Monthly Archives: June 2016

  • The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1943)

    Powell and Pressburger’s film is famous for several reasons, not least the attempts to stop it being made at all.   The BFI used as a programme note a piece that Richard Combs wrote for Monthly Film Bulletin in 1985 and which, not unexpectedly, deprecates the attitude of government agencies and of Churchill in particular towards the picture.   There’s no suggestion in Combs’s article that censorship during wartime might be justifiable, no attempt to grapple with the argument which may  have been made in the early 1940s that constraining artistic freedom of expression in the short term in Britain could help to secure its longer-term future.  Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were asking for trouble with the title they chose for the picture.  Colonel Blimp is the name of a 1930s cartoon-strip character, which David Low originally drew for the Evening Standard – a character described in Wikipedia as ‘pompous, irascible, jingoistic and stereotypically British’.  This must have been a main (and I don’t think an unreasonable) cause of the Churchill government’s opposition to the prospect of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.  The Blimp label is misleading, however.  The film is complex and by no means politically narrow-minded although it is extraordinary that it was made when it was.  As you watch, you need to keep reminding yourself that it was released during rather than in the aftermath of World War II.

    Powell and Pressburger dramatise the life and career of Clive Candy through the Boer War (as a lieutenant), World War I (as a brigadier-general) and World War II (when he’s a retired general, in the Home Guard).  Clive’s continuing counterpart – his rival in love, his military foe and friend – is the German Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff.  While he’s on leave from the Boer War in Berlin, they fight a duel after Clive inadvertently insults the Imperial German army.  At the end of the Great War, Clive tracks Theo down to a prisoner of war camp.  At the start of the Second World War, Theo is an immigrant in Britain, widowed and separated from his family in Germany after his children have become Nazis.  Clive Candy is lampooned not because he represents ‘traditional English’ values as such but because, Powell and Pressburger suggest, these values are dangerously unrealistic for the purposes of modern warfare – specifically for the purposes of fighting the Germans in the current conflict.  As Theo notes at one point, ‘There’ll be no return match’.  Yet the lampoon is almost eclipsed by the Archers’ ambivalence:  Powell and Pressburger, although they came from very different backgrounds, were both too steeped in, fascinated by, and affectionate about, Englishness to be single-minded in their portrait of Clive.   They also have trenchant things to say about what they present as the German psyche.  Candy’s wife Barbara talks about (pre-Nazi) German soldiers ‘listening to Mendelssohn and Schubert in their butchers’ uniforms’.   Theo is a dinner guest at Clive’s London home shortly after being released from prisoner of war camp.   He admits later to Clive to the excitement that he felt listening to the dinner party conversation, realising the implications of the British men round the table seeing the 1914-18 hostilities as a game that’s now over – no hard feelings.

    The film’s opening credits appear on a tapestry, created by members of the Royal College of Needlework, which anticipates what’s to come.  (The tapestry is back for the closing credits too.)  In the background is a tree, with the names of the three main actors – Roger Livesey (Clive), Anton Walbrook (Theo) and Deborah Kerr (in a trinity of roles) – embroidered across its branches.  Halfway down its trunk is a self-referential archery target.  There’s a coat of arms immediately below this.  At its foot, the motto ‘Sic Transit Gloria Candy’ spreads across the roots of the tree.   In the foreground, Candy – bearing oversized arms and with impressively plumed headgear but otherwise clad in nothing but a towel – sits bellicose on horseback.  In the sky, aeroplanes complete the richly anachronistic picture.  What’s effectively a prologue to the film proper – before it moves into extended flashback – features a Home Guard training exercise.  This is heavy-handed comedy – complete with frenetic activity, zooming camera movements and strenuously unfunny dialogue – leading up to Candy’s ‘capture’ in a Turkish bath.  I didn’t realise this was Blimp’s usual habitat in the Low cartoons:  Powell and Pressburger in effect take it as their starting point – and then take Clive Candy a very long way from that point.  As soon as the elderly man in the Turkish bath begins to fight back, the tone changes.  The film turns into something more interesting and continues to do so.

    We soon discover that the older Clive Candy’s caricatural walrus moustache conceals a scar he got from the duel with Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff forty years earlier.  Although the 1902 Berlin section is too long and some of its scenes lack rhythm, Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrook and Deborah Kerr are immediately compelling.  In this section, Kerr plays Edith Hunter, a young Englishwoman with feelings for Clive and for Theo; those feelings are reciprocated by them both but it’s the German that she marries.  The momentum of Colonel Blimp really builds from the start of the post-Great War section onwards.  Roger Livesey’s first sight of Deborah Kerr’s second incarnation, a nurse called Barbara Wynne whom Candy meets in a convent in France where he’s briefly billeted, is very powerful.    When Barbara and Clive marry, the unstressed humour between them is much more effective than the film’s attempts at jaunty comedy, which, although fortunately few and far between, continue to be its weakest bits. Clive’s dinner for his British soldiering colleagues, which Theo attends just before his return to Germany, has quite remarkable tension, especially given the cartoon treatment of most of the military men up to this point.  The excitement stirring in Theo that he later explains is unspoken but it breaks out startlingly once he’s back with fellow Germans on the boat train.  Both Walbrook and Livesey age extremely convincingly.  The make-up is good but there’s also a complete lack of strain in the actors’ progress from men in their late twenties to near septuagenarians (both were in their mid-thirties when the film was made).  The contrast between the consistency of Clive’s character and the changing attitudes of Theo is a large part of what makes the friendship between the two men fascinating.    There’s a marvellous bit when Theo visits Clive in London, when both are widowers before their time, and Clive shows Theo a portrait of Barbara (who of course resembles Edith), which is surrounded by hunting trophies.  ‘It’s a strange place to hang such a lovely picture’, remarks Theo.

    Because the film’s themes are so strong the quality of the performances may well have been underrated.  Deborah Kerr is, in all three parts, much freer than she became in what’s regarded as her heyday in the 1950s and early 1960s.  (After playing the wives of Theo and Clive, she’s the latter’s driver in the WWII part of the story.)   Her colouring is beautiful – especially in a marvellous scene in which Barbara and Clive sit at the fireside of their home in Cadogan Place.  The combination of Kerr’s golden-red hair and the cornflower blue dress she’s wearing is magical.  The intimacy of her and Livesey humming to each other is very touching.   (The cinematographer Georges Périnal paints the images vividly.)  Roger Livesey has many wonderful moments:  when the young Candy, after the duel, is swathed in bandages, Livesey plays a scene looking into the mirror with fine sympathetic wit.  There’s a great bit towards the end of the film when the elderly Candy is using his walking stick to tidy leaves on the ground.  The power of what Anton Walbrook expresses from within as Theo sits quietly at Clive Candy’s dinner table is remarkable; what Walbrook does in the sequence in which Theo is giving an account of himself at the aliens’ office is quite extraordinary.  The supporting cast is variable – Michael Powell always struggles with actors who need looking after – but Roland Culver is good, as usual, as a piece of military top brass and John Laurie is excellent as Candy’s batman Murdoch.  It’s retrospectively apt, of course, when Laurie’s Murdoch also joins the Home Guard.

    25 May 2012

  • The Left Handed Gun

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Arthur Penn (1958)

    Clyde Jeavons’s introduction to the BFI screening was really excellent.  He was impressively informative about the long list of actors who’ve played Billy the Kid (and Pat Garrett) on screen.  He was convincing on how the outlaw William Bonney became an iconic, even heroic figure in popular culture in the years after his death in 1881.  (Jeavons thought that the growth of popular reading matter – dime novels as well as newspapers – had a lot to do with it:  he told us how Pat Garrett, with the help of a ghost writer, had produced a book for purposes of both self-promotion, as the man who brought the Kid to justice, and telling people about Billy’s desperately rough childhood in the Irish slums of New York City.)   He was amusing and engrossing in explaining the myth of Billy the Kid’s left-handedness (a famous photograph which appears to prove this is a ‘flipped’ version of the original) and the symbolic importance of Billy’s sinister side.

    This was Arthur Penn’s first feature and it’s an excellent Western, well written by Leslie Stevens (from a teleplay by Gore Vidal).  The Left Handed Gun is doubly subversive in that it strips away the moral clarity of the traditional Western as well as debunking the glamorous image of Billy the Kid.  (I’m assuming that the films about him which preceded this one usually presented Billy as a romantic figure.)  At the same time, Penn preserves enough reminders of the heroic appeal of both the genre and the protagonist to maintain a strong tension and Paul Newman is the ideal actor for what the director wants to do.  Newman completely embodies the allure and charisma of the legend of Billy the Kid; he’s also able to show us the brutal confusions inside him.   There’s a fine scene early in the film, when Billy is in conversation with Tunstall (Colin Keith-Johnston), the peaceable, Bible-reading farmer who’s taken Billy under his wing.   Newman, who had an unusual ability to interpret and illuminate men of limited intelligence, is wonderful as he listens to Tunstall’s words about the religious tract he’s reading.  We can see, and we see repeatedly in The Left Handed Gun, that Billy tends to feel more than he’s able to think.  He’s miserably sensitive to his lack of education.  He tells Tunstall that he can’t read (he knows something of the Bible from his mother’s telling him stories from it); subsequently insists more than once to others that he can; finally admits that he still can’t.   Billy seduces the wife (Lita Milan) of another benign father figure, the Mexican Saval (Martin Garralaga).  It’s when Saval finds out about this that Billy seems almost to decide that he (Billy) now deserves to die.

    Tunstall is a Scot (from Ayrshire) but he’s known as ‘the Englishman’.  According to Wikipedia, Tunstall was a real person and an important figure in the Lincoln County War between the British farmers newly arrived in the American West and longer-established local ranchers.  It’s Tunstall’s death, at the hands of four men, that sets Billy on a quest to avenge his killing.  The retribution scenario is a venerable tradition of Westerns yet it’s presented here as something pathological and which sows the seeds of mayhem – just as, when Pat Garrett eventually shoots Billy, it’s a hollow restoration of moral order:  Garrett is mortified to discover that the Kid hadn’t drawn his gun.  Billy goes on his pursuit of revenge with two other young men, named Charlie Boudre and Tom Folliard, and Arthur Penn shows how the trio’s youthful high spirits and impulsiveness bleed into hot-headedness and trigger-happiness.  Newman dramatises these distinctions, or the lack of them, with great skill and he’s well supported by James Best as Tom and, especially, James Congdon as Charlie.

    The impressive score by Alexander Courage is full of familiar Western film theme cadences but it’s supple enough to incorporate elements that reflect what a different treatment of goodies and baddies on horseback The Left Handed Gun must have seemed at the time.   Penn uses sounds (and silence) cleverly – like the noise of water from a decorative fountain throughout a particularly tense encounter between Billy and Joe Grant (Ainslie Pryor), a friend of Pat Garrett who has been appointed to monitor the amnesty which the new territorial governor issues for all those involved in the Lincoln County War.  The sound of the water, continuing after the threat of violence has – for the moment – passed, seems to underline the fragility of the amnesty, and to make us feel grateful relief at the narrow escape we’ve just experienced.

    The dialogue is credible and intelligent and Penn orchestrates the acting very ably, although The Left Handed Gun is least convincing at its most consciously dramatic points – when Pat Garrett rails against the violent interruption of his wedding celebrations or a creepy, groupie-like character called Moultrie reacts to being rebuked by his hero Billy.  The actors concerned, John Dehner (Garrett) and Hurd (Dorian Gray) Hatfield (Moultrie), both go over the top at these moments (although Dehner gives a strong performance whenever he’s quieter).  And perhaps, by the end, there have been too many carefully composed deaths by gunshot.  While some of them supply a salutary reminder that human beings are being killed and it’s not just Western fun, others seem to be asking for admiration of their technical bravura.  There’s one killing, however, which is staged with such shocking originality that it’s more than enough on its own to justify Penn’s artfulness.   When Billy first escapes from custody, he positions himself on the roof of the jail and calls out to the sheriff, who looks up – into a sun so bright that he can’t make out the figure on the roof.   Billy shoots the man out of his boots; he falls dead but one of the boots remains upright.   A mother and her little girl are passing by and the child runs giggling towards the empty boot.  Her mother slaps and scolds her and they disappear from shot as J Peverell Marley’s camera stays on the boot.  We hear the child whimpering as she moves away.  This moment in particular anticipates Penn’s wiping-the-smile-off-our-faces approach in Bonnie and Clyde.   No doubt The Left Handed Gun, in terms of historical accuracy, downplays the extent to which William Bonney was a vicious public menace.  Given what it succeeds in doing to take the shine off the Kid’s legend, as well as make the moral universe of the Hollywood Western a less certain and more unstable place, it’s still a film of disquieting integrity.

    7 April 2010

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