" The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp." At the
Odeon.
THE CINEMA
Im The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have set out to slay a dragon and have finished up by staying for a peg in the dear old monster's club. In fact they all get on so well that I for one am left in considerable doubt as to whether they intended the, old creature any harm in the first place. It is this feeling of half-heartedness about the hue and cry that makes the film so puzzling. Here is a long, expensive production hailed in advance as the major war-time work of the writer-director team which made 49th Parallel, and when it is over one is com- pletely baffled by its istentions. For my own part I found it to be excellent propaganda for Colonel Blimp. At the same time, it is clear that this Colonel Blimp is not the same bumbling political
reactionary who originally bore the name. In the film he is nothing more than an old-fashioned soldier who believes in what is repre- sented to be an out-of-date code of military behaviour and who must regretfully be retired because he is too much of a gentleman to use underhand methods of fighting. (One curious episode of the last war appears to recommend to us the torturing of prisoners as a means of obtaining information, a method which Colonel Blimp refuses to employ.) Is it surprising that by the end of the film we feel for the stiff-necked old gentleman a sympathy which certainly was never aroused by Low's pot-bellied tyrant? The Low character was essentially a political rather than a military figure, an ally of Fascism (conscious or unconscious) and an opponent of social pro- gress who was prepared to use the most unscrupulous means to grind the noses of the common people into the dust. That he should have been rehabilitated by this film in new Technicolor raiment and paraded as an ageing symbol of "British fair-play" is indeed one of the more extraordinary quirks of war.
Much of the reason for the reinflation of Blimp may be found in the nostalgia which appears inevitably to attach itself to the historical film. For Blimp (Roger Livesey) is first met as a dashing young Boer War V.C. off to Berlin to restore British prestige. In this he fails, but he finds a life-long friend in the shape of a Uhlan officer (Anton Walbrook) and an English governess (Deborah Kerr) whose face is to haunt him to his dying day, and, indeed, is mysteriously to manifest itself twice more in his life, first as the face a the Great War nurse whom he marries, and finally as a medium for the pert wise-cracks of his M.T.C. driver of the nineteen-forties. Blimp, known in the film as General " Sugar " Candy, V.C., is the central figure in each of the episodes which trace the history of our relationship with the Germans through forty years. Inevitably he becomes the hero of the saga. His Uhlan friend, our prisoner in the last war, our anti-Nazi ally in this, recommends that Nazi un- scrupulousness be matched by the same qualities in our own war- making. We are at one with Blimp in being unconvinced, and the original issue of the film is lost in a welter of sentimentality and a nostalgia for the airs and graces of the past. The propaganda has boomeranged back and left us weeping for the honourable duelling
scar beneath the walrus moustache. EDGAR ANSTEY.
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