How To Defeat The Nazis - The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943)

The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp.
Opening sequence and first few minutes of the film in question. The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp.
In the hands of Powell and Pressburger, Blimp became Major-General Clive Candy VC (Roger Livesey), whose career is traced from his early days as a headstrong young subaltern to crusty old age as a Home Guard officer in World War II. Using an elegant flashback device, the film locates Candy in three different years: 1902, 1918 and 1942. In each one, his life intertwines with those of a German officer, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), and three women (all played by Deborah Kerr) with whom the romantic but reactionary Candy falls in love.

The film opens with Candy slumped like an old bull walrus in the Royal Bathers steam room, draped with towels, his bald pate drenched with sweat. In this refuge, he is surprised and taken prisoner in a pre-emptive strike by an eager-beaver young army officer, his opponent in a Home Guard exercise.

The war begins at midnight! splutters the old tusker as he wrestles his nemesis into the pool. As they both disappear in clouds of steam, we are plunged back into Candys history and, by implication, into the history of Britain.

Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The: BFI Film Classics
http://filmstore.bfi.org.uk/acatalog/info_273.html
Winston Churchill hated The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and tried to have it banned when it was released in 1943. But Martin Scorsese, a champion of directors, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, consider it a masterpiece.
A.L. Kennedy, writing as a Scot, is fascinated by the nationalism which The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp explores. She finds human worth in the film and the pathos of stifled emotions and unfulfilled lives. 'If he is unaware of his passions,' she writes of Clive Candy, the films central figure, 'this is because his pains have become habitual, a part of personality, and because he was never taught a language that could speak of emotions like pain.'

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The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• colonel
• blimp
• Powell
• Pressburger

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