-Devdutt Trivedi
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp(1943) is perhaps the most important of the Powell and Pressburger collaborations. The film has become a benchmark for the films produced by the British studio system and their sophisticated use of camera and editing in certain areas in the 1940s that would be established techniques in American and European film craft only by the ‘60s. The character of Colonel Blimp was based on the comics of David Low during the war. In these graphic novels, Blimp was a fascistic caricature of a member of the British military, who in the author’s words ‘was a symbol of stupidity, and stupid people are quite nice.’ The film was modified after oppositions to its controversial opinion of the British military, to a shorted 120 minute version which alongside cutting out several scenes from the film, also sacrificed the flashback structure of the film, so that in Martin Scorsese’s words ‘the motivation was cut out.’
The idea for the film however did not center around Low’s cartoon character but on an idea that struck Michael Powell while filming his work One of Our Aircrafts is Missing (1942). David Lean, the film editor, who would go onto become a film maker of great repute, was struck by a sequence where an older officer talks to a younger one and thought it had the potential of becoming an entire film. The film would be about being old and its context within the army, to point out the transformation of specific rituals that men associated it and were proud of. These rituals point out the act of battle as being far removed from the act of violence or simply the act of dying. In the process the film makers attempt to, through the character of Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff differentiate between a German and a Nazi, and in this way, much like the character of Colonel Blimp poke fun at the British conservatives.
The film was produced by The Archers, a production company founded by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The film was made on a budget of £188,000, but was only restored to its original form with its restoration in 1983. The film was only exported to America after the war in 1945. Notable in the film is the career-best performance by Roger Livesey as Clive Wynne-Candy, whose character served as a commentary on, instead of a direct adaptation, of Low’s Blimp. He finds excellent accompaniment in the part played by Anton Walbrook, who also plays significant parts in Powell and Pressburger’s other most important works such as 49th Parallel (1941) and The Red Shoes (1948), as the human German, Kretschmar-Schuldorff. The original choices for the two parts of Candy and Kretschmar-Schuldorff were Laurence Olivier and James Mason. However the director-scriptwriter duo found excellent replacements in their final choices.
The film has several remarkable features none more striking than its use of colour. Scorsese compliments the use of Technicolor by the British in the Golden Era of the British studio system, by mentioning that it was much more sophisticated than the use of Technicolour in Hollywood at the same time. Scorsese points out that the sophistication came out of the process to develop the images namely the chemicals use in the developer
bath.Remarkable is the sequence in the party sequence in the beginning where the colouring in the frame moves from red to black, from red on the left to black on the right with a waiter in the center wearing a suit that is black in the front and red at the back. Powell and Pressburger will continue this interest in movement and its relationship with music. Eisenstein himself was very engaged with this in the ice battle in Alexander Nevsky(1938) and was impressed with Walt Disney’s matching of music with image. Powell and Pressburger match the movement of the waiter to the carefully choreographed camera movement as well as music. According to Scorsese this captures the effect of a mood ballet in a film that otherwise fulfills the requirements of the drama genre. The subsidiary actors move in the frame like ballet dancers, which can be read as a combination with Lubitsch’s obsession with minor character parts usually from the butler class with his interest in musicals. This act of movement, almost like a dance within the sequence creates a movement-image, where narrative, camera and character-actor movement become one.
Another important sequence is the one where Wynne-Candy’s escapades are shown in the form of a montage. Instead of showing a montage of Wynne-Candy hunting in different parts of the world, Powell and Pressburger restrict the action to a single location, the wall of Wynne-Candy’s drawing room with a remarkable chiaroscuro of him on the wall, followed by a series of cuts with successive additions to his collection of stuffed animals. This form of editing influenced montage-driven film makers in the post-modern era, such as Martin Scorsese in that master class in montage, Mean Streets (1973) and more recently Darren Aronofsky in his early works Pi (1998) and Requiem for a Dream (2001). The sequence uses camera movement in a unique way closer to a Welles or Ophuls and Powell himself insisted that the montage sequence ‘would have been done better by Ophuls.’
Another startling technique used in the film is the remarkable back projections with Kerr and Livesey in the foreground on a soundstage in the studio, and the backprojection seamlessly merging with the action in the foreground. These back projections are synthesized to perfection by the work of the significant cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who went on to shoot Powell and Pressburger’s succeeding films Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). He also shot some of Hollywood’s most important colour works of the period such as Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949) and Joseph L. Manckiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954).
The last sequence of the film, with Wynne-Candy not being allowed to broadcast at the station was taken from a real life incident of an old colonel who was not allowed to give an interview at the BBC Underground because Churchill thought that the liberal comments passed by him may be read as anti-war statements weakening Churchill’s own pro-war propaganda. Churchill had problems with the sequence in the film as well and delayed the distribution of the film till 1945.
The last sequences of the film, where Kretschmar-Schuldorff returns to England in the hope of escaping the Nazis, once again bring back the theme of differentiating between a Nazi and a German. The sentiments portrayed through Walbrook’s excellent performance
highlight the sentiments of Emeric Pressburger, who had fled from Hungary and became quite an Anglophile after settling down in England.
Courtesy
Martin Scorsese & The Criterion Collection
Carlton International