Cinematography:
Georges PérinalComposer:
Allan GrayCast:
James McKechnie, Vincent Holman, Roger Livesey, David Hutcheson, Roland Culver, Deborah Kerr, Albert Lieven, Arthur Wontner, Anton Walbrook, John Laurie (more)Plots(1)
From the celebrated team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger comes this artistic masterpiece. Roger Livesey brilliantly portrays a British officer, Clive Candy, through the trials and tribulations of three wars, three loves and a lifelong friendship across enemy lines. During the Boer War, Candy is sent to Berlin to trap a German spy. There he befriends Theo, a German Officer, who marries the girl Candy is in love with. During the First World War, Candy marries a girl who resembles his lost love and helps Theo - now a POW - to get repatriated. Candy comes back in the Second World War as a Brigadier General and once again encounters Theo. On joining a Home Guard exercise, Candy is captured and the two are forced to either aid or betray each other. (ITV DVD)
(more)Reviews (2)
I didn't feel for a moment that the film could excite me, in any way, but that was before I watched it. First, the beautiful Technicolor got me, then the actors in great roles, then the humor, and then the whole film. There are many ways to cope with war, and this is definitely one of the more pleasant alternatives.
()
I can’t entirely come to terms with the fact that this chronicle of one life only veils its war-propagandistic message – the mythologising of the British army – with a boldly humanistic message of friendship between nations (the same idea on which Stairway to Heaven is based). The jovial Clive Candy, convincingly portrayed by one actor in all three acts, personifies everything good about the British Empire, a tradition that all young whippersnappers should revere. He is the bearer of qualities such as loyalty, leniency and love of country (the endlessly mentioned home). The music of his life is a military march. Each of his gestures and everything he says presents an argument for the existence of the army. Fortunately, Powell and Pressburger were clever and capable enough as filmmakers to stick with forming an idealised image of a man who may easily have been modelled on Winston Churchill (who hated the film because of its sympathetic portrayal of the Germans). Above all, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is an exquisite example of how to engagingly chart two human lives over the course of forty years. With the storytelling confidence of New Wave filmmakers, the duo employ original narrative shortcuts (resolving multi-year transitions, omitting important events, condensing time) and audacious Buñuel-esque tests of the viewer’s attention (the three different characters played by Deborah Kerr). The flashback structure of the narrative, where the whole film is an explanation of what happens in the prologue and the individual sequences are similarly based on the explanation of the information provided (the narrative thus atypically moves from effects to causes at both the lower and higher levels), stimulates our curiosity while also functioning as a formalistic expression of the film’s central idea. It is always good to know the context and the origin of current events and thus avoid any possible misunderstandings. Wars are also interpreted as a product of misunderstanding, at least from a female standpoint, the consideration of which is evidence of the filmmakers’ effort to confront different perspectives, all of which in the end, however, confirm the inevitability of a difficult defence. Ideological unambiguity simply belongs to national epics. Let’s enjoy the fact that this one is told with the elegance of real masters. 80%
()