The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) on Netflix
Passed19432h 43mComedyDramaRomance
In 1943 Britain, Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy leads a Home Guard unit, and younger officers take him for an old man with outdated ideas. He won the Victoria Cross in the Boer War.
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- Rotten Tomatoes97%
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Plot summary
In 1943, Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy leads a Home Guard unit in Britain. Troops commanded by Lieutenant "Spud" Wilson seize him in a Turkish bath ahead of a training exercise, and he objects that they have moved before the exercise was due to begin. In 1902, on leave from the Boer War, Clive gets a letter from Edith Hunter, a woman in Berlin he has never met. She asks the embassy to stop Kaunitz, a German who spreads propaganda against Britain's role in the Boer War. Clive's superiors deny him leave to travel to Berlin, and he goes regardless. At a café there he confronts Kaunitz, insults the Imperial German Army's officer corps, and the Germans insist he face an officer selected by lot.
Cast
- Neville Mappas Stuffy Graves
- Vincent Holmanas Club Porter (1942)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime prime minister, wrote to the Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, asking for measures to stop the film before it went further, after Secretary of State for War James Grigg objected to it.
- Because the British government disapproved of it, the film was not released in the United States until 1945, and then in black and white as The Adventures of Colonel Blimp; the 163-minute original was cut to 150 minutes, later to 90 for television, with the flashback structure removed.
- Powell wanted Laurence Olivier to play Candy, but the Ministry of Information refused to release the actor from the Fleet Air Arm, telling Powell and Pressburger they could not have him and advising them not to make the film.
- Wartime shortages and Churchill's objections made filming difficult, with a ban on the crew's access to any military personnel or equipment, though they still managed to "find" Army vehicles and plenty of uniforms.
- The film provoked an extremist pamphlet, The Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp, by the right-wing sociologists E.W. and M.M. Robson of the obscure Sidneyan Society, who called it the most disgraceful production ever to come from a British film studio.
- The idea for the film came not from David Low's comic strip but from a scene cut from Powell and Pressburger's earlier film One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, in which an elderly crew member tells a younger one, "You don't know what it's like to be old"; editor David Lean said the premise was worthy of a film.
- A jazz piece underscoring the Home Guard sequence in which Colonel Blimp is captured in a Turkish bath became popular in its own right as "Commando Patrol", recorded by The Squadronaires in 1943.
- The film's military adviser, Lieutenant General Douglas Brownrigg, had a career rather similar to Wynne-Candy's: he served with distinction in the First World War, was retired after the Dunkirk evacuation, and then took a senior role in the Home Guard.
