The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
Directed by Michael Powell
General Candy, who's overseeing an English squad in 1943, is a veteran leader who doesn't have the respect of the men he's training and is considered out-of-touch with what's needed to win the war. But it wasn't always this way. Flashing back to his early career in the Boer War and World War I, we see a dashing young officer whose life has been shaped by three different women, and by a lasting friendship with a German soldier.
6 connections found
View:
6 connections, in both directions
What critics compared The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp to
It’s like the opener in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) that explained Harrison Ford’s chin scar—or perhaps more accurately, the titular character in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), who hid a facial scar behind his walrus mustache.
There is something of Powell & Pressburger’s The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp in its coda, in a military man mourning the death of honour…
Considering Powell & Pressburger could make a woman standing in front of a window in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp visually gorgeous…
His story is, after all, a story of Britishness, like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp .
Advertisement
There are direct allusions to films that have popped up frequently in Anderson’s oeuvre: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Man Escaped, L’enfance nue and many Lubitsch films.
Only someone madly obsessed with being the first to hail a new auteur, which is always a nice way of calling attention to oneself, could spend the time needed to find genius in the erratic works of Mr. Powell — "One of Our Aircraft Is Missing," "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp," "The Red Shoes," "Tales of Hoffman" and so on, all directed with Emeric Pressberger, and "Peeping Tom," which he directed alone.
Peeping Tom followed a train of successes from British filmmaker Michael Powell, who, along with scenarist Emric Pressberger, is responsible for The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp; Peeping Tom was critically rejected and banned, and although not his final film, it is seen as Powell’s career-ender.
Powell and Pressburger made some of the best and most successful films of the 1940s and '50s, including " The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp ," with Roger Livesey's great performance spanning three wars; " The Red Shoes ," with Moira Shearer as a ballet dancer; "Black Narcissus," with Deborah Kerr as a nun in the Himalayas, and " Stairway To Heaven (A Matter Of Life And Death) ," with David Niven as a dead airman.
The great, trailblazing director of "Stairway to Heaven" and "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" made only two more features before his death at 85 -- though he did see his own cinematic stature reestablished by younger admirers like Martin Scorsese, while "Peeping Tom's" sleazy rep evolved from cinematic scandal to movie classic.
Having established himself as a maestro of quality cinema with classics such as The Red Shoes (1948), Ill Met By Moonlight (1957), Battle of the River Plate (1956), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Powell took a sharp left turn with this shocker about a camera-wielding killer - and it cost him dearly.
This is the man who, with his partner Emeric Pressburger, had been a part of England's greatest filmmaking team with a string of wonderful and successful movies in the 40's: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), and Black Narcissus (1947).