In the opening sequence of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)— considered by some the greatest British film ever made—a young army officer commanding a mock invasion receives orders to attack at midnight but, citing the surprise assault on Pearl Harbor, instead moves in at 6 PM. When he and his men arrive at a Turkish bath in London and capture the enemy commander, a rotund old major general wearing nothing but a towel and a walrus mustache, the younger man can’t resist jeering at him and his quaint code of honor. Enraged, the old man charges him, and they go tumbling into a pool. “You laugh at my big belly, but you don’t know how I got it,” shouts the old man as he thrashes the younger one. “You laugh at my mustache, but you don’t know why I grew it. How do you know what sort of fellow I was when I was as young as you are, 40 years ago?” Forty years ago . . . The words echo as a flashback transports us to his youth.
When Scorsese’s clipped delivery gives way to Powell’s enfeebled voice, the contrast is startling. One might chalk this up to simple biology—Powell was about ten years older when he recorded his commentary than Scorsese was when he recorded his—but you can also hear in their remarks the difference between an artist who’s still going strong and another who has nothing left to do but reminisce. Powell shows great fondness for some of the long-forgotten character actors in the film (Roland Culver, playing the starchy Colonel Betteridge; Muriel Aked, playing Candy’s sharp-tongued Aunt Margaret) and returns again and again to Deborah Kerr, noting her impressive maturity as an actress (she was only 20 at the time, playing characters that were considerably older). Powell even mentions that he’s just received a Christmas card from Kerr; only from a making-of documentary does one learn that, in a real-life echo of Clive Candy, Powell was madly in love with her.
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
