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The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943)
🕑 Added 2021-08-29 03:08:31 +0000 UTC
Having finally caught up with the Archers towering canonical masterpiece, I'm going to have to cast my vote with the estimable Doug Dilliman. Colonel Blimp is the kind of film that is so meticulously wrought that it's difficult for me to approach it with ardor, even as it clearly demands admiration. There are a few different reasons for this. The main one, really, is its overall theme of dear old Blighty as a fading way of life. I think it makes perfect sense in the context of a World War II-era production. But where others see as generosity and grace, I find an unnerving ambivalence.
The portrait of Gen. Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey) as an embodiment of good, strong, classic English values is not allowed to simply stand, of course. Colonel Blimp's denouement is all about WWII as a sea change, the Nazis as an ideologically driven fighting force who don't simply reject European liberalism but actively resent it, practically seeing it as a genetic defect in the Allied nations. Wynne-Candy must grudgingly accept that his sportsmanlike ideals will only invite defeat. (How sad that this idea -- how to properly fight the Nazis -- is relevant again. The Britain that won the war was Antifa; Candy would be on the editorial board of the New York Times.)
It's been correctly noted that Powell and Pressburger took a big risk in their depiction of Candy's German friend Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), in a sense applying the very broad-mindedness that other parts of Blimp were critiquing. It all starts, of course, with Theo being chosen by lot to duel with Candy. He was chosen by fate to be the General's opponent, and this directly mirrors his Germanness as an accident of birth. This event leads them to be lifelong friends. While it is relatively common now, with considerable hindsight, to acknowledge the good Germans who opposed Hitler (cf. Schindler's List, A Hidden Life), it probably seemed nearly treasonous while Britons were deep in the fog of war.
The role of Theo allows Powell and Pressburger to partially dispel ideas of national temperament and focus on ideologies, if not individuals. But this certainly complicates our understanding of Wynne-Candy himself. Colonel Blimp continually insists on his decency, while at the same time showing him to be an inadvertent chauvinist who regards honor and fairness to be somehow ingrained in the British experience. This contrasts dramatically with Candy's reflexive embrace of empire, to say nothing of the wall of heads from the animals he's killed while traipsing through the colonies.
The Archers are clear on these contradictions, and take great care to underline them. (The sequence in Candy's den of death seems to go on forever.) But this doesn't mean that those contradictions are meaningfully explored. When we remember that Blimp took its title, as well as Candy's mustache and the bizarre Turkish bath setting, from David Low's satirical comics about dunderheaded British arrogance, we certainly understand that Candy is not to be taken at face value. But still, he is unfailingly a man of honor, someone with whom we are bound to identify even as we may bristle at his worldview. It's a genial jingoism that's supposed to remind us of our grandfathers and the Greatest Generation, a paternal conservatism that is difficult to resent or resist because it is so comfortingly quaint.
It's important not to forget that the U.K. was being led at this time by Winston Churchill, perhaps the single figure of the 20th century who most embodies this old school Tory nobility. So Colonel Blimp exemplifies the struggle to find a way out of the dominant perspective of its own time. As admirable as this may be, it doesn't necessarily lead to humanist complexity. It actually reflects a fascinating but troublesome incoherence.
