A trip to the Film Forum when I was in New York around Thanksgiving gave me the privilege of seeing The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The promotional material cited the movie as “England’s greatest film” and “better than Citizen Kane” and so forth; but these are about as useful as the blurbs on the backs of modern books; Blimp is a good movie but hardly great. The directing is uneven, some of it is kitschy, as a movie it is far too “stagey,” being evidently conceived for the theater rather than the screen, and it is shot in the old Technicolor which looks so artificial. But still, the movie was good, and pleasingly subtle.
The main character is a British officer by the name of Clive Candy; the term “Colonel Blimp,” never used in the movie, was contemporary usage (the movie was made in 1943) to describe Britain’s old guard of officers, trained in the Boer War and veterans of World War I, who thought that you could hardly be a good soldi-er (three syllables) without bayonet and saber training. These officers proved utterly useless fighting against the Luftwaffe and German Panzer divisions, and were relieved of command after a series of catastrophic losses. Candy is meant to be one of them; and the movie documents his career from winning a Victoria Cross in the Boer War to the evacuation at Dunkirk.
This is one of the magical powers of the cinema, to thus present forty years of history in a few hours; at the beginning of the film the streets look like Manet paintings of Paris, horses, dark suits, bowl hats, and the soldiers might be from a Pushkin story, in bright British red with gold helmets and fantastic plumes; by the end General Candy is in a BBC studio, being told by a lawyer in perfectly modern dress (it is amazing how little male formal attire has changed in the last 70 years) that his radio address is being canceled because of P.R. Reasons. In each scene Candy becomes slightly older, slightly less capable of understanding what is going on around him, and slightly more irrelevant.
The emotional development of the film centers on an impetuous trip Candy makes in 1903 to Berlin, to publicly denounce news reports being spread about at the time of British atrocities in South Africa. This trip, taken against express orders from the Foreign Office, ends in public insult and scandal, resulting in a German officer, Theo Kretschmar-Schueldorff, challenging Candy to a duel. The Foreign Office, aghast at the public relations nightmare, sees no other option but to proceed with the duel, and the arrangement, done by a small coterie of world-weary diplomats, is a perfect set piece on the mechanical stupidity (but manly courage) of the era’s notions of military honor.
The duel unfortunately is treated as it would be on a stage; it is begun but then goes offstage. The end result was supposedly that both men fought with perfect savage honor, crashing through a set of glass doors in the gymnasium where they were dueling (with sabers) and each seriously wounding the other. We modern moviegoers of course want to see the swordfight (couldn’t they have gotten Errol Flynn to play Candy?) and the crashing through the doors, but we must be content to hear about it. The Foreign Office was overjoyed at the result which pleased both nations. Both men are sent to the same hospital, where the honor they show each other is slowly transformed during their convalescence into real friendship. The German officer ends up marrying one of Candy’s British friends in Berlin, who was visiting him in the hospital.
Here begins one of the strangest and most convincing parts of the movie: Candy, after he sees his friend married off, realizes that he had loved her, and she becomes an “idee fixe” in his mind: fifteen years later he marries a girl who looks exactly like her, and as an old man he takes as his driver another girl who is the “spitting image” of the original girl he knew in 1903 (all played by Deborah Kerr). Late in his life he confesses that he “never got over her” – a testament, in many ways, to the problems of a perfectly polite and honorable life, which gives little room for self-knowledge, vulnerability, complicated emotions, or honesty and healing.
When World War I arrives Candy has become a general. But he is no expert in radio technology nor in equipment supply, and a strategist is almost irrelevant in a trench war; so he seems useless. There is a harrowing scene where he attempts to interrogate prisoners more or less by asking his questions very sternly; when they don’t answer he gives up. But the looks on the faces of his subordinates makes it clear that they will torture the men as soon as he is gone. They look on all his talk about “fair fighting” as so much cant. He had been boiling over with indignation at reports that the Germans were torturing their prisoners – not to mention using chemical weapons.
The end of the war brings us to the most astonishing scene in the movie. He hears that Kretschmar-Schueldorff is being held in a prison camp nearby, and he goes to see him. He sends for him, and is astonished to hear that the German has received his message but will not come. He insists that there must be some mistake, and he goes himself to find him. The German officers had enough skilled musicians among them to start an orchestra, and Candy arrives as they wrap up a movement from Schubert’s Eighth. He finds Kretschmar-Schueldorff having a cigarette with the others, and he is again rebuffed: Theo simply walks away. Candy is left standing there, noticeably aged, and utterly uncomprehending, as the orchestra begins Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture (an astonishing juxtaposition, and given a creepy and powerful Stokowski-esque sound in the film). The two had been friends, but now circumstances had placed a chasm between them; one of them had been humiliated, and was the captive of the other’s army. As this is going on, in the room where Candy had left, his wife gives a speech wondering at the Germans’ capacity for invading countries, massacreing thousands with machine guns, gassing enemy lines, torturing captives, and then calmly sitting down and listening to Schubert. But the diatribe implicitly implicates Candy and the British as well: how could they and the Germans and the French officer corps leave a few million dead bodies on the battlefield and then expect to go to the pub and slap each other on the back and tell war stories and be bosom buddies again, as if this were all a polo match? Candy’s notion that war was the equivalent of dueling, a reputable, regulated contest of honor, in which no one is really hurt and the quarrel definitively decided, seems so ignorant as to be barbaric.
The most disturbing part of the movie is its conclusion, as General Candy, relieved of command, is put in charge of “home defense,” a second line of resistance should the army utterly fail. He proclaims that the first exercise will begin at midnight; he supervises the defending force; the attacking force, however, strikes before midnight and captures all the officers of the Home Defense while at their club, thus decapitating the resistance. When he remonstrates that this is not the way the game is played, he is told that they are fighting Germans, and such reasoning has no value in war. The movie continually implies that any kind of decency or honor is misplaced in modern war; General Candy is utterly irrelevant in part because he really does have a code of honor. The applicability of this line of reasoning to contemporary American life is obvious enough – the Senate just passed a bill eliminating habeas corpus for American citizens, as irrelevant now that we live in a state of permanent war, though the president may veto it – and probably explains why The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is getting its revival now.
No More Habeas Corpus.
02-Dec-11Not good news. This easily passed the Senate.