Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger wrote, produced and directed a number of remarkable films under the joint name of The Archers. One of their finest, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), is a masterpiece of the most despised genre after snuff films, the propaganda film. Given its subject matter and the time and place of its making, it could never have been made if it were not a propaganda film. Its awkward history – it comes dangerously close to the category of films maudit – can be accounted for simply enough. The genre normally deals in stereotypes – think of the classic American movie platoon, with its wise-guy New Yorker, drawling Southerner, earnest farm boy from the Mid-West and the guy with glasses who wants to be a writer. E pluribus unum story-line. The opening scenes of Blimp deliver the British equivalent, all classes represented and even a Taffy, look you. All bursting to fight the jerry, but first they must overcome that walrus, Colonel Blimp, in a training exercise. No sooner do Powell and Pressburger start us down this dismally cheery road than they swerve into a massive detour taking us to a time and place and story of an utterly different kind.
At the moment of his capture by the jolly, thuggish army lads, Blimp (Major-General Candy, played by Roger Livesey) drags their leader into the pool of a Turkish bath and emerges into a flashback to 1902. The man who climbs from the pool is Lt Clive Candy VC, youthful, handsome and sanguine to the point of bumptiousness. Just returned from the Boer War, he embarks on a Boy’s Own escapade, seeking to expose a rascally double agent in Berlin. He enlists the help of Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr), an English teacher, and they manage to create a scene in a café which leads to his being challenged to a duel. The officers of a regiment of uhlans draw lots for the honour of fighting, and Theodor Kretschmar-Schuldorf (Anton Walbrook) is chosen. Theo doesn’t believe in duelling, but honour demands, and the two fight a duel in which each gets a scratch; honour is satisfied.
Subsequently Clive and Theo recuperate in the same nursing home, and with Edith as their interpreter they become friends. Their recovery takes longer than is medically plausible, but by this time the film is a full-blown Lubitschean comedy of manners and one mustn’t quibble. Theo believes Edith is Clive’s fiancée, but he and she fall in love and this leads to a key scene when it seems Clive and Edith are about for return to London. Theo apprehensively tells Clive that he and Edith are in love, but Clive enthusiastically congratulates them both. Departing, Clive wishes them well and Edith kisses him. A shadow of puzzlement crosses his face and in that instant the film drops its happy disguise and begins to reveal its truth. It retains much of the forms of the propaganda film and the comedy of manners, but its inner workings are deeply, delicately melancholic.
Candy VC is an overgrown adolescent. His parents are gone, he has no siblings – only a conveniently wealthy and doting aunt who provides him with a very comfortable home base in London. As a rising officer in the army of an empire flooding the map of the world with red, his course seems clear and unproblematic. But he has recognised depths in Theo that he treasures, and he knows, painfully and too late, how deeply smitten with Edith he is himself. He reacts rather than responds, by travelling to the outposts of empire in pursuit of his military career, a course revealed to us by a montage of animal-head trophies appearing on the walls of his aunt’s house, each labelled with its origin and date. The final trophy is a German pickelhaube labelled “Hun – Flanders – 1918”.
This is economical narration, indirectly revealing a sublimated depression relieved by furious activity, criss-crossing the world killing larger and larger animals until he is called on to kill humans again. Candy is a kind, humane man, but he is also brave and a killer. The film includes no direct depiction of his great fighting capacity – we are simply told of his VC, the camera retreats at the start of the duel and we never see a blow struck. We never see him shoot an animal and the film cuts directly from the pickelhaube to the last days of the war. This absence of violence isn’t a matter of squeamishness, or trying to protect the public from the realities of war. The truth of the Great War was carried in the work of the war poets and novelists, and in the bodies and memories of the combatants, the poets and novelists of the Great War. For Candy, the war retains the semblance of a rough game in which the other side have not fought fair, and a moral order is restored by their defeat at the hands of the side that did fight fair.
Just before the war’s end, Brigadier-General Candy is travelling with his driver, Murdoch, through the devastated landscape of Flanders. In a couple of brief scenes with combat officers, he shows that he’s becoming a blowhard on the topic of fighting fair, but the officers are unimpressed. He takes shelter for the night in a convent being used as a field hospital staffed by British nurses. There he sees a nurse who looks exactly like Edith – Deborah Kerr has the part. He mentions this to his driver, who reminds him that he has frequently seen Edith lookalikes during the war. He is an effective, if rather old-fashioned soldier, but his inner life has become a constant search for a lost object.
He tracks down the nurse, Barbara Wynne, and in short order they marry. He becomes Brigadier-General Clive Wynne-Candy, VC, DSO; the transformation from the brash young officer to the increasingly pompous Colonel Blimp is essentially complete. At lunch with the Wynne family, he reveals the method he had used to track Barbara down after the war. It is an uneasy moment; those present seem to sense something of the obsessive nature of his pursuit of Barbara. She says “I understand exactly what you mean, darling.”
Candy finds Theo in a POW camp and takes him home to dinner with an assembly of guests including several senior military men and diplomats and his father-in-law, representing British industry. They attempt to console Theo, assuring him that things will return to “normal”, an idealised state of peace, progress and fair play. Theo is polite, but privately unconvinced. He is well aware of just how difficult life is in Germany, and that it is likely to become worse.
The Wynne-Candys travel about the world through a series of military/diplomatic postings, conveyed by a sequence of dissolves of photo album pages and invitation cards, ending with a shot of an announcement in The Times of Barbara’s death in 1930. A series of quick cuts accompanied by rifle shots show the trophy heads accumulating on the wall again until the camera moves in on a map showing Munich. As in 1914, war has rescued Candy from despair.
Theo had fled Germany in 1934 and in 1939 he is forced to register in Britain as an enemy alien. He explains to an official that his sons became Nazis and his wife died in 1933. In a remarkable single shot monologue, he speaks of life in Germany after the war, his detestation of the Nazis and his decision to come to Britain.
. Walbrook delivered a similar anti-Nazi monologue for The Archers in 49th Parallel (1941), but here it is infused with an ageing man’s sorrow at the destruction of all his youthful hopes. Candy rushes in and rescues Theo from internment, but an elegiac tone begins to suffuse the film and both these old widowers must now contend with time and irrelevance. They reminisce that evening, and Candy reveals his love for Edith. It’s a beautifully written and acted scene, and a painful irony that the depiction of this warm, empathic relationship between two sometime enemies, a German and an Englishman, contributed to Blimp being seen as politically incorrect.
A moment later, Candy invites Theo to look at a portrait of Barbara; he points out the resemblance to Edith, and Theo gives reserved agreement. “You must not forget I saw Edith thirty-one years later than you. We grew old together, you understand.”
Candy’s driver, Angela, takes Theo home. As they chat, she turns to him and says “Do you know, he chose me out of seven hundred girls, sir?” Theo sees that she looks exactly like Edith; he subsides into silence.
Candy is to give a radio talk on the state of the war. At a critical moment in the fight, he plans to reiterate his belief that “Right is Might” and the importance of fighting hard, but fairly. He is about to speak much to that effect, when the talk is abruptly cancelled. His ideals have become passé with Goebbels’ declaration of total war early in 1943 – not a new concept, but one acquiring a new ferocity. The Blitz is on and the very next sequence begins with a radio announcement of the bombing of Malta. Britain will suffer total war, and return it later in the raids on Germany. (Poor Powell and Pressburger were not to know that their film would suffer nearly the same fate as Candy’s talk, and for much the same reasons). Candy returns home to learn that he has been ordered into retirement. He argues with Theo, and again Walbrook delivers the critical speech:
“I read your broadcast up to the point where you describe the collapse of France. You commented on Nazi methods, foul fighting, bombing refugees, machine-gunning hospitals, lifeboats, lightships, bailed-out pilots and so on, by saying that you despised them, that you would be ashamed to fight on their side and that you’d sooner accept defeat than victory if it could only be won by those methods. (Candy: So I would!) Clive, if you let yourself be defeated by them just because you are too fair to hit back the same way they hit at you, there won’t be any methods but Nazi methods. If you preach the rules of the game while they use every foul and filthy trick against you, they’ll laugh at you. They’ll think you are weak, decadent.”
Theo goes on to denounce Nazism roundly and tells Candy that war is not a gentleman’s game.
This is not that familiar, dreadful scene in the propaganda film where the hero climbs onto the soapbox and gives a stirring patriotic speech to the audience, in the guise of a secondary character. The speech is delivered as one dear friend speaking to another about the raison d’être of his entire adult life, helping a man who already has had to cope with a lonely life to cope also with the loss of its meaning.
Candy has always responded to great reversals by throwing himself into vigorous activity, often at some cost to the world’s wildlife. At the urging of Theo and Angela, he decides to join the Home Guard. His new optimism is not shaken when the Blitz destroy his home and kills Murdoch, his manservant who had been with him since the Western Front. Candy moves to the Royal Bather Club, completing the picture of the original Colonel Blimp created by the cartoonist, David Low, of a bald fat man with a walrus moustache, sitting in a Turkish bath wrapped in a towel – the Candy we met at the beginning of the film. As a Zone Commander in the Home Guard, he is to lead his troops in a major training exercise – the one we saw at the outset. But the regular troops are going to jump the gun – as Angela’s boyfriend tells her, “We’re going to teach him total war… Nazi methods, you know.” In due course the outraged Candy is captured, but his friends talk him into acceptance of his defeat and the film ends on a note of reconciliation and reflection.
Although Blimp is now a cornerstone of Powell’s reputation as one of the greatest British directors, its production and distribution were notably problematic. Before it went into production, Powell and Pressburger faced opposition from the Orwellian-sounding Ministry of Information. The ministry considered that the project was defeatist, and when the production went ahead anyway, they ensured that Laurence Olivier would not be released by the Fleet Air Arm to play Candy. In retrospect, this seems a stroke of good luck, whatever the ministry’s intent. Churchill detested the film for having portrayed a sympathetic German, and detested it all the more for never having seen it. He tried to stop the production, but succeeded only in delaying its release.
It was widely attacked upon release. The critics much preferred 49th Parallel, a relatively simple and straightforward propaganda film, albeit a good one. What seems now to be a greater complexity in the later film was seen at the time as a suspicious lack of clarity. It got a better reception when it was released in America two years later, although in America it was severely shortened, chiefly by removing the flashback structure.
The charge of defeatism levelled against Blimp seems hard to sustain. Theo is surely given the final word on that matter in the speech partly reproduced above. What was it that so irritated the authorities and critics of the time? Surely it is the problem of Theo; the most civilised, intelligent and humane character in the film is a German. He sees the Nazis for what they are, and accepts that fighting them is both necessary and terrible – he can intuit the relation between the bombing of London and the eventual fate of German cities. At the same time, he shares with his friend the experiences of hope, happiness, loss and despair that accompany the stages of youth and age, and the final struggle between regret and acceptance. Not really the Ministry of Information’s cup of tea.
In the mid-eighties a fully restored and re-released Blimp was hailed as amongst the greatest films of the British cinema.
“Every time I revisit The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, it grows; it becomes richer. With every passing interval of time – and that’s what the film is about, after all – it seems to have become more resonant, more moving, more profound. You could say that it’s the epic of an ordinary life. And what you retain from this epic is an overpowering sense of warmth and love and friendship, of shared humour and tenderness, and a lasting impression of the most eloquent sadness.”
(Martin Scorsese)
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