Issue 2: Film Reviews
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Dir: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK, 1943
A Matter of Life and Death
Dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK, 1946
A Review by Sarah Knight, University of Warwick, UK
Representations of nationhood and heroism are particularly important in films whose subject is war. In The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger engaged directly with these topics to create films of rare wit and profundity, skewering pomposity. During the Second World War and immediately afterwards, many critics did not know how to respond to their irreverent scrutiny, characterised by Pressburger's biographer, Kevin Macdonald, as "confusing playfulness" (Macdonald, 1994: 258). Sometimes their playfulness relies on the use of a mock-heroic register, subverting the epic tone favoured in the war films of their contemporaries. In film as in literature, mock-heroism derives its impact from a grand treatment of the trivial or from a redefinition of grandeur as pomposity. Mock-heroism deflates military gravitas in films such as Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove (1964) and Altman's M*A*S*H* (1970), which turn theatres of war into theatres of the absurd in order to make an eirenic point. Powell and Pressburger, filming in the midst and in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, did not share this savagely satirical pacifism, and their 'war films' do not promote an anti-war message. However, Colonel Blimp and AMOLAD concertedly examine military excess to give a wry perspective on soldierly behaviour and to consider the complex nature of 'national character'. These two films show how Powell and Pressburger used mock-heroism among other methods to represent 'Englishness', patriotism and the construction of national stereotypes (patriotism's dim offspring).
One of the central aspects of patriotism and of social order that Churchill's Ministry of Information sought to control during the 1940s was the cinematic depiction of national character. The Ministry's 'Programme for Film Propaganda' (dating from c.1940) lays particular emphasis on the depiction of 'Englishness'. The 'Programme', particularly the key clauses 4 (a) (i) ('British Life and Character') and 4 (a) (ii) ('British ideas and institutions'), presents a serious-minded contrast to the witty anatomies of nationhood we see in the work of the Archers (Powell and Pressburger's production company). According to the 'Programme', the apparently realistic treatment of British heroism was to be fostered. Yet Powell and Pressburger were less interested in didactic realism, and more in characters as vehicles for ideas. In his autobiography, Powell describes the decision to make Colonel Blimp as "a challenging step to take in 1942" (Powell, 1986: 399). Sir James Grigg, then Minister of War, turned down the Archers's request, while Churchill himself furiously tried to halt a "foolish production" promoting "propaganda detrimental to the morale of the army" (Powell and Pressburger, ed. Christie, 1994: 44). The unease of Churchill's administration stemmed from a sense that Colonel Blimp was in some way troublesome because it aimed to call 'Englishness' into question. The Ministry of Information at this crucial point of the war would not support what Powell called "a hard-hitting film which lampooned the military mind" (Powell, 1986: 399). Lampooning got the Archers into trouble: in daring to scrutinize 'the military mind', even to represent it in certain instances as absurd, they transgressed the propagandistic norms of 1940s British cinema.
Three years later, by contrast, AMOLAD was produced with the backing of the Ministry of Information. However, central themes that had threatened to deflate Colonel Blimp before it was airborne still prompted dissent, even after AMOLAD premiered as the first Royal Command Performance. The detached examination of nationhood provoked particular criticism in the immediate aftermath of war. The reviewer for Kinematograph Weekly identified "anti-British feeling shown during the trial scenes" (Christie, 2000: 60). In the Daily Graphic too the Archers were taken to task for their ideological ambivalence: "Ancient charges against British 'Imperialism' which, for the most part, never had any real substance, are paraded and no defence is offered" (Christie, 2000: 60). So even though the later film enjoyed official approval, similar objections were raised to its representation of patriotism as were levelled at Colonel Blimp.
The Daily Graphic critic's use of the word "paraded" implies that the Archers made this representation somewhat showily. The verb is accurate. As Ian Christie has noted, Colonel Blimp in particular presents "an England 'made strange' in Brechtian fashion by the witty, self conscious manner of its presentation" (Christie, 1994: 47). Central to both films' treatment of national characteristics and behaviour is a slightly theatrical notion of what it might mean to be 'English'. Typically of the Archers, this self-conscious presentation of nationhood is both amusingly and meaningfully executed. We see this theatrical treatment the grand undercut by the showy, or the impressive rendered performative in Colonel Blimp, from the credits sequence onwards. The back-cloth to the credits is a faux medieval tapestry depicting a knight on a white charger, but this stitched representation of bygone chivalry is undercut by the vaudevillian lettering announcing the names of cast and crew. The tapestry's depiction of archaic nobility is shredded when the knight is shown to be a moustachioed reactionary, the Colonel who first appeared in David Low's cartoons for the Evening Standard. In Colonel Blimp the Blimp-ish character Clive Candy (Roger Livesey) is chivalrous, certainly, but he is also comical, marked by this juxtaposition of grandeur and bluster, particularly as he ages.
As viewers watching the film, we move from a general impression of venerable chivalry (the august-looking tapestry) to the realization that a particular and potentially humorous subject is being identified. A similar movement from the general to the specific occurs at the beginning of AMOLAD, which opens with a sweeping view of the cosmos. However, as in the Colonel Blimp credits, sardonic wit undercuts a sense of awe, as the matter-of-fact narrator refuses to be moved by the spectacular view ("This is the universe. Big isn't it?"). In his analysis of the film, John Ellis argues that the sequence "poses an order very strongly at the outset"(Ellis, 1978: 93). Yet just as the Colonel's red-faced indignation and the gaudy circus lettering undermine the impressiveness of the earlier film's credits, so in AMOLAD this grand cosmic order swiftly breaks down. We move abruptly from the leisurely panorama as the narrator with sudden urgency tears himself from contemplating the solar system when a burning, noisy planet comes into view. This is Earth on the second of May, 1945, and it is "night over Europe". Tellingly, it is also three days before ceasefire. Immediately the viewer is plunged into a consideration of the particular plight of one individual, airman Peter Carter (David Niven). Carter should have died on this very night but stubbornly refuses to join the ranks of the dead, playing havoc with the forces of fate and cosmic order. We might compare the awkward insistence of Peter Carter with Blimp staring out belligerently from an archaic tapestry, refusing to merge with his tranquil setting. In both cases, stubborn individuals (who both happen to be soldiers) are at odds with a larger order. This questioning of established order and fixed fates, as potentially disruptive people jar with a governing system, contributes to the 'confusing playfulness' of these films. A celebration of individualism as set against a governing order suggests that the values and codes this order sanctions can be called into question. Powell and Pressburger do not suggest such an interpretation forcefully, but these films certainly consider sympathetically independent thinking within overarching socio-political structures, and examine how such independence can be accommodated within notions of proper patriotic behaviour and national character.
Colonel Blimp engages from the outset with obvious manifestations of Englishness, as Powell and Pressburger wrote to the Ministry of Information:
What are the chief qualities of Clive Candy? They are the qualities of the average Englishman: fairness in fighting, based upon games: fairness after the fight is over: a natural naivetι engendered by class, insularity and the permeability of the English language...(Macdonald, 1994: 208)
Clive Candy is presented as an 'average Englishman' according to the standards of his class, profession and era, who personifies his assertion made early in the film that "England isn't as bad as all that". Clive is an enthusiastic soldier whose devotion to fighting fair sees him through the Boer War and the First World War, but he does not merely conform to patriotic stereotype. Unlike Peter Carter, Clive is not a cerebral or imaginative man, expressly defining himself against the type of the "sickening long-haired poet", but both men share a capacity for disruption, even though Clive is superficially such an 'Establishment' figure. Clive provokes a diplomatic incident in Germany at the start of the film, and half a century later his behaviour is equally incendiary: because of his "ill-timed" opinions, he is not allowed to make an intended broadcast for the BBC. Clive might embody many qualities of an 'Establishment' figure, but as an individual he still challenges a fixed social order.
At key moments in the film Clive is satirically presented as an embodiment of Empire. The famous sequence in which the animals he has shot suddenly appear mounted on the walls of his aunt's London house showcases the boyishly bloodthirsty hobbies deemed appropriate for this 'average Englishman'. We are deprived of a big-game hunting sequence and never actually see Clive shoot the animals, a tactic employed several times throughout the film with particular purpose. The film-makers deny us a view of action and conflict and dwell instead on a character's behaviour in the immediate prelude to or aftermath of a violence that never gets shown. Consequently, we can concentrate on the character rather than the action. This denial of violence occurs perhaps most significantly in Colonel Blimp during the pivotal duel Candy fights with Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (played with great dignity and delicacy by Anton Walbrook). When the camera pans upwards into the Berlin night, refusing the viewer even a glimpse of the cuts and parries in the duel, we might feel cheated, but as A.L. Kennedy remarks in her study of the film: "the duel is now superfluous. It will not develop character in a useful way, it will provide a false dash of swashbuckling in precisely the wrong place" (Kennedy, 1997: 49). Powell and Pressburger do not include the duel for 'swashbuckling' purposes, as many other forties directors or screenwriters would have done. Instead, they employ the behaviour of the two duellists and the social scaffolding around the encounter military etiquette, political implications to develop their anatomy of Englishness.
The friendship that soon develops between Candy and Kretschmar-Schuldorff gives the Archers their opportunity to further investigate their 'average Englishman'. Crucially, the appraisal of Candy's behaviour that will continue for the rest of his lifetime is made by his new friend, the German originally intended to wound him. Although Clive is a sympathetic individual, he is also too much of a national stereotype (good soldier and patriot) to be able to view his nation with detachment. The most vehement critique of military behaviour is uttered by Theo: after an awkward encounter with soldiers and politicians in Clive's dining room, Theo condemns the English upper classes in particular for their "childlike stupidity", telling his compatriots that "they are children, boys playing at cricket". Theo pinpoints the 'fairness in fighting, based upon games' the Archers identified as crucial to their depiction of Clive Candy. Later in life, he both recognizes his earlier comments as embittered, and acknowledges that the Englishness represented by Clive (and, crucially, his English wife who has died) is an ideal conceived sentimentally, "very foolishly", but strongly enough to cause him to seek refuge in England during the war. After his own experience of the rise of Nazism, however, and despite his emotional nostalgia for England, Theo nonetheless realizes that Clive's sportsmanlike approach to warfare needs to alter. "If you preach the Rules of the Game while they use every foul and filthy trick against you," Theo says in exasperation, "they will laugh at you!"
For Theo, Clive becomes a surrogate for his nation, simultaneously charming and exasperating, basing his conduct on outmoded notions of 'fighting fair'. The film's attitude to such Englishness is ambivalent, which the Ministry of Information saw as a "dangerous... over complication of ideas" (Powell and Pressburger, ed. Christie, 1994: 33). Powell and Pressburger justified their representation of the Englishness Clive embodies by arguing that such innocence needs carefully to be stored during crueller times: "We think these are splendid virtues: so splendid that, in order to preserve them, it is worth while shelving them until we have won the war" (Powell and Pressburger, ed. Christie, 1994: 37). In the film, tellingly, Theo is the one to articulate this idea. Powell and Pressburger's use of a foreign mouthpiece to question patriotism and 'Englishness' was extremely unusual at the time: the act of questioning becomes even more resonant when carried out by a foreigner as intelligent and perceptive as Theo.
We have seen how some early critics of AMOLAD reacted to perceived 'anti-British feeling' in the film's celestial trial scene. Much of this feeling comes from the counsel for the prosecution of Peter Carter, Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey), first victim of a British bullet during the American War of Independence. Farlan is a Bostonian patriot, unapologetically prejudiced against English society, who delivers his Anglophobic tirade to an audience of soldiers and politicians in heaven. In his memoir David Niven describes him as "the 'heavy'" (Niven, 1971:247), but Farlan is not a cartoonish thug or a mere demagogue. In his bravura critique of Englishness, Farlan contemptuously recounts the various inconveniences of the country, its "warm drinks, cold rooms, draughty windows, smoky chimneys, faulty plumbing." Farlan's list of English flaws is persuasively given, and addressed to a jury that is in Farlan's words "already prejudiced against your country". Farlan's prosecution begins by judging Peter Carter's personal right to life or death but swiftly expands to a larger investigation of an Englishman's place in the world historically. The "prejudiced" jury includes a Boer from the Transvaal, a Punjabi and an Irish soldier, all from countries occupied or invaded by the British Empire. As in Colonel Blimp, in AMOLAD we see the presentation not only of an individual's plight in wartime but also warfare's status at a particular historical moment.
War is debated carefully in these films, which both examine past military success, and relentlessly historicize warfare. In AMOLAD, a variety of dead souls from wars spanning centuries watch the young British airman on trial: seventeenth-century Parliamentarians and Napoleonic casualties of war sit in judgement as an aristocrat from the French Revolution acts as counsel for the defence. In Colonel Blimp, we do not see such a dizzying historical synthesis, but nonetheless three different wars are presented to us, and each war has its own particular codes of behaviour. This panoramic representation of various wars within a single film has the effect of de-centering warfare and turning it into an abstract notion, particularly since we see very little combat. We have already considered how the camera in Colonel Blimp swerves away from depicting Clive and Theo's duel: similarly, we only meet Clive after he has won his Victoria Cross in the Boer War, and we see the First World War only as aftermath. The battle tactics of the Second World War are only playacted in the military exercise sequence that frames the film. No battle scenes are shown in AMOLAD apart from the initial sequence in which Peter Carter's Lancaster bomber is about to crash. Consequently, we have to ask why these films were set during wartime and what the point of this context was if not to show thrilling conflict. One answer is that Powell and Pressburger seem to have intended the emphasis of their films to rest on national character rather than on a depiction of national combat.
We might fancifully interpret the motif of the Archers, an arrow aimed at a red-white-and-blue target, as an indication that patriotism will be sharply examined in the film that follows. Certainly such an interpretation proves true for these two films, and contemporary critics including the Churchill administration were swift to pick up on the sharpness of the examination. The attitudes the political authorities demonstrated towards the production of these two films were in some ways markedly different: Churchill's government treated Colonel Blimp with suspicion while AMOLAD was commissioned by the Ministry of Information. Nonetheless there are key similarities in critical response, deriving from how national character is presented, for contemporary critics seem to have regarded Powell and Pressburger's wry take on a particular kind of 'Englishness' as subversive.
Critics have drawn attention to the archetypal nature of the Archers' characters. Both Colonel Blimp and AMOLAD, Ian Christie argues, are examples of "modernised allegory" (Christie, 2000: 19). In the case of Colonel Blimp particularly, the War Office chose to view this allegorical characterization as a presentation of flattened national stereotype. Sir James Grigg wrote to Powell in May 1942 that the film "revolves around a character that is more fictitious than real," and "a caricature" (Powell and Pressburger, ed. Christie, 1994: 27). But Candy is not a caricature: he is an idea, a personification of a kind of Englishness the Archers were most interested in dissecting. By making Englishness to some extent 'obvious', a technique condemned by the 'Programme for Film Propaganda', the Archers illustrate symbolically how such Englishness functions as an idea, and question it philosophically. They do not neatly map 'British life and character' onto 'films of heroic actions' but instead problematize the connection between the two categories. Both films ask us to examine how such 'life and character' may be manifest, and how these might link with 'heroic actions'.
Mock-heroism becomes one means of examining national character: the advantage of a mock-heroic register is that it enables the film-maker simultaneously to celebrate and to satirize national virtues. The two protagonists, Clive Candy and Peter Carter, could both be viewed as types: Clive is the Good Soldier and Peter, as Ian Christie has argued, represents the ideal aviator and poet (Christie, 2000: 17-18). However, the ways in which their individual heroism manifests itself are perhaps less obvious than we might expect from such archetypal characters. 'Obvious' characters, stock types, offer the potential for subversion, through subtle alterations and challenges in how the 'obvious' is presented. Consequently, and counter to the Ministry of Information's decree, it is through such characterization that 'heroic actions' are considered. Both films are embedded within a world at war, but the conduct of warfare is curiously de-centred, and human responses to strange, testing situations take its place. Colonel Blimp and AMOLAD prize other human qualities beyond stiffness of the upper lip and playing of the game. However, although an exaltation of such qualities in a 'national character' to the exclusion of all else is questioned in these films, these qualities are not cursorily dismissed. Powell and Pressburger considered nationhood and patriotism with compassionate detachment, and this approach resulted in two extraordinary films that offer thought-provoking perspectives on the cultural and cinematic representation of 'Englishness'.
References
Ian Christie (2000) A Matter of Life and Death. London: British Film Institute.
--- (1994, first published 1985) Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. London: Faber and Faber Limited.
--- (1978) Blimp, Churchill and the State, in Ian Christie (ed.) Powell, Pressburger and Others. London: British Film Institute, pp.105-120.
John Ellis (1978) Watching Death at Work: An Analysis of A Matter of Life and Death', in Powell, Pressburger and Others (see above), pp.79-104.
Kevin Gough-Yates (1995) Pressburger, England and Exile, Sight and Sound 12 (December 1995), pp.30-5.
A.L. Kennedy (1997) The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. London: British Film Institute.
Kevin Macdonald (1994) Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter. London: Faber and Faber Limited.
David Niven (1971) The Moon's a Balloon. London: Coronet Books.
Michael Powell (1986) A Life in Movies. An Autobiography. London: Heinemann.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, ed. Ian Christie (1994) The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. London: Faber and Faber Limited.