Critics reviews

Less a narrowed character study than a work of incisive microcosmic portraiture, Colonel Blimp captures as much a man as it does a generation, one passing gradually and stubbornly from relevance into tired antiquation, the value systems and moral frameworks once held with the strongest conviction suddenly rusting and pried apart.

[Is it] a triangular love story in which two men's pursuit of a single woman (Deborah Kerr, multiplied by three) pays gallant homage to the theme of the eternal feminine, transcending time and place? Or is it, finally, a dirge for the loss of traditional English values and the idea of fair play, or a resigned repudiation of those values for the sake of winning a dirty war? The astonishing and confounding answer is that it's all of these things...

The greatest British film, the greatest film about Britishness, a study of the Kabuki ritual of the stiff upper-lip, a wondrous snapshot of the creative romance between Powell and Pressburger. Lubitsch is concurrent with Heaven Can Wait, Ridley Scott holds up a cracked mirror in The Duellists.

Colonel Blimp's most mysterious accomplishment is the transformation of Candy from blustering fool to kindhearted windbag, personification of British generosity. The filmmakers originally wanted Laurence Olivier, but it seems unlikely that so acerbic an actor could have delivered so warm a performance.

Of all the things to be nostalgic about, warfare would seem the least likely candidate, but that's the unusual perspective of this one-of-a-kind 1943 landmark---maybe the most wonderfully British movie ever made.

For the audience, the idea of a triple-Kerr is a Buñuelian fantasy abstraction, but for Theo and Clive, it's nearly the only continuity they can depend on as the 20th century marches on, eventually without them. After everything else dies, falls away, or renders them mere spectators to history, they still love one another because they love/loved her. She is, to both men, the totem image of enduring love and lost love...

Naturally, death has no real place in Powell's masterpiece either, despite the promise of the title. The duel will result in mutual injury, mutual recovery, and mutual friendship, but in that one extra-narrative camera movement, Powell subtly unites the many movements operating within his most ambitious film thus far. It is a narrative movement, eliding the outcome of the duel and increasing the suspense by focusing upon those who wait outside.

The triple casting of Deborah Kerr (she also plays Angela aka "Johnny," Clive's spunky driver in the WWII scenes) is a brilliant visual device to convey the nature of Clive's obsession... Yet there is something troubling about the film too, in the way it continually elides over violence.

Though [Dave Kehr's] assertion [that "It stands as very possibly the finest film ever made in Britain"] may read as cavalier, the seemingly endless imagination of directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger regularly inspires hyperbole. Infusing their personalities into the whole of film production in a manner seldom seen before the ascendancy of Stanley Kubrick, Powell and Pressburger maximized every aspect of moviemaking to guide their audience fancifully through time and space.

These incisions, which unite [Candy and Theo] for life, suggest the mutual cutting Powell and Pressburger practiced on each other: Powell slashed scenes and lines of dialogue from Pressburger's scripts ("Do we really need that?") and Pressburger exacted his revenge in the cutting room over the footage Powell had shot. The symbol of their collective identity is, in fact, a puncture: their production company is called The Archers, and its legendary trademark shows an arrow hitting a bullseye.

With its imaginative and flamboyant use of Technicolor and its rich period detail in sets, costumes and manners, its outstanding performances and the strong emotional impact of the story, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is a masterpiece in the full sense of the word. A film that enriches, enlightens and ennobles, and does this with intelligence, wit, style, compassion and beauty.

It's almost impossible to define this 1943 masterpiece by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It was ostensibly based on a cartoon series that satirized the British military class, yet its attitude toward the main character is one of affection, respect, and sometimes awe; it was intended as a propaganda film, yet Churchill wanted to suppress it; it has the romantic sweep of a grand love story, yet none of the romantic relationships it presents is truly fulfilled...