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By
SCOTT D. O'REILLY
One of the most remarkable
war films ever conceived, it was written,
produced, and directed by the legendary duo of
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger during the
height of WW II when Britain's very existence was
a matter of grave doubt. It was intended by the
filmmakers to capture something of the essence of
British character and British ideals, the hope
being that it would bolster the national spirit.
Winston Churchill didn't see the film that way,
and he reportedly sought to ban it. Today, sixty
years later, the film comes across not as a
propaganda effort but as a detailed and
authentically human character study. The character
of the title role was based on the Colonel Blimp
cartoon series popular at the time by political
satirist David Low. Blimp was conceived as a
dense, pompous figure of enormous girth and a
walrus mustache, given to astonishingly ignorant
pronouncements. At first glance Blimp is not the
kind of figure that would lend itself to a complex
and compelling screen portrayal in a serious war
epic. Yet it is a triumph of the Powell &
Pressburger vision, and Roger Livesey's
performance, that Colonel Blimp comes across as
one of the richest and most sympathetic characters
ever portrayed on screen. The role was originally
marked for Lawrence Olivier, but the role landed
in the lesser known Livesey's lap and he turned in
the performance of a lifetime. It is more than a
little ironic that most contemporary film
characters comes across as two-dimensional
cartoons, while Livesey managed to create such a
vivid and compelling portrait from a
two-dimensional cartoon figure.
The film follows the trajectory of Blimp's life
from his early service as a young officer in the
Boer war to an obsolescent anachronism of a leader
of the English Home Guard During WW II. The story
is told in flashback, and features several
pioneering cinematic devices to indicate the
passage of time, including the well admired scene
in the Turkish bath where the aged Blimp tumbles
into the water and emerges as a young man. The
film is about duty, love, friendship, moral
conviction, and patriotism in the finest sense of
the word. It contains not a single scene of actual
combat, yet it remains one of the most compelling
war films ever made. Powell and Pressburger imbue
every minute of this film with intelligence, wit,
and invention. The two would go on to make several
idiosyncratic, uncompromising films that pushed
the boundaries of film making, including cinematic
gems like "A Matter of Life and Death," "The Red
Shoes," and "Black Narcissus." But "Blimp" was
their first Technicolor collaboration, and the
first of their unqualified artistic successes.
"The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" was
drastically cut for it's American release, so much
so that its flashback structure was lost. Some low
budget VHS versions floating around feature this
truncated (115 min.) cut, which only hints at the
brilliance of the original British release. The
version released by Criterion, however, restores
the film to its original length of 163 minutes,
and features an exemplary digital restoration,
which captures the full glory of the British
Technicolor. DVD extras include a full-length
commentary by the late Michael Powell and
filmmaker Martin Scorsese, a David Low cartoon
Gallery, and a 24-minute documentary. |
