THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP Movie Review

Colonel Blimp

Roger Livesey delivers a legendary performance as major General Clive Candy, a British officer whose confusion over the loss of honorable behavior by the military during World War II causes him to reflect back over his long and extraordinary career. This first production by the Archers—the British film company that consisted of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger as co-producers, coauthors, and co-directors—was a rich, complex, and satisfying film (based on a popular comic strip of the day) that became immediately controversial upon its release in 1943, the height of World War II. It didn't please Winston Churchill that this film's hero makes a lifelong friend of a German officer (Anton Walbrook) prior to World War I, or that at the end of his life Candy is so appalled by the loss of honorable behavior in a now-savage world that he claims he'd rather lose the war than sink to the Nazis' level of fighting. Livesey and Walbrook are superb, as is Deborah Kerr, who portrays all three of the women in Candy's life. Colonel Blimp is above all a magnificently drawn character study, brilliantly photographed in Technicolor by Jack Cardiff and Georges Périnal. Yet Churchill saw the picture simply as dangerous, anti-British propaganda, all the more outrageous in his eyes because of its British pedigree. His ire had an immediate impact, and he kept the film from being exported. When it finally did get seen abroad, it had been cut into various butchered versions; the American prints, for example, had 80 minutes removed and were released in black and white. The film has finally been restored to its full, 163-minute version thanks in no small measure to the support of admirer Martin Scorsese. (The wonderful Criterion laserdisc version features Scorsese and the late Powell on an alternate soundtrack, discussing the film's production.)

NEXT STOP … Grand Illusion, A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven), The Red Shoes

1943 115m/C GB Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr, Anton Walbrook, Ursula Jeans, Albert Lieven; D: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger; C: Georges Perinal. VHS, LV NO