The Amazingness That Is "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp"

This blog is quickly turning into a trip down movie memory lane for me.... I'll stop soon I swear, but not quite yet.

This afternoon I watched "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" (1943), one of my favourite English films of all time. It always stuns me that this movie isn't more of a classic even among cineastes, it's this little gem that no one seems to know about, or if they have heard of it they've never watched it. I discovered it at a screening at the Toronto Film Festival in 1998 (back when it was still called the Festival of Festivals) and I cannot remember what made me curious to see it. But once it ended, I was so friggin' glad I'd gone because I had discovered a stone cold classic.

This movie is great for so many reasons. Director Michael Powell and lead actor Roger Livesey are at the absolute top of their game here. Livesey, as the title character Clive Wynn-Candy, an English career soldier, delivers the performance of a lifetime, playing the character from his 20's at the turn of the century to his 60's during WWII. Many actors in many films have played characters who go from young to old, but I can't think of a single performance that comes even close to this. The whole film is told in flashback, starting in WWII with Wynn-Candy so clearly the old, blustery "Blimp" of the title, and promptly jumps back to him as a vigorous, cocky young man. He's so convincing as the elder Wynn-Candy in the beginning of the film that the first time I saw it, when they flashback to him as a young man, I actually thought that the younger Wynn-Candy was played by another actor (never mind them fancy Benjamin Button CGI effects, this is the real deal!!). The aging makeup alone is pretty impressive but it's Livesey who sells the illusion so completely and truly brings the character to life, going from a brash young soldier who inadvertently insults his way into a duel with a complete stranger, to the old, bloated officer who has survived into his own obsolescence. Livesey was in his mid 30's when the film was shot, so the fact that he could play such extremes of age so convincingly is a testament to his talent. Yet despite all this, Livesey doesn't seem to have ever received the acclaim for the part that he so richly deserved, even at the time the film was released. Even in the many different posters for the film, he gets third billing after his co-stars Anton Walbrook and Deborah Kerr, and he's the title character! Only on one of the most recent DVD releases is Livesey's face - as the balding, mustachioed Blimp - front and centre.

Anton Walbrook (the Austrian actor changed his name from "Adolph" for obvious reasons) plays Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, the German soldier Wynn-Candy duels and who quickly becomes his comrade-in-arms, in spirit if not in country. As a German soldier, he learns his life lessons much more bluntly than Wynn-Candy, surviving through two world wars that humiliate his honour and his people, and losing his sons to the Nazis. Walbrook also has the big acting setpiece of the film, a monologue about his life as he petitions to leave Germany and emigrate to England, in which he comes to embody the tormented soul of his country. The film was made in England during WWII, so the fact that one of the main characters is German, and a very sympathetic one at that, is a minor miracle. (see another Michael Powell film "The 49th Parallel" for another great Walbrook performance, again as a sympathetic German living in Canada during the war). Livesey and Walbrook play off each other brilliantly, and if Livesey is the showy Jagger of the film, then Walbrook is the heart and soul Richards.

Any normal actress would be smothered by these two brilliant performances, but Deborah Kerr is more than up to the task. Her presence in the film is equally showy, as she plays three different roles - the nurse who they both love and Kretschmar-Schuldorff eventually marries, the officer who Wynn-Candy marries in WWI, and finally Wynn-Candy's driver in WWII - each one very different than the last. This gives the film a little fairy tale-like quality, this ageless presence that pass through their lives again and again, a reminder of their past innocence, while Livesey and Walbrook get older and more worn down.

Director Michael Powell and his writing and producing partner Emerich Pressburger were doing some of their best work during this period - "49th Parallel", "Tales of Hoffman", "A Matter of Life and Death", "I Know Where I'm Going" - and this film is their masterpiece. Powell had a directing style that often relished in the artifice of film, and that is in full effect here, from the plot that circles from 1943 to 1903 back to 1943, to Deborah Kerr playing three different roles, to the makeup transformation of Livesy from cocky young soldier to the balding, bloated "Colonel Blimp" When, towards the end of the film, they reveal Livesy in his final incarnation, when he has fully aged into the man we saw at the beginning of the film, Powell lets the camera linger on him for an extra moment as if to say "Yeah it's him, pretty cool makeup effects huh?" Even in the famous/infamous hunting trophy montage - where the passage of years is depicted by a string of animal head trophies appearing on Wynn-Candy's wall - though it may seem dated to a politically correct 21st century audience, Powell creates an entirely appropriate visual metaphor for what Blimp is: a man from a bygone era completely out of step with the times.

For a history buff, it's a great film too, not for any historical accuracy per se, but because, by following the career soldier Wynn-Candy from the very formal, very antiquated rules of combat in the fencing duel early in the film, to the no-holes-barred, by-any-means-necessary attitude of the young soldiers in WWII at the end, one is watching the birth of the 20th century. Between Wynn-Candy and Kretschmar-Schuldorff and their enemies-as-comrades attitude, war seems almost like a gentleman's game, a noble enterprise, but when in the final WWII sequence, Wynn-Candy learns the hard way the way how wars are fought in this new world, one can't help feeling, as "Blimp" obviously does, that something irretrievable has been lost. As foolish as the rules of conduct that forced them to duel in the first place seem, not just to a modern audience but even to Wynn-Candy and Kretschmar-Schuldorff, their lifelong friendship by the end of the story shows that there was something that actually was "good" about the "good old days", and that the modern, more brutal world has no place for their kind of camaraderie.

The movie takes an old blowhard like "Blimp", who would be a punchline or a peripheral character in any other story, puts him front and centre, takes you on the journey of his life, and makes him a fully realized and deeply sympathetic character. And you find out that under that old man mustache are the scars, both physical and emotional, of a life lived.

So what are you waiting for? Rent it already!!!