Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger turn a blustering soldier into someone worth understanding, without excusing his mistakes. A funny, moving film about friendship and ageing, with Roger Livesey giving its debates about honour a stubborn human warmth.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is funny, generous and unusually clear-eyed about the trouble a decent man can cause by refusing to change. This 1943 film asks us to care about a British soldier and his German friend without pretending that honour will solve the problems of war. That is a difficult undertaking, and the film earns our affection for both men. Its 163 minutes are worth making room for.
The long flashback matters because the older Candy could so easily remain a joke. John Seabourne Sr.’s editing takes us through the years with transitions that make the distance between youth and age feel startlingly short. The montages are pleasurable in themselves, but they also keep us conscious of how much a life contains that a film must pass over. We are allowed to understand how he became this man before being asked to decide what is wrong with him.
Roger Livesey gives Major General Clive Wynne-Candy enough bluster to justify the comedy without making stupidity his defining quality. We were moved by his stubborn faith in fair play, because the performance makes that faith seem hopeful even when it has become dangerous. He is brave, vain, romantic and capable of being absurd, sometimes within the same stretch of the performance. His warmth keeps the comedy from becoming a succession of jokes at an old man’s expense.
Anton Walbrook, as Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, makes the friendship equally important from the other side. A sympathetic German officer in a British wartime film is a striking enough choice, but the performance deserves more credit than that historical distinction alone. He makes Theo worth listening to, and gives the men’s affection a seriousness that the comedy needs. For a war film, it pays an unusual amount of attention to the difficult business of remaining friends.
Deborah Kerr plays Edith Hunter, Barbara Wynne and Angela “Johnny” Cannon, and the repeated casting is both affecting and a limitation. It encourages us to look for what Candy keeps wanting from women, when we might rather learn what each woman wants for herself. Her performances have enough independence to resist being treated simply as parts of his romantic history. Even so, the film gives the friendship between its men more room to develop than it gives its women.
Georges Périnal’s Technicolor photography makes the past inviting, with carefully composed images that reward attention beyond the actors. Alfred Junge’s production design shares that fondness for a handsomely ordered world. At times the polish makes us a little too comfortable with the life being questioned, though that pleasure helps explain why Candy has trouble letting it go. Allan Gray’s music supports the tenderness without making the friendship feel like an excuse to forget the war.
We would take this over a war film that settles every disagreement by handing the decent man a victory. The directors give Candy’s beliefs a fair hearing before showing why they will not do, and never make him a fool simply for holding them. The length asks for an uninterrupted evening, and the women deserve more of it than they get. We would recommend it even to someone who usually rules out war films.
