Film Notes: Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) film notes by Tova Gannana for our Enchanted Evenings: The Boundless Cinema of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger series, running September to November 2024 at SIFF Cinema Egyptian. Follow Tova on Instagram: @tovagannana

The series is presented by The British Film Institute, SIFF, and Greg Olson Productions. Passes and tickets available now.

In 1988, filmmakers Michael Powell and Martin Scorsese recorded an audio commentary to accompany The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943). Listening to them converse while watching the film is like reading liner notes on the back of an album while listening to the record.

Powell recalls much from the war years in England. Speaking about the hospital scene in Germany following the duel between Major General Clive Wynne Candy (Roger Livesy) and Imperial German Army Officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), Powell said, “It was very difficult for us to do this scene, the reason why we just didn’t have any men. I very nearly resorted to dressing women up as guards. By that time in the war, it was 1942 and every able-bodied man was in something or other. And to have a scene with guards, officers, it’s quite impossible.”

Later on, in the POW camp in England, German soldiers lay on the grass listening to Mendelsohn, Theo among them. Powell tells how creative they had to be to fill in the scene: “This is interesting because you see about 250 Germans standing about, sitting in a line on the grass listening to the concert and at least 200 of the 250 are plaster figures. I had different poses – sitting on the ground, standing up – and they made about 50 of each dressed up in German uniforms. Just toss them around. And then the live extras sat down with them, got away with it beautifully.”

This was movie making in wartime England. Powell and his partner Emeric Pressburger got rebuked by Winston Churchill, who hadn’t read the script but worried that the film wouldn’t lean enough in British favor. Powell and Pressburger made the film anyway, despite the difficulties they faced, because Britain is a democracy and the prime minister doesn’t have the power to stop a film from being made.

The Life And Death Of Colonel Powell was aired in the early 1950s in black and white on public television. A 10-year-old Martin Scorsese saw this version, cut from almost three hours to 90 minutes. Scorsese recalls how the nature of the film interested him, “that it encompasses forty years of a man’s life, the sense of history of the film, and the period detail of the film. I found that the picture stayed with me over the years.” Moreover, the film’s style stayed with him: “I found the surprise of his way of telling the story seemed to stay with me. For years we tried to track down a complete print of The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp. I’d say we discovered the film over a period of twenty years rather than at one time.”

This shows how a film is akin to a painting or a book: It can be shelved, altered, passed from gallery to library to museum. There are those who will track it down, memorize it, internalize it. Something of the film will follow you around: the lighting, the dialogue, the attention to detail.

Powell said that actor Roger Livesy had an “honest face”. Livesy brings to mind the 1930s British cartoon character Colonel Blimp, who was more often than not wrapped in a towel after his bath. Livesy, with a voice both melodic and sincere, brings more than bumbling to the role of Blimp: He’s steadfast and stubborn, and an optimist. Scorsese said that the film is about “How people fight wars” and “tradition and ritual.” Livesy as Major General Clive Wynne-Candy plays a man who is a lifelong soldier; he has no children.

Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff is played by Anton Walbrook, a Jew who left Austria in 1936, and made films in Hollywood and then Britain. In The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, Walbrook playing a German Army Officer deflects to Britain during WWII, in an immigration office, where he tells his reasons why he left Germany, Walbrook could just as well have been speaking for himself: “You know that after the war we had very bad years in Germany. We got poorer and poorer. Every day, retired officers and schoolteachers were caught shoplifting. Money lost its value. The price of everything rose, except of human beings. We read in the papers, of course, that the after-war years were bad everywhere. That crime was increasing and that the honest citizens were having a hard job to put the gangsters in jail. Well, I needn’t tell you, Sir, that in Germany the gangsters finally succeeded in putting the honest citizens in jail.”

Powell said that Pressburger wrote the scene from his own experience: “I imagine a good deal of the dialogue here was noted by Emeric in his own examination, of which he had several. Because at the time we made the film during the whole of the war, he was classified as an enemy alien, and all these great propaganda films were written by an ‘enemy alien’. He was Hungarian born. Hungarian, Jewish. He’d taken himself out of Berlin in 1933.”

Powell directed the scene through audio, as though he was listening to Walbrook and Pressburger: “The sound here is important. If you notice, I gradually take the background sound out until there’s no background sound at all. Only the speech. And then when he finishes the speech, gradually all the sound comes flooding back again.” The room becomes like the Red Sea receding; Walkbrook as Kretschmar-Schuldorff is telling his way to freedom. Powell directs the British bureaucrats in the room to listen. The audience follows.

The film is also about friendship. Clive comes to the immigration office to vouch for Theo, an enemy alien, played by Walbrook, a Jewish refugee; Clive is played by Livesy, an Englishman with history and family solidly rooted in his country of origin. Pressburger wrote the speech spoken by Walbrook, directed by Powell, who like Livesy, was vouching for his friend. The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp becomes a story within a story, inside history, inside a war, made in friendship.

Who are the offspring of the eternal soldier? While all are going about their lives, Colonel Blimp is toweled and after a bath, but not Major General Wynne-Candy. He is evolving. Throughout the film, he suffers. But his willingness to be persuaded, to hear another side, to be convinced, does not suffer. Likewise, Theo’s two English phrases in the beginning of the film are “Very much” and “Not very much”, both of which are openings, exhibiting vulnerability, a willingness to try, just as Theo is open to friendship with Clive. In the 40 years of their knowing one another, there are times when it becomes too much for Theo. As a German, he balks. He was defeated by Britain in WWI. But it is Theo who convinces Clive at the end of the film that to defeat the Nazis, Clive must keep fighting: “This is not a gentlemen’s war. This time you are fighting for your very existence against the most devilish idea ever created by a human brain: Nazism. And if you lose, there won’t be a return match next year.”

Powell tells Scorsese of the power of this scene: “Imagine how wonderful this scene would have been for a German actor in the middle of the war, if they were to say these things on all the screens of the world. Emeric knew only a German can say this and make it hurt at all. If an Englishmen says it, what does it mean?”

Recall that this film was made in 1943, with Churchill and his cabinet in the war rooms, with Londoners living through blackouts and German bombings. And yet the film doesn’t show any battles, rather just interactions, conversations, and confrontations. Over the course of the film, we see various generations of soldiers, their attitudes and experiences of war changing. Powell shows this through costuming; Presburger through dialogue.

Deborah Kerr plays three different women: Edith Hunter, Barbara Wynne, and Angela “Johnny” Carson. If Livesy plays the eternal soldier, then Kerr plays the one who got away, the wife who died tragically, the young woman who fights alongside the men. Whenever Kerr is on screen, Powell speaks proudly of her, how she was only 21, yet had so much depth as an actress, brought so much intelligence to her roles. He talks about how period dressing helped Kerr portray all three characters authentically: “I hope you like the way Deborah looks. Particularly the way she moves. I was very particular about corsets. You can’t possibly play different women in different ages unless the foundation garments are right, I said to the art department. Now somebody – preferably a sculptor or painter – that’s gonna be put on these costumes. We’ve got to change the shape of the woman. The first time you see this young woman, she’s all in real lace-up corsets. You can tell by the way she moves. In the 1914 war, women threw away corsets and were fighting with the men. And so her body had to be much freer, but not as free as it was in the 1940s.”

“I have no comment to make about this scene,” Powell says to Scorsese as Theo tells Clive that Edith and him are in love. “I think it is just a perfect scene. Two men play together so well, and you really feel that there’s a real friendship that can be between two men.” Powell describes not only the friendship between Theo and Clive, but between the actors Walbrook and Livesy, between himself and Pressburger, and his new friendship with Scorsese, all because of a film: the making, the writing, the researching, the experience of being alive in whatever time you turn up in. Colonel Blimp on screen and in the comic strip was childless, but the film, because of its nature and style, continues to bear fruit.