Part of The Archers Season - 1942 to 1957

Since I joined Letterboxd, I've only had reason to hit the 5 star button for a viewing of a film during my lifetime here on six occasions, and three of those were for films I'd seen before. Out of all them, I probably hit it for The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp twice as quick as for any of the rest of them. What a wonderful, wonderful film.

I did a little bit of reading up about it beforehand as I really did not know anything about it all and I have to say that I was a little bit daunted by it before I started. Not because of its…

Not yet the eye-piercing target of subsequent films, the Archers’ freshly-minted emblem is here the enchanted stamp on a vast, elaborate tapestry. Britannia during the Blitz is a rubicund, slumbering walrus (Roger Livesey), outraged by the new generation’s ungallant aggressiveness; his bushy mustache hides a scar, he was also a reckless blade once, four decades and three wars flash before his eyes. In the Edwardian Belle Époque the fussy old general is a Boer War officer, young and impudent enough to turn a diplomatic affair into an affront to the German Army. The symphonic first movement climaxes with the camera craning away from a duel just as swords are crossed, then finding the protagonist and his Prussian opponent (Anton Walbrook)…

Colonel Blimp is also, of course, a grand historical epic without pretense or theatrics, an unabashed wartime romance without a single scene of battle or love. Anticipated events and turnabouts of any significance are summarily excised, matters of the most consequence duly expurgated, until all that remains of the story in its truncated form are the details that make every life worth living, not the biographical bullet points but the white space between them. This is a film composed of gestures, a film whose most memorable moments are some of the most minor: a smile exchanged between strangers as they find themselves thrust into combat with one another (a parody of war's utterly arbitrary configurations), a beer-bribed brass band giving…

Film 56 of The December Project

You know it's a good epic when the thing's been going for two and a half hours and you still wish they'd shown more about events they've already covered. So it was with Colonel Blimp, a film I owned on DVD for six and a half years before watching it, partly intimidated by the running time and the subject matter.

There's very little left to say in the way of summarising and analysing Colonel Blimp, or is that because I'm friends with quite a few Powell & Pressburger fans? Though I never realised before that it must have been such an influence on Dad's Army.

It did take me a while to really warm to…

An epic life depiction similar in ways to Lawrence of Arabia (except severely lacking in the amount of 'epic' in comparison), Colonel Blimp tells the woes of military life and the struggle of keeping an adherence to morals despite the war and regret around the subject Clive Candy. "Right is might", Candy says after he realizes that the British morals he believes in has won The Great War. Candy is a character who defines morality in everything he does. Never a moment occurs where he doesn't follow it, whether it is confronting a young soldier on his techniques to befriending a German officer he has dueled with (creating a scar on Candy's lip that leads to him growing quite an…

Stunning. My first Powell & Pressburger film, the restored version at the Castro in S.F., and now I'm going to rearrange my viewing list to see more of their collaborations.

Some scattershot reactions: Easily one of the best war films - I always prefer when war films speak to the continuum of war, and this was a spirited, emotional entry, with a grace note about the continuum of love too. I actually thought Candy was played by two different actors at first, that's how remarkable the make-up was on Livesey. I guess it's poor criticism to talk about acting, especially in superlatives, but Livesey, Walbrook, and Kerr are all so indelible, and I'm tired and just feel like gushing instead of…

An epic life depiction similar in ways to Lawrence of Arabia (except severely lacking in the amount of 'epic' in comparison), Colonel Blimp tells the woes of military life and the struggle of keeping an adherence to morals despite the war and regret around the subject Clive Candy. "Right is might", Candy says after he realizes that the British morals he believes in has won The Great War. Candy is a character who defines morality in everything he does. Never a moment occurs where he doesn't follow it, whether it is confronting a young soldier on his techniques to befriending a German officer he has dueled with (creating a scar on Candy's lip that leads to him growing quite an…

The sheer visual power of this film is something that simply cannot be denied. It's a style so lush and enveloping that there is no way to escape it. The colors and emotions are so intense that they are able to leap from the screen and take you over, both body and soul. Those simple shots of floating leaves near the end of the film are just as powerful and resonant as anything Yasujiro Ozu ever concocted. Add to this the stellar performances on display and resistance is futile. I know people love to trumpet The Dark Knight as the high water mark in terms of cinematic adaptations of comics, but this film did it better. Twenty-seven years before Christopher…

An elegy for the old British way of life that may just have all of life (and movies) in it. An epic sweep of minute observations, of pride in good form that necessitates a certain level of obliviousness, of the military man's need for war emphasized only through the trophy heads that materialize in his rarely occupied home during peacetime, of romance revealed only in rearview as belatedly understood love sends shades of a never-aging ideal back into an older and older man's life to comfort and taunt him. A battleground's painted skies contain only the sound of birds taking their first tentative chirps at the cessation of hostilities, and low-key lighting blends with aging makeup to give further voice…

Have any filmmakers implanted their evocations so ardently in the fertile soils of other artisan realms as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger? Proffering their cinema as not only a protraction of life but also of art’s variable forms, the famed duo often call upon established means of expressions – and usually in juxtaposition of some sort of conflict or war – as if to suggest not only art’s importance to art but the everyday as well. Their 1948 masterwork, The Red Shoes, probably best encapsulates this reverberating dynamic, positing the multifarious nature of creation as, because of human pride, existing in something of a constant state of friction, its participants often striking discord rather than harmony in attempting to collaborate;…