a particular story, with a number of quite
realistic themes and arguments which just happen to run at cross purposes.
The 'fantasy v. reality' excuse was also invoked and dismissed by one .reviewer
of the day, James Agate, in the Tatler: 'In a word the film lacks
reality. But neither is it fantastic. It pretends reality one minute, relapses
into comic opera the next, and is sentimental whenever it gets the chance.'
Agate also suggests the limitations of the film's attack on Candy, setting
him up as a figure of fun who then too quickly becomes a sterling sort of
chap and an endearing old duffer: 'Any French or Russian director would
have jumped at the chance of showing Candy messing up one military operation
after another, and making stepping stones to promotion out of the lives
he had sacrificed by his stupidity. Not so the directors of this film, which
contains no flick of irony from start to finish.' The film, in fact, never
attacks Candy on any substantial ground at all, whether military (the image
of him at the beginning, caught with his pants down in a Turkish bath, is
soon contradicted by a flashback showing him as a feisty young soldier),
social or political. The latter two, indeed, are where Powell and Pressburger
seem most closely, sentimentally, to identify with their hero. Certainly
his 'place' here is never questioned or examined - one tiny but extraordinary
scene shows Candy courting a nurse he has met during the First World War
in the grounds of her home, which is (realistically? ironically? fantastically?)
a rolling country estate. The Powell-Pressburger mysticism about England
could easily be seen as underpinned (in the words of critic Raymond Durgnat)
by a 'high Toryism'. What the film leaves unexamined, of course, one might
expect contemporary re-evaluation to delve into. But in this significant
respect, the recent reviews are less sophisticated than their 1943 counterparts.
The irony is that wartime writers should have looked askance at this fantasy
of Englishness, of the noble and victorious tradition of clean, decent soldiering
(James Agate: 'And there is nobody to tell him that the only time when clean
fighters can beat the other sort is when they outnumber them'), where today's
reviewers have taken it in, lock, stock and barrel, for the greater glory
of British Film Year.
it is this connection which explains much of the recent distortion, the
blindness, with which Powell and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
have been taken up. Powell's celebration of Englishness, with its personal
idiosyncrasy, its mysticism, its heraldic and chivalric stiffness and its
ultra-conservatism, has been widely admired as an exemplar of English cinema.
The oddness of the equation might be illustrated by the strangeness of the
political bedfellows Colonel Blimp has created: from Time Out
('A 21-gun salute and full formation flypast for Michael Powell') to
the Daily Mail ('... it sweeps one back to a time when there was
real grace, and decency, and heroism, when the Empire was a source of pride
and when to be born British was to have won first prize in the lottery of
life').
The incongruity points to one of the murkiest areas of the Powell revival,
where an implicitly left-wing, revisionist approach to film history takes
up with a subject not operating at all on the same political wavelength.
Churchill's opposition to the film has landed Colonel Blimp with
the label 'subversive', as if that must inevitably mean it is anti-Establishment
in its attitude to the military hierarchy; but Colonel Blimp only
upbraids the hierarchy (in very confused terms) for not being a better,
more efficient, more ruthless, or more soldierly establishment. Its examination
of English vices and virtues is nowhere near as pointed, as perceptive,
as 'realistic', as in The Bridge on the River Kwai, though it is
possible that Powell's own 1950s war films (The Battle of the River Plate
, Ill Met by Moonlight) were, after the fact, more coherent and
penetrating on the subject. A Canterbury Tale, his wartime film aside
from the war, is an incomparably better film than Colonel Blimp,
though there again, the current hoop-la of revival and backing Britain forces
an emphasis on the 'Englishness' of Powell (as my own piece on the film
in The Listener two weeks ago unhappily illustrates) as though it
had somehow been vindicated by the fashions of film criticism and re-evaluation.
It is easy to see why the 'discovery' of Powell should be such a plum in
the British film renaissance, and his 80th birthday and the reissue of
Colonel Blimp both plums of British Film Year. With Hitchcock dead
(and half American anyway), Powell is the grand old man (or spryly twinkling
genie) who supplies what no amount of hype could manufacture - a sense of
history and continuity, and a sense of great understanding of film, of cinematic
nous, which has been the hardest tradition to maintain here. There is also
a measure of guilt assuaged, guilt over the ill-treatment Powell has had
at times in his own country, especially after the critical savaging of
Peeping Tom. But if Powell has not had the clear public image and
popular fame of Hitchcock, he has not suffered lifelong neglect. At different
periods of his career, he has been very much in the public eye - but only
one eye at a time, as if his mysterious, multifarious cinema could never
be looked at head on, never taken in all at once. What the current revival
of interest has done is not so much corrected that Cyclopean gaze as turned
the other eye.
A new book on Powell and Pressburger, 'Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael
Powell and Emeric Pressburger' by Ian Christie (Waterstone 17.95), will
be published next month.
[This article was published in October 1985, Ian published this book in
1985
and it was updated and reprinted in 1994]
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