The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
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The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp Movie Review
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is a 1943 British romantic war film directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and starring Roger Livesey and Deborah Kerr. It’s quite an accomplished, thematically rich movie that is still slightly overrated.
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“My English is not very much,
but my friendship for you is very much“
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General Candy, who’s overseeing an English squad in 1943, is a veteran leader who doesn’t have the respect of the men he’s training and is considered out-of-touch with what’s needed to win the war. But it wasn’t always this way. Flashing back to his early career in the Boer War and World War I, we see a dashing young officer whose life has been shaped by three different women, and by a lasting friendship with a German soldier.
This is the main premise behind this rather unusual war movie that is unlike anything I’ve seen before for better and for worse. It is one of those films that I admire much more than I enjoyed while actually watching it. In fact, at over two and a half hours the movie was a chore to sit through. Couple that with a problematic, though innovative structure and you’ve got a flawed, but admirable experiment in filmmaking.
Exploring what it means to grow old and how the young constantly disrespect the older generations, the film is timeless in that theme, even more relevant today when younger people hold even less respect for the elderly than they did before. How the movie also treated war was interesting and different from the time.
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By for example entirely cutting and not showing one duel near the beginning and properly evading the more bombastic approaches from Hollywood during the war years, the film is very much modern in its exploration of how war affects people psychologically. The film also functions as a sweet romance and a great friendship story while throughout in essence being very British in its feel and tone. It even deals with what it means to be a British person, which definitely made it perfect for that intended audience, but rather limited in appeal for everybody else who isn’t from the UK.
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp has a flashback structure that was quite intriguing and again very modern. It is easy to see why modern audiences would appreciate Powell and Pressburger more than other directors from the period as they were very much ahead of their time in terms of their filmmaking style and flourishes. My issue with this approach and the emphasis on so many different themes and tones is that the movie ended up being tonally and thematically somewhat incoherent, overly complicated and not as streamlined as I would have hoped for.
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Roger Livesey was terrific in the main role and quite competent at emoting and depicting the protagonist’s complex emotions throughout. Deborah Kerr was of course just as fantastic as she always was and all of her scenes were very memorable. The characterization in this movie is solid and so is the dialogue, but something about this movie prevented me from enjoying it more, which is probably it being extremely British in style and sporadic humor. The Technicolor cinematography is gorgeous and the editing accomplished, but I wished for a much shorter runtime in this instance.
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is a film that I ended up admiring afterward much more than enjoying it while I was watching it. Thematically rich, beautifully acted and gorgeously shot in Technicolor, the movie was also surprisingly modern in its treatment of the subject of war, the passage of time and how younger people treat the older generations. Even though the flashback structure was unique and ahead of its time, the movie ended up being too convoluted in a number of characters and themes incorporated and the staggering runtime did not help matters at all. In tone and dialogue it’s such a British movie for better and for worse.
My Rating – 4
This is the fourth film in my th3ee series where I will cover one film per decade that is having an anniversary this year, from 1913 to 2013. Next up is the year 1953 where I chose How to Marry a Millionaire. Keep an eye on that one as well.
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