The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

I implied last week when I did a post on the three-hour movie The Sand Pebbles that for me there's a running time beyond which most movies could probably stand some editing down; for me that point is usually about two and a half hours. It's something I was thinking of again as I finally got around to watching The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

The movie starts off at the height of World War II in the UK. The Home Guards are doing training exercises, with the "war" they're going to fight set to start at midnight. However, the young commander suggests that since this is supposed to be as realistic as feasible, and the enemy doesn't hold to a set of gentlemanly rules of war, why should they? Therefore, the war will start early and they'll have the element of surprise in capturing the enemy commander.

That commander is General Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey), who lives in one of those gentlemen's clubs that populated movies of the 1930s where men could go to spend the night if they've ticked off their wife or if they've gotten too drunk to make it home without creating a scene or somesuch. He's in the Turkish baths, unaware that he's about to be captured. But when he does get captured, it makes him think back on the last 40 years of his life....

In 1902, the much lower-ranking Candy, having recently returned from the Boer War where he earned a Victoria Cross, hears from an Englishwoman living in Berlin that the Germans are using him as propaganda to put out a bunch of lies about the way the British are treating the Boers in South Africa. So he proposes that he should go to Berlin and tell the Germans the truth. Not that they'll listen, of course. And not that his commanders think this is a good idea for his career.

So he goes off to Berlin to meet that woman, Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr). He falls in love with her, but also falling in love with her is a German officer, Theo Kretschmar Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook). Candy's comments cause all sorts of controversy which eventually leads to Candy being challenged by a duel, where he fights Theo. The duel is inconclusive as they both wind up with scars from which they need to convalesce, although they also wind up about as good friends as possible for people who don't really speak each other's language.

Fast forward to 1914, and the start of the Great War, said fast-forward being done with a montage of hunting trophies. Candy goes back into service and winds up in France in 1918, where the troops under his command have taken some Germans prisoner. Candy has reason to believe Theo is among them, and sure enough Theo does wind up a POW in England, only heading back to Germany in 1919. But more importantly, Candy is trying to get back to England on leave. His attempts to get a train bring him into contact with one of the English nurses, Barbara Wynne, who looks amazingly like Edith Hunter from Berlin all those years ago, which is unsurprising considering Barbara is played by Deborah Kerr as well. As you can guess from Livesey's character being named Wynne-Candy in the opening scene, Candy and Barbara get married.

It's not exactly a happy marriage, at least in the sense that they don't live happily ever after as Barbara dies tragically young. This leads Candy to do a lot more hunting, until the start of World War II. He's old by this point, and the Army would like to pension him off, although as a VC winner he's got enough clout to make that a problem for the younger command, which is why they put him in charge of the Home Guards instead. He gets an army driver in the form of Angela, nicknamed "Johnny", who reminds him of Barbara and Edith, which is again unsurprising since Angela too is played by Deborah Kerr.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is one of those movies that's well-acted and competently made, and looks lovely in Technicolor, but man does it seem slow. That's not much of a surprise since the movie runs 163 minutes. Director Michael Powell was trying to make a statement about a certain type of Briton -- at least in the eyes of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who wanted to ban the movie. Blimp, to me at least, represents the sort of old-fashioned colonial soldier we saw from C. Aubrey Smith in The Four Feathers, or the older generation getting pushed aside 15 years later in I'm Alright Jack, people who thought they'd win the war by being gentlemanly, as Candy himself says about the first World War.

I happen to know any number of Brits who take the relatively tedious to me attitude that if Johnny Foreigner does it one way, that way must be automatically wrong. But the people who take the diametrically opposed view that if John Bull does it one way, that way must be old-fashioned and wrong always come across as equally tedious to me. And that second sort of tedium really does bubble to the surface at times.

Still, the acting performances in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp are definitely to be recommended. It's just that if I were going to recommend Michael Powell movies to people who don't know much (if anything) about him, there are other movies I'd pick first.