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Rating: Everyone has their own paraphilias: there's someone who at least once a week feels the irresistible urge to shell and devour a kilo of salted pistachios, there's someone who loves to fornicate with car exhaust pipes, and there's even someone who can't live without Led Zeppelin. As for me, nothing can delight my palate as much as the finely fragrant mold that emanates from every English Old Fashioned Movie that truly is such a thing.
And here we are not talking about a frugal lunch of club sandwiches, but an opulent gala dinner with liveried waiters and twenty-five courses, from lamb consommé to pineapple carved in the shape of a swan.
Early 1900s. Berlin, military Gymnasium, 7 in the morning.
A mocking English colonel and a serious German officer engage in a duel with all the due formalities. We observe the entire ceremonious etiquette expected in cases like this, but as the sabers clash, the camera rises, in a continuous movement, first to the height of the roof beams and then as a bird's-eye view out of the gymnasium, into the snowy air of that still dark morning; only to descend outside the building's perimeter, concluding its arc on the frosted window of a carriage lingering in front of the gate. Inside, a woman in anxious waiting clears the glass with her hand.
(All the cinema of Powell & Pressburger can be said to be summarized in this savoir-faire with the camera.)
It's 1943, both inside and outside the film. For some weeks now, the freezing of German troops in the indigestible siege of Stalingrad has opened a small breach in the Nazi indissolubility, perhaps hinting at a near end to the war. In this bombed Europe, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is being screened, not without Winston Churchill's disfavour.
In London, a young and impudent sneering lieutenant bursts into the city's Turkish baths with a squad of soldiers in tow, unknowingly shattering the entire Weltanschauung of the old General Clive Wynne-Candy. The latter, irritated, ruddy, walrus-moustached, naked and dripping with sweat, drags the sneering lieutenant by the collar into the steaming bath, plunging his snout underwater. A leap backward of forty years —to the enchanted echo of forty years ago… forty years ago…— sets the magical carousel of the narrative in motion. Apparently, some clever person must have read too little of the Arabian Nights and thought it wise, in the Italian version, to cut the entire prologue under the pretext of excessive length, completely severing what is the very essence of the film. Indeed, in the following one hundred and fifty minutes, the stern figure of the old General will gain the depth that only a Bildungsroman on film like this, with the patient indulgence of the viewer, can unfold before us.
But let's proceed in order.
Everything begins with the character of Colonel Blimp, whom the hand and mind of the satirical cartoonist David Low made so famous in wartime England that he even settled into common parlance. A Colonel Blimp is a rotund, pompous, irascible, and reactionary man, dispensing sentences from the warmth of his beloved Turkish bath, deciding the fates of entire battalions of English soldiers. Colonel Blimp is Wynne-Candy. Or, at least, that's what Powell & Pressburger enjoy making us believe at the start.
More than anyone else, the Englishman Michael Powell and the Hungarian Imre József Pressburger conceived their first feature film as a symphonic suite, where each part gains its own meaning in the order and view of the whole, or like a teeming living fresco. The whole, certainly, can and should appear unreal and even contrived, at times. But who says that art must necessarily be imitatio naturae?
We left off at the flashback. The General Wynne-Candy, whom the audience at the time could only immediately identify with the Colonel Blimp giving the film its title, exclaimed against the young sneering lieutenant something like: you laugh at me, but how do you know what sort of a fellow I was when I was as young as you, forty years ago?
Now it's 1903 and we see at the other end of the bath of that same Turkish bath a young and impudent lieutenant, Clive “Sweet” Candy. Due to his recklessness and naivety, he finds himself having to duel a German soldier unknown to him, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorf, who represents the entire army he offended at the Café Hohenzollern.
The subsequent forty years of the English lieutenant's life, which parade before us with rare grace and acumen, revolve around the fluctuating friendship of Sweet Candy with the German officer —a fact that certainly could not leave Churchill indifferent: this indeed cost The Archers, Powell & Pressburger's production company, some serious dressing downs and the suspension of state funding for cinema—and, almost like a continuous bass, around the English general's obsession with a woman, Deborah Kerr, embodied in turn as an English lady stationed in Berlin, a Red Cross nurse encountered one night in a French convent, and a military driver. First: a parade of colorful cafés, theatres, luxurious hotels, and embassies, then: the gray and muddy trenches of the Fourteen-Eighteen war, then again: the late 1930s London, leaden and weighed down by an oppressive burden.
With this plot and weave in hand, the two wise craftsmen of unreality weave, lightening everything with that so typically English sense of humor and with narrative devices as classic as they are fitting, a tapestry of a bitter yet festive flavor. Like a country carousel at the end of summer.
Thus, what at the beginning seemed clear and evident turned out to be nuanced and complex, like everything seen whole: the stern General Wynne-Candy doesn't seem so stern anymore, nor does the young and impudent lieutenant so sneering, in the end.
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