The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

First banned, then released in a shorter version, in which the central flashback structure was replaced by a linear story line, the challenges faced and ultimately surmounted by The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp stand as a metaphor for the struggle of Britain against the Nazis – a struggle the film was aimed to depict and to bolster.

Finally restored to the original version, as envisaged by the writer-director-producer team Michael Powell and Emeric Pressbuirger, in 1983, 40 years after its release, this film rises above mere propaganda picture to be lauded by one critic as "very possibly the finest film ever made in Britain."

It achieves this status despite occasional heavy-handed speechifying (three times we are reminded how the Hun sunk neutral shipping and bombed innocent civilians – Dresden and Hamburg loom uncomfortably on the horizon), inserted, one can only assume, to get past the censors – Churchill was one unhappy bunny about the making of the film and the army refused to help with equipment.

Colonel Blimp might be based on David Low's cartoon strip, which first appeared in a London evening newspaper in the 1930s and was a parody of the buffoon-like quality of many army top brass (General Melchett in Blackadder Goes Forth follows in this tradition), but the Blimp character in the film, Clive Candy, played by Roger Livesey, is neither called Blimp not particularly blimpish.

He does however provide the perfect foil for Anton Walbrook's portrayal of an anti-Nazi German army officer whose career is terminated shortly after the Great War, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff. And, in a film also featuring 21-year-old Deborah Kerr in her first starring role, it is Walbrook (an Austrian émigré born Adolf Wohlbrück, who teamed up with Powell and Pressburger again for The Red Shoes) who steals the show.

Two scenes stand out. In the first, a long speech done in one take, according to Roger Ebert, who places this film in his list of 100 Great Movies, Kretschmar-Schuldorff explains to a Home Office official charged with considering his request for residency in Britain at the outbreak of war why he has chosen England over his homeland. In the second, set a year or two later, the Good German galvanises his friend of 40 years, now Major General Clive Wynne-Candy, with the following words, arguably as relevant today ('though not with reference to the Germans) as they were when spoken nearly 70 years ago:

"Because victory was yours, you failed to learn your lesson 20 years ago … Some of you will learn quicker than the others. Some will never learn it, because you've been educated to be a gentleman in peace and in war … But this is not a gentleman’s war. This time you're fighting for your very existence against the most devilish idea ever created by a human brain – Naziism*. And if you lose, there won't be a return match next year. Perhaps not for 100 years."

* I render the word thus to reflect Walbrook's pronunciation.