UK drama
1943
color 163 min.
Director: Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell
CLV: $69.95 - available
           2 discs, catalog # CC1137L
The Life and Death of
Colonel Blimp is one of the great works of art in the history of film, and
yet, except for some recent television screenings, this British production is
largely an unknown film in the United States. This is primarily due to the
obscurity of the title character in this country. Colonel Blimp was a
creation of the English political cartoonist David Low, and was used by him to
satirize the unimaginative reactionary minds, both political and military, that
were rampant on the British scene in the 1930s and 1940s. Colonel Blimp as
conceived by Low was a puffy, pompous member of the British military, a
near-Fascist, usually making profound contradictory pronouncements on the state
of everything. He was the walrus-whiskered epitome of unenlightened
self-interest. Low him-self described his creation thusly: "Blimp is a symbol of
stupidity, and stupid people are quite nice." To turn a series of non-linear
cartoons into this epic narrative film took imagination, daring and genius -- all
adjectives which apply to the two men who created this magnificent film --
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, whose production company was known as The
Archers.The two men were widely dissimilar in background and training. Powell,
born in Canterbury, England in 1905, had begun his film career in the South of
France as an actor and a still photographer for the legendary silent film
director Rex Ingram. Within three months, his passionate involvement led to his
learning the intricacies of all phases of the craft of movie making; within three
years, having acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of all things filmic, he
returned to England to work for British International Pictures just as sound was
introduced, co-writing Alfred Hitchcock's (and Britain's) first sound film
Blackmail. He learned the new sound technique with amazing speed and
turned out 23 low budget "quota quickies" (the British equivalent of our "B"
pictures) until 1937 when his independently made The Edge of the World
brought him critical acclaim and an offer from Alexander Korda to work for his
fabled London Film Productions. It was Korda who introduced Powell to Emeric
Pressburger.
Born in Hungary in 1902, Press-burger had been a professional
violinist, journalist and writer of short stories, one of which had brought him
to the attention of famed German producer/director Erich Pommer, leading to a
contract with the great UFA company in Berlin. Pressburger had fled Germany when
the Nazis came to power and shortly thereafter was working in England for fellow
Hungarian Korda, for whom he scripted The Challenge (1938), the story of
the mountaineer Edward Whymper.
The meeting of Powell and Pressburger, as
historian William K. Everson has written, "proved to be one of those fortuitous
combinations (Ford and Wayne, Astaire and Rogers, Laurel and Hardy) where the
chemistry was felicitous in every degree. Powell's delight in technique was given
substance by Pressburger's writing; and that sometimes gentle and subdued writing
was given flamboyant re-lease and emphasis in Powell's direction." The first film
they made together was The Spy in Black (1939) with Conrad Veidt and
Valerie Hobson. Powell had then gone on to co-direct Korda's Technicolor classic
The Thief of Bagdad (1940) and The Lion Has Wings (1940), a
propaganda piece about the RAF. Powell and Pressburger next collaborated on
Contraband (1940), The 49th Parallel (1941), and One of Our
Aircraft Is Missing (1942). The success of this latter film brought them an
offer from J. Arthur Rank to form their own production company -- The Archers --
and their first production was TheLife and Death of Colonel Blimp.
In
his 1957 autobiography A Life in Movies, Powell wrote of Pressburger: "[He
was] witty, ingenious and creative . . . a screen-writer who could really write .
. . a screenwriter with the heart and mind of a novelist . . . interested in the
medium of film . . . [He had] wonderful ideas, which I [could] turn into even
more wonderful images . . . [he] only used dialogue to make a joke or to clarify
the point." Powell wasn't referring specifically to The Life and Death of
Colonel Blimp when he wrote that, but the description is an ac-curate
assessment of Pressburger's achievement in fashioning a screen-play around Low's
famed creation. In episodic form, Pressburger spun a tale that spans forty years
in Blimp's military and private life. Framed by a modern-day (1942) Prologue and
Epilogue, the story is told in flashback in three sections. The first, opening in
1902, introduces Blimp as "Clive Candy," a young gallant British officer fresh
from the Boer War, who takes it upon himself to rush off to Berlin to refute some
popular German lies about the mistreatment by the British of Boer prisoners. A
cafe quarrel leads to a senseless duel in which he, 1) gets the wound which
causes him to grow his walrus must-ache, 2) makes a life-long friend of his
unwilling opponent (Anton Walbrook), and 3) loses to this Prussian officer a
charming English girl(Deborah Kerr) whom he has shyly begun to love. In World War
I as a brigadier, he serves quietly and creditably. He meets a nurse (Deborah
Kerr) who is remarkably like the woman he loved and lost. After the war he
marries her. In a British prisoner of war camp he seeks out and is coldly
rebuffed by his old friend the Prussian officer. They are reconciled and by the
time of World War II, Candy is the grand old lobster of the Low cartoons --
angry, hurt and bewildered to find his age and military experience held in low
esteem, if not contempt, by a newer, younger generation. The crowning blow comes
when some upstart young men of the new army jump the gun in training maneuvers
and capture him, boiling red and boiling mad, in a Turkish bath hours before the
sham battle is to begin. Pressburger here drives home the point of the film: the
idea that the code of gentlemanly con-duct that had ruled Blimp's life is an
anachronism in a world threatened by a monster like Hitler.
The resulting film
took four months to shoot, utilizing the vast resources of the Denham Studios and
actual locations in war-torn London and the English country-side. It was produced
under the most difficult conditions imaginable: Great Britain was under aerial
attack by Nazi Germany, the "Blitz" was laying waste to London, shortages of men
and material had to be overcome daily and the situation was not helped by the
Government's attitude toward the film. No less than Prime Minister Winston
Churchill himself tried to prevent Colonel Blimp from being made; he and his
administration objected to what they considered to be slurs on the British
military, to the friend-ship between Candy and the German officer and to the
implication in the final scenes that unless the British fought dirty, they would
lose the war.
However, after an expenditure of over $1,000,000 the film was
completed and released in England in July, 1943. Reviewers hailed it as"a
magnificent production, consistently human, spectacular and discursive and always
entertaining,"with praise being lavished on its superb use of Technicolor, the
production design and especially the performances by the three leads. Roger
Livesey, as Clive Candy, was singled out for honors for his amazing portrayal,
aging convincingly and sympathetically from an idealistic young officer to a
bald, overweight, querulous old man.
Due to Churchill's hostility, however, the
picture did not reach the United States until mid-1945, and then in a 153-minute
version (10 minutes shorter than the British relase). After a brief and
unsuccessful first run here, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp was
further trimmed to a running time of 93 minutes which prompted film critic Archer
Winston to complain that "cut almost in half . . . it has lost much of the
quality that made it unique . . . it jumps from event to event without doing them
complete justice." It was this version that remained in theatrical circulation
for years, eventually ending up on television. But even in this fragmented,
mutilated form, it had the power to intrigue and influence a younger generation
of American film lovers. Director Martin Scorsese, who saw Colonel Blimp
as a child in New York, remembers being impressed by the direction, by the
indirect manner in which story points were made and by the curious credit
"Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger." It was
a curiosity shared by many other younger film lovers all over the world. This
eventually led to a major reassessment of the work of these two unique and gifted
filmmakers by the British Film Institute in the early 1970s. It was at this time
that a new, complete full-length print of The Life and Death of Colonel
Blimp was first put on public view in London and then later shown at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. This Criterion laserdisc release, made from
that restored negative, now enablesfilm lovers to own and enjoy this superlative
achievement.
Both Michael Powell and Martin Scorsese are heard individually on
this laserdisc's second audio track, with Powell talking about the background and
production of the film and Scorsese commenting on the bravura technique and the
impact that his style has had on his own filmmaking efforts.
With its
imaginative and flamboyant use of Technicolor and its rich period detail in sets,
costumes and manners, its outstanding performances and the strong emotional
impact of the story, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is a masterpiece
in the full sense of the world. A film that enriches, enlightens and ennobles,
and does this with intelligence, wit, style, compassionand beauty.
-- RONALD
HAVER
Credits
Written, Produced and Directed by: Michael Powell,
Emeric Pressburger
Photography: Georges Perinal
Edited by: John
Seabourne
Music composed and arranged by: Allan Grey
Conductor: Charles
Williams
Costume Design: Joseph Bata
Military Advisor: Lieut. General Sir
Douglas Browning
Cameramen: Geoffrey Unsworth, Jack Cardiff, Harold
Hayson
Production Designed in Color by: Alfred
Junge
Transfer
This complete edition of The Life and Death
of Colonel Blimp was transferred from an archival 35mm print, made from a
Technicolor negative restored by the British Film Institute.