The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

The greatest British film of all time

Powell and Pressburger's masterpiece is actually slightly misleadingly titled. There is no character called Colonel Blimp in the film; there's not even a Colonel in it; and the central character (whose name is Clive Candy) doesn't die. Blimpishness, named after a cartoon strip character created by David Low, was a sort backward-looking pomposity, apparently espoused by Candy in the opening section of the film, but the Archers' idea was to expose not just the reality behind it (Candy is a VC-decorated hero and a thoroughly decent sort), but that the idea itself not only had died, but must die. The Nazis were not soldiers, in the old sense, but gangsters, and had to be dealt with as such.

Given this, the propagandist elements of the film are present and correct, making it all the more incredible that Churchill should have disliked the screenplay so much that he refused to sanction Laurence Olivier's appearance in the central role. We may say thank goodness he did, since Roger Livesey, balancing artifice and art to a niceness, gives the single greatest performance you will ever see by a British actor. Perhaps Winston suspected he himself was being slyly satirised.

Some of the components that go to making this the best ever British film are obvious: Georges Perinal's sublimely rich Technicolor cinematography, the acting, the rousing score, the thrilling motorcycle opening, but it goes deeper than that. P&P are also trying to examine the best of Britishness (hence, perhaps, the best of Blimpishness), the profoundly romantic yearning for something better for everybody set off against the flinty, stiff-upper-lip exterior. I defy anyone to watch the final section of this film without weeping.

It really is that good.

Fantastic

This is a great movie from Powell and Pressburger. Made two years before the end of WW2 it takes a close look at war as a gentleman's past-time. Roger Livesey is remarkable as The soldier Clive Candy who goes through three wars, The Boer, WW1 and WW2. The film follows Candy through his relationship with the characters played by Deborah Kerr and Anton Walbrook. All three actors give great performances particularly Walbrook who plays the character of Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff over the years with great aplomb. From the beginning of his and Candy's friendship after a duel in Germany, through his imprisonment in a prisoner-of-war camp at the end of the first great war to the man who escapes the Nazis, and comes to Britain to be taken under the wing of Candy once more and Candy's chauffeur, once again played by Kerr in her third role of the film. The movie is a great expression of the British fighting spirit in the first part of the twentieth century, when the Empire moved from a being the play thing of the elite gentlemen's club to a body of people who would pull together to save the world from the evil of Nazism regardless of the gentlemen's rules of engagement.