Director:
Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell
CLV: $69.95 -
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)
[real "quota quickies" were worse than that <G> - Steve]
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, Pressburger 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),
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 accurate 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 mustache,
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 conduct 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
countryside.
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,
[in black & white - Steve]
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
enables film 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 and 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 Brownrigg
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.
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