Submitted by
Richard Layne
Original at
The Guardian
Powell and Pressburger: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
By Derek Malcolm (Film critic: The Guardian)
Thursday April 20, 2000
I was once asked to provide a tribute to Michael Powell at the Cannes film
festival. It was at short notice - Dirk Bogarde had cried off - and my
audience was extremely distinguished. Powell himself was there, and I took
my courage into my hands and said that there were a good many people present
from the British film industry who had once done their best to decry the
work of Powell, one of Britain's most justly celebrated film-makers.
It was after the making of 1960's Peeping Tom, Powell's most controversial
film, that he was attacked not only by the industry but by most of the
British critics. Even before that, however, his extraordinary capacity to
make utterly British films - but with some of the imagination and
sensibility of Bunuel - made him more suspect than contemporaries such as
Hitchcock, David Lean and Carol Reed. His achievement, mostly in partnership
with the writer and producer Emeric Pressburger, was immense, and his
reputation is now finally secure, thanks in part to the consistent advocacy
of Americans such as Martin Scorsese .
It would be perfectly in order to choose any of five or six of their films
to present among one's personal best. I choose The Life and Death of Colonel
Blimp not because it is perfect. Rather, it stands out because at the time
of its making during the second world war it raised so many awkward
questions that Winston Churchill even tried to have it banned. It typifies
Powell's unorthodox approach to the conventions of British film-making,
and it was the film that one American critic has called "the British Citizen
Kane". But in truth it is more of a tribute to the paradoxical nature of
the British character.
The film uses flashbacks to trace the lives of a young British officer and
his German counterpart from the time when, as young men, they fight a duel
in the Berlin of 1902 right up to the middle of the second world war. By
then, Roger Livesey's Major General Clive Wynne-Candy VC has become a
Blimpish old buffer (the character is based upon the cartoonist Low's
Colonel Blimp). Then, Anton Walbrook's gallant German officer arrives as
a sad refugee from the Nazis. The two are now fast friends, even though
Candy lost his one true love (Deborah Kerr) to the German. Kerr also plays
the other two women in Blimp's life, neither of whom are ultimately
obtainable. It is this that gives the film its romantic and elegiac, if
pessimistic edge.
Churchill's reaction was furious. He is said to have stormed into Walbrook's
dressing room when he was appearing in a West End play demanding: "What's
this film supposed to mean? I suppose you regard it as good propaganda for
Britain."
[Anton's reply was quite telling, he said
"No people in the world other than the English would have had the
courage, in the midst of war, to tell the people such unvarnished truth."]
But the film, although it mourns the death of the Blimps of
Britain with their old-fashioned virtues of decency and generosity, admits
the necessity of their demise. We should, it suggests, finally leave the
past but never forget its better aspects. This was interpreted as
"black-hearted bitterness against Britain" in some quarters but, when the
film was revived during the British Film Year of 1985, it received almost
unanimous acclaim, although several critics mistakenly praised its
recognition of a time when there was pride in being British. The truth is
that it is the emotional tensions in Powell's work that renders it
exceptional.
All this would be as nothing had Powell not been, admittedly much aided
by Pressburger, a film-maker of great technical and imaginative ability.
He could shape his stories with such flair that you could not recognise
a
cliche even if it stared you in the face. Admittedly Colonel Blimp is too
long, but Powell's almost expressionist use of colour (aided by
cinematographer Jack Cardiff
[Only slightly. Jack only did some 2nd unit work like the animal heads.
most of it was filmed by Georges Périnal]),
his feeling that fantasy often holds more
truth than reality and his generosity of spirit towards both his central
characters triumphs over the film's flaws. So too does the magnificent
performance of Livesey as Blimp, a part once scheduled for Olivier who would
surely have made into more of a parody. It's a great British film, and there
haven't been too many of those.
Back to index
