Keen-eyed reader(s) may have noted a recent lull in posting. This is because our lives have been fairly hectic of late, so we haven't done any interesting non-work activities or had time to watch films. So I came up with an idea: we should watch super-long films that we've always meant to watch in 40 minutes to an hour-long blocks (which is all the time we have time or energy for at the moment). In other words, treat a long film like a television show that we binge on successive nights. First up: Colonel Blimp. This is one of the longer films in
our 50-film set that we bought probably ten years or more ago, which is why we haven't watched it before. Well, in the interim we have become quite fond of the work of
The Archers (which is why I pushed this over worthier fare like
Ikiru or
Andrei Rublev), so I looked forward to this, supposedly their "first masterpiece". And it did not disappoint. The title is misleading: it would have made contemporary viewers think they were seeing a film version of
David Low's Colonel Blimp character, very much a stuffy, conservative caricature. But not only does the main character, wonderfully played over a 40-year time span (with very effective aging effects) by
Roger Livesy, not die, he isn't even called Blimp. And, furthermore, Major General Clive "Suggie" Wynn-Candy is far from being stuffy or ridiculous. While he does have a regrettable fondness for big-game hunting, especially in times of grief or personal tragedy, he is a wonderfully warm, lovable, generous individual. Particularly noteworthy is the bond that develops between him and a German officer, whom he first meets in Berlin in 1902 (where he is on a complicated mission to root out a person spreading false stories about British atrocities in the Boer War in the German press) called
Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff. His first encounter is not auspicious: Theo is the officer who comes forward to duel him (for reasons that weren't too clear to me)
and they end up both staying in the same convalescent hospital for weeks thereafter, nursing the scars they dealt each other (Clive's requires him ever after to sport Blimp's famous mustache), bonding over cards. They also bond over Deborah Kerr, who plays three different roles as Clive's (and, one understands, Michael Powell's) ideal woman across three periods of time. This first time
he loses her (gladly at first, but later he rues it) to Theo. The next time, when he meets her as a nurse in WWI, he marries her, only to lose her to an early death not too many years later (which brings on another spurt of large-animal slaughter). Finally, she shows up as his driver
in the bookending sections of the film set in WWII, when he has finally transformed into the fat, bald Blimp.
Theo's attitude to Clive vacillates: he loves him at first, then resents him when he is the loser in WWI, then he resumes his fondness after he flees Germany to avoid following his sons into the Nazi party. He both loves and is exasperated by his upright English friend, whose attitude to war as a game that should be played by honorable rules (itself of course a piece of outrageous pro-British propaganda, of the kind the Archers had been turning out in their earliest films) is no longer suited to a Nazi-haunted world. Clive is demoted to the Home Guard (it's a funny parallel that his butler (and WWI driver) Murdoch is played by
John Laurie, who many years later went on to a well-known role in
Dad's Army), and defeated in an exercise by a whipper-snapper who isn't afraid to bend the rules. All in all, a poignant but charming portrait of a man whose time was past, if ever it really existed, and a great success for my new policy of films-by-installment, because we probably would never have got round to watching this nearly 3 hour long film otherwise.
