The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Saw The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a film by the Powell/Pressburger duo. I'd read somewhere that they sought to bring the outsized passion and drama of the opera to the silver screen. Judging by The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and this film, I'd say they've succeeded. Full of rich color and old-world sentimental emotion, which is all the keener for being slightly hallucinatory, their films are awesome.

This film opens on a war-game just before WW2 where the old bloated Home Guard is up against the sharp-eyed army. The dashing army's general laughingly barges into the private quarters of the Colonel of the home guard to take him prisoner. The Colonel is a fat, bewhiskered old man who bloviates and blusters and is the very image of an old fat pretentious fool. But he is the titular Colonel Blimp (actual name: Clive Candy. I don't know what Colonel Blimp refers to.) and we flash back, back into his past where we get to know him and, after two hours, discover that he is indeed an old fat pretentious fool.

But seeing him as an impetuous youth, growing older and more foolish, we begin to love him. He is idealistic, but the sort of gentlemanly idealist who invites his dueling opponent to drinks after this nasty duel is over with. Later, he cannot believe that after the armistice of WW1 is declared, that the British people are so mean as to still hate the Germans. He is hastily prevented from declaring on radio, shortly before going to war (this time against the Nazis,) that the Nazis are not a chivalrous people and that England would rather be defeated than win by less-than-chivalrous means. He is absurd, but he is grand. He thinks of himself as a common, tough but humble soldier but evokes a fragile ideal of something uniquely and un-ironically British that could barely survive the cruelties of the first world war (it is heavily implied his co-officers in WW1 do not share his ideals re. torture,) and will not survive the second. There is some hysterical business about Nazis here as well ("the most devilish idea ever created by a human brain: Nazism.")

A really moving film. This is what all those lame sincere dramas of the 50s and 60s were trying to imitate.