The Great Movies II by Roger Ebert

Author:Roger Ebert
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Tags: Film
ISBN: 9780307485663
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2005-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

{THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP}

One of the many miracles of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is the way the movie transforms a blustering, pigheaded caricature into one of the most loved of all movie characters. Colonel Blimp began life in a series of famous British cartoons by David Low, who represented him as an overstuffed blowhard. The movie looks past the fat, bald military man with the walrus mustache and sees inside, to an idealist and a romantic. To know him is to love him.

Made in 1942 at the height of the Nazi threat to Great Britain, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s work is an uncommonly civilized film about war and soldiers—and, rarer still, a film that defends the old against the young. Its hero is a blustering old windbag, Clive Wynne-Candy a warhorse of the army since the Boer War, now twice retired from regular duty and relegated to leading the Home Guard.

As the film opens, the general has ordered military training exercises and announced, “War starts at midnight.” A gung-ho young lieutenant decides that modern warfare doesn’t play by the rules and jumps the gun, leading his men into the general’s London club and arresting him in the steam room. When Wynne-Candy bellows, “You bloody young fool—war starts at midnight!” the lieutenant observes that the Nazis do not observe gentlemen’s agreements, and insults the old man’s belly and mustache.

Wynne-Candy is outraged. “You laugh at my big belly but you don’t know how I got it! You laugh at my mustache but you don’t know why I grew it!” He punches the young lieutenant, wrestles him into a swimming pool—and then, in a flashback of grace and wit, the camera pans along the surface of the water until, at the other end, young Clive Candy emerges. He is thin and without a mustache, and it is 1902.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp has four story threads. It mourns the passing of a time when professional soldiers observed a code of honor. It argues to the young that the old were young once, too, and contain within them all that the young know, and more. It marks the general’s lonely romantic passage through life, in which he seeks the double of the first woman he loved. And it records a friendship between a British officer and a German officer, which spans the crucial years from 1902 to 1942.

This is an audacious enough story idea to begin with, but even more daring in 1942, when London was bombed nightly and the Nazis seemed to be winning the war. Powell at first wanted Laurence Olivier to play his title role, but the screenplay ran into fierce opposition from Winston Churchill, and the Ministry of War refused to release Olivier from military duty. Then Powell cast Roger Livesey, a young actor who had worked for him before, and as the German officer, an émigré Austrian actor named Anton Walbrook.

That led to an encounter between Churchill and Walbrook, recounted by the British film critic Derek Malcolm: “Churchill’s reaction was furious.

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