Sarah Parnaby
RETROSPECTIVE
Gone to Earth
Monthly Film Bulletin August 1985, Volume 52, Number 619, pp.256-257
Great Britain, 1943
Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
[Other
film credits
omitted]
1942. In an invasion exercise due to start at midnight, Lieutenant "Spud"
Wilson, commanding the second battalion of the Lancashires, decides to demonstrate
how modern war should realistically be conducted by attacking the 'enemy',
the Home Guard commanded by General Clive Wynne-Candy, at six instead. Although
Wilson's girlfriend Angela (nicknamed "Mata Hari") tries to warn the general
(she is also his driver), Wynne-Candy is surprised in his Turkish bath and
attacks Wilson when the latter implies that his old-fashioned ways are impeding
the war effort ... In 1902, just back from the Boer War with a VC, the young
Candy is told by a fellow officer of an English governess, Edith Hunter,
who has written from Berlin complaining of the propaganda about British
behaviour in the war being spread by a German officer, Kaunitz. With the
reluctant agreement of Colonel Betteridge,
[Betteridge didn't agree to it - "It's a secret from him too."]
Candy goes to Berlin, meets the brisk and forthright Edith, and insults
Kaunitz in a night-club.
[In the café Hohenzollern]
Candy is challenged to a duel on behalf of the German officer corps, and
both he and his opponent, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, are wounded. While
they are recuperating together, Theo falls in love with Edith. Candy gives
them his blessing (though he realises that he too is in love with Edith
[Well, when he gets home he realises he is]), and returns to England.
On the Western Front in 1918, Candy meets a nurse, Barbara Wynne, and at
the end of the war rejoices in the fact that England has won by decent and
honourable soldiering (unaware of the means a South African fellow officer
has used to extract information from German prisoners). He marries Barbara
(who closely resembles Edith), but is hurt when Theo, whom he has tracked
down to a POW camp, refuses to acknowledge him. They are later reconciled,
but Theo berates the English for believing that affairs between nations
can be conducted in a sportsmanlike fashion. Barbara dies in 1926, and Theo
(who loses Edith in 1933) eventually flees the Nazis and enters Britain
as a refugee with Candy's assistance. Recalled from retirement with the
outbreak of war, Candy causes embarrassment with a radio speech (which is
cancelled),
[As the speech was cancelled, how could it cause embarrassment?]
warning against the adoption of Nazi-type techniques in the name of 'total
war'. He wins renown as the head of the Home Guard, a new concept in self-defence,
though Theo continues to worry that his gentlemanly notion of war will make
no headway against the Nazis ... Sobered by the incident with Wilson, though
reassured by Angela (herself a double for Edith/Barbara), Candy considers
that it may be time to change.
Churchill's famous opposition to The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
has probably done most to crystallise the image of Powell and Pressburger's
wartime epic as a subversive thrust at the military establishment. Interestingly
enough, in the 'Blimp file' of official correspondence on the subject, opposition
from all government agencies is fiercest at the production stage, when the
reasons are necessarily theoretical - mainly that the film was going to
resurrect "an imaginary type of Army officer which has become an object
of ridicule to the general public". Once the film is completed, the opposition
fades, to the point where even the Minister of Information decides that
it is "too boring" to do any damage except to the people who made it. Only
Churchill (and there is no indication that he even saw it) continues to
worry away at the film throughout 1943; seized with an idée fixe
that in the end makes him seem an ideal Powell-Pressburger character
himself, one who found in the film (or his image of it) the proper sporting
ground for his bulldog temperament.
For if there is one thing that The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
resists, it is being cast in any anti-establishment role. Its restlessness,
its élan, its stylistic variety and dazzle have more to do with a
quest for an establishment role that is worthy of it. The film is an implicit
demonstration of the conservative impulse behind much formal experimentation
in art - the anger at what is outmoded, at what has lost its power to enshrine
those values considered eternal. It also goes to the heart of Powell-Pressburger's
particular paradox vis-à-vis political/national allegiances and an
apparently free-floating cinematic determination to attack something
. Their collaboration seems to involve such an inextricable criss-cross
of un-, anti- and ultra-Englishness - is Powell the Englishman's Englishman
who understands more about his compatriots than they could ever accept?;
is Pressburger the foreigner with the most sublime, mystical, overarching
view of his adopted home? - that it is hard to decide whether they are insiders
trying to cut their way out of hidebound traditions or outsiders trying
to revitalise those traditions.
[Or is it the other way around? Powell being the Englishman with the world
view (rare at the time) and Pressburger being the foreigner who understands
us better than we understand ourselves]
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp may come on with a great deal
of animus, the sense that it is attacking some deep-rooted canker in the
military establishment that is impeding the war effort, but its energies
are actually profoundly integrationist, conciliatory; its movement not thrusting
but circular. It is also intrinsic to the Powell-Pressburger paradox that
their films should have such an un-English stylistic attack (the opening
sequences here of motorcycle despatch riders racing through the countryside
could be strong competition for The Wild One or The Wild Angels
) when their aim is usually to re-establish some ideal or fantasy of
Englishness. The oppositions set up by Colonel Blimp consequently
have a kind of unreal, skewed dimension, as if the conduct of the war really
did depend on the question of whether an old-fashioned, gentlemanly, playing-fields-of-Eton
approach should apply, or a much more ruthless realpolitik, the all-out-to-win
tactics implied by the term 'total war'.
As a strategic consideration of the Second World War, or of the military
history of the first half of the twentieth century, this is a fantasy akin
to The Thief of Bagdad. And as is appropriate to a fantasy, its oppositions
prove chimerical, illusory, easily blending or reversing in effect. If Candy
at the beginning is viewed as a hidebound, tradition-bound, class-bound
old fogey, those same qualities are assumed by the rest of the film to be
synonymous with moral rectitude, honour and decency ("Clean fighting, honest
soldiering have won" as Candy announces at the end of the First World War,
and Powell and Pressburger seem to concur with his view of a war in which
only the dirty Hun used poison gas). Similarly, the film approves the initiative
and daring of "Spud" Wilson, the boyish enthusiasm with which he pulls off
a manoeuvre by cheating a little - and then worries (or pretends to) that
there's something of the Nazi mentality about it. Or is it just efficient
German-type soldiering? One thing that makes the film's argument so ambiguous,
mystical and difficult to grasp is that it conflates too many qualities
- of political ideology and national character, for instance - and assumes
that military conduct can be discussed in purely spiritual terms, without
reference to political or historical circumstances, or even to technology.
If Blimp is a very ambiguous - chimerical - figure in the two wars, in between
he virtually ceases to exist. Of this the film seems to be quite ironically
aware, though its irony insists more on the poignancy of a real soldier
having no place in peacetime: the inter-war years are summed up by a series
of montages (in one of which the death of Blimp's wife, Deborah Kerr's second,
barely noticeable incarnation, is noted) and the accumulation of hunting
trophies in his sepulchral study (where the wife's portrait eventually finds
its place). The parade of women - the same but different - through Blimp's
life may be the film's most inspired and most ambiguous move. In their interchangeable
background function, they are on the one hand a reproach to the blindness,
the exclusivity of this military tapestry. On the other, the interplay of
their diversified characters with Candy's bulldog role gives the film's
image of a chivalric place that is forever England an emotional completeness
which it would not otherwise have. (Though it is unclear whether or not
the last of these roles, that of the driver Angela who prefers to be called
Johnny, should be taken as a further reproach to the equalising tendencies
of total war.) The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is in a sense
playing at soldiers, playing at myths of nationhood. What gives it such
uncanny power as a myth in its own right is that it uses its own disrespect
for narrative, visual and thematic decorum to create a national fiction
that is too 'ecstatic', contradictory and shifting to be called propaganda.
Richard Combs
(This film was originally reviewed in the M.F.B. No. 114, p.61.)
Copyright © The British Film Institute, 1985
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