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Gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!
Incidentally [the British Museum] is the best place in London to lose an acquired or embarrassing umbrella. It costs no more than the pain of carrying off a brass disc; and that's not all loss, for there is one special pattern of slot machine in which these discs perform miracles.
—T.E. Lawrence, from his introduction to Richard Garnett's The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales (1924)
Apologies for the lack of recent content. For the last four days, I've been sick with a stomach flu: it has not been so much fun. I seem to have had a norovirus, which my mother somehow misheard as "Norway Flu." This instantly gave me and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28 an image of little rat-Vikings paddling ferociously up the Charles, spreading plague and Wagner wherever they went, and that would have been immensely cooler than the reality.
I need to be more efficient about my movie posts. TCM has been saving my sanity lately, such that in the last couple of weeks I've seen The African Queen (1951) for the first time, a double feature of The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), both of which I love, and back in mid-January an odd comedy-metamovie called Paris When It Sizzles (1964) with William Holden and Audrey Hepburn. Not to mention The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), whichrushthatspeaks and nineweaving came over to watch on Tuesday before my digestive system decided it despised me. I will either catch up on all of them or I won't . . .
Now that I've seen five of them, I should sit down sometime and seriously consider what makes an Archers film. That will not happen tonight. Mostly I will note that I loved The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and that I should come back to thinking about it sometime when my brain is not slush.
It's not that I can't place it in the Archers' canon. There is a sense of place, but perhaps most of all there's a sense of time—vanished, changing, static, new, woven back across itself and full of echoes (a trait shared with Black Narcissus and A Canterbury Tale, but I will have to save this comparison for later), and these shifting layers can be used equally for serious emotional or parodic effect. The title credits are stitched into a medieval tapestry, but the knight on his white horse is the big-bellied, walrus-mustached Colonel Blimp of David Low's cartoons. When first introduced in 1942, Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey, looking impressively seventy years old and about the size of a walrus) is an anachronism in the other direction, a retired officer surprised in his characteristic Turkish bath who can only sputter impotently, "But war starts at midnight!" at the young Home Guardsman (James McKechnie) who has stolen six hours' march on him in a training exercise: as though the real enemy would be as tractable as a war game. The young lieutenant is not pleased at being scolded for his innovation and loses his temper; a few unwise remarks at the expense of the old man's girth, mustache, and general complacency later, he's been pummeled into the nearest pool for his troubles and through the steam Wynne-Candy is shouting, "You laugh at my big belly, but you don't know how I got it! You laugh at my mustache, but you don't know why I grew it! How do you know what sort of fellow I was when I was as young as you are, forty years ago?" And there's no dissolve. No familiar cinematic shorthand for time turned back. The water in the plunge-bath ripples, and out of it surfaces Clive "Sugar" Candy forty years ago, trim, vigorous, clean-shaven, and butchering the "Mignon Aria" terribly.
Much to the annoyance of an older officer of the club, a sort of proto-Blimp who harrumphs and mutters about disrespect and good men's lives lost until he sees the Victoria Cross pinned to Candy's coat, but this is not a film about how the young Candy grows up, ticky-tacky, into him. It's almost more about how Candy doesn't grow up, even as he grows older: how time passes around him and the world alters and he remains unchanged. "That's a promise. You stay just as you are, till the floods come and this is a lake." Oh, but you have to be careful with promises and adynata. The seas may not run dry or the rocks melt with the sun, but there is cataclysm on the horizon and the old world will wash away. Then you'd better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone . . . From the very start of the story, the times they are a-changing. Newly arrived in Berlin to refute anti-British propaganda—without the permission of his superiors—Candy nearly sets off an international incident when his confrontation with one of the nastier propagandists inadvertently offers insult to the entire German Army. Eighty-two officers promptly demand satisfaction; for Candy to refuse would be a political disaster. The year is 1902, but the audience hears echoes from twelve years ahead as two officers of the Imperial German Army and two officials of the British Embassy sit down with a book of rules and plan the duel between Candy and his lot-drawn opponent, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), right down to the last polite detail:
"Do you prefer to strip the upper parts of the bodies of the combatants, or do you prefer them in shirtsleeves?"
"Shirtsleeves. I see here that Paragraph 133 says, 'A few hours previous to the duel, it is advisable to take a bath.'"
"Only the principals. Not the seconds."
"It's a very strange sensation to be preparing a duel between two people who've never even seen each other."
"It happens sometimes. Marriages also."
And as it turns out, this duel will seal Candy and Theo to one another for the rest of their lives. While Candy grows a mustache to cover his scarred mouth and Theo heals from the cut across his forehead, the two play bridge and converse in smashed-up English and German and presently, oddly and importantly, fall in love with the same woman: the governess Edith Hunter, whose letter originally brought Candy to Berlin and whom the British Embassy uses as a cover story for the duel, and whom Candy gladly gives away to Theo only to realize too late that he also loves her. Thereafter she will recur throughout the film like another trick with time, played in each incarnation by Deborah Kerr. When he meets her in World War II as the nurse Barbara Wynne, he courts her even before he knows her name, because she is the double of his lost love twenty years ago. In the present day, she's his driver Angela Cannon, called Johnny by her friends, hand-picked by Candy out of a pool of seven hundred candidates for a reason she doesn't know, but which is immediately apparent to the audience and to Theo. The film leaves open whether the three women are doppelgängers in more than Candy's wishful gaze—Theo does not see Edith duplicated in a portrait of Barbara, but his first glimpse of Johnny's face in a wash of headlights startles him—but the effect is the same. Time pleats back on itself, so that he can meet her over and over again, but he only ever had one chance.
More straightforwardly, his life will cross Theo's with elliptical regularity, like La Grande Illusion (1937) taken one step forward in history. While he cannot get word of Theo when stationed in Flanders in 1918, Candy returns home to find that his erstwhile German friend has spent the last two years as a prisoner of war in Derbyshire; is snubbed by Theo when he attempts a visit to the P.O.W. camp and some months later is called up from Victoria Station by an apologetic, enthusiastic Theo who is going home; invites him over for what proves to be a dinner from hell with various British dignitaries and finally, in 1939, becomes all the family Theo has left when he flees Nazi Germany. They orbit one another, Candy in his old idealistic security, Theo in his wryer, sadder realism, and Churchill must have found it just another strike against Powell and Pressburger that the most perceptive character in the entire film is the German.
But this is the great trick of the movie: that we still care about Clive Wynne-Candy. By all rights, Theo with his complications and his losses and his essential—if occasionally exasperated—fondness for his English friend should steal every scene out from underneath him, because Candy is very nice, and very honorable, but frankly he's not the brightest bulb in the marquee. I don't mean that he's stupid. He hasn't received all his promotions and honors for nothing. But he doesn't think much about what he does. His duel with Theo, which kickstarts all the plot threads that we'll follow up into the present day, comes about because he insults an entire coffeehouse full of officers because he's in the Café Hohenzollern because he doesn't want to make Edith feel worse after he's told her that he can take no political action in Berlin despite his presence there against the orders of his superiors . . . Et cetera. He doesn't recognize his feelings for Edith until after he's pledged "the happiness of my fiancée who was never my fiancée and the man who tried to kill me before he was introduced to me." He knows an Indian rope trick when he sees one, but he marries her anyway. And he reminds me a little of the Archchancellor of Unseen University, whose mind runs rather like a locomotive: once it gets onto a certain track, it takes some effort to switch it over onto another. The ways in which he was brought up to think, he only calcifies into as he grows older. He doesn't question that the world will run as it always has, by the same rules, with the same results. Whereas Theo has always been something of an iconoclast: an officer of the Imperial German Army who does not believe in fighting duels, who marries an Englishwoman in the aftermath of the Boer War and the run-up to World War I, and from the beginning he knows that wars are not the gentleman's game their generation has all been brought up to play. Candy's as naive about his own countryman as about the enemy. "It means that Right is Might after all," he exults at the cease-fire. "The Germans have shelled hospitals, bombed open towns, sunk neutral ships, used poison gas—and we won. Clean fighting, honest soldiering have won." This is the same man who once left some German prisoners alone with a captain who would clearly work them over as soon as his superior was out of the room; not as some kind of good-cop-bad-cop interrogation routine, but because it never once seems to have crossed Candy's mind that anyone in the British Army might own brass knuckles.
It's an odd, innocent sort of egotism—the assumption that because he's a decent man, or at least tries to be one, the rest of the world must naturally work the same way. And it is this attitude that drives Theo up the wall, that Candy is a decent man, a good friend and a fine soldier and a loving husband and all sorts of other positive attributes, and yet it's as though that very goodness is a gigantic wraparound blind spot. "The war's over," he says to Theo at the dinner from hell in 1919. Jovial, well-meant, hideously off the mark: "You're a decent fellow and so are we." But Theo snaps back, "I am not a decent fellow! I am a beggar, like all the rest of the professional soldiers in our army. A beaten country can't have an army. So what are we going to do?" and Candy is exactly as confused as when his friend would not speak to him in Derbyshire. For him, the war is over. Why don't the Germans feel the same way? What have they got to be sore about? Hello, groundwork for World War II.
I suppose this is another aspect of the film that Churchill objected to: that The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp lays some of the responsibility for the Nazis at the feet of England and the sanctions imposed on Germany at the end of World War I. Yet I still can't see it as anti-British. For God's sake, Theo emigrates to England because as much as he loves his Vaterland—and because he believed that one must stand by one's country, remained there long past the point when he should have packed up and gotten his family out—his happiest memories seem linked to his wife's homeland. "In this very nursing home," he explains, "I met my wife for the first time. And I met an Englishman who became my greatest friend. And I remembered the people at the station in '19, when we prisoners were sent home, cheering us, treating us like friends, and the faces of a party of distinguished men who were kind and tried their utmost to comfort me when the defeat of my country seemed to me unbearable. And very foolishly I remembered the countryside, the gardens, the green lawns, the weedy rivers and the trees she loved so much. And a great desire came over me to come back here, to my wife's country." There's the sense of place, that here a refugee feels more keenly than a native. And it is timeless, to be cherished and loved and preserved, rather like Candy himself, but not in the confident blindness that claims that if one fights fair, then so will one's enemies. Theo doesn't despise his friend for his old-fashioned, gentlemanly ideas. He just wishes Candy could learn to see past them: outside his own head: into the future. And in the final minutes of the story, he does. Sic transit gloria Candy. But we've got a marvelous film to remember him by.
I need to learn to write these analyses when I'm not so tired . . .
—T.E. Lawrence, from his introduction to Richard Garnett's The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales (1924)
Apologies for the lack of recent content. For the last four days, I've been sick with a stomach flu: it has not been so much fun. I seem to have had a norovirus, which my mother somehow misheard as "Norway Flu." This instantly gave me and
fleurdelis28 an image of little rat-Vikings paddling ferociously up the Charles, spreading plague and Wagner wherever they went, and that would have been immensely cooler than the reality. I need to be more efficient about my movie posts. TCM has been saving my sanity lately, such that in the last couple of weeks I've seen The African Queen (1951) for the first time, a double feature of The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), both of which I love, and back in mid-January an odd comedy-metamovie called Paris When It Sizzles (1964) with William Holden and Audrey Hepburn. Not to mention The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), which
rushthatspeaks and nineweaving came over to watch on Tuesday before my digestive system decided it despised me. I will either catch up on all of them or I won't . . .Now that I've seen five of them, I should sit down sometime and seriously consider what makes an Archers film. That will not happen tonight. Mostly I will note that I loved The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and that I should come back to thinking about it sometime when my brain is not slush.
It's not that I can't place it in the Archers' canon. There is a sense of place, but perhaps most of all there's a sense of time—vanished, changing, static, new, woven back across itself and full of echoes (a trait shared with Black Narcissus and A Canterbury Tale, but I will have to save this comparison for later), and these shifting layers can be used equally for serious emotional or parodic effect. The title credits are stitched into a medieval tapestry, but the knight on his white horse is the big-bellied, walrus-mustached Colonel Blimp of David Low's cartoons. When first introduced in 1942, Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey, looking impressively seventy years old and about the size of a walrus) is an anachronism in the other direction, a retired officer surprised in his characteristic Turkish bath who can only sputter impotently, "But war starts at midnight!" at the young Home Guardsman (James McKechnie) who has stolen six hours' march on him in a training exercise: as though the real enemy would be as tractable as a war game. The young lieutenant is not pleased at being scolded for his innovation and loses his temper; a few unwise remarks at the expense of the old man's girth, mustache, and general complacency later, he's been pummeled into the nearest pool for his troubles and through the steam Wynne-Candy is shouting, "You laugh at my big belly, but you don't know how I got it! You laugh at my mustache, but you don't know why I grew it! How do you know what sort of fellow I was when I was as young as you are, forty years ago?" And there's no dissolve. No familiar cinematic shorthand for time turned back. The water in the plunge-bath ripples, and out of it surfaces Clive "Sugar" Candy forty years ago, trim, vigorous, clean-shaven, and butchering the "Mignon Aria" terribly.
Much to the annoyance of an older officer of the club, a sort of proto-Blimp who harrumphs and mutters about disrespect and good men's lives lost until he sees the Victoria Cross pinned to Candy's coat, but this is not a film about how the young Candy grows up, ticky-tacky, into him. It's almost more about how Candy doesn't grow up, even as he grows older: how time passes around him and the world alters and he remains unchanged. "That's a promise. You stay just as you are, till the floods come and this is a lake." Oh, but you have to be careful with promises and adynata. The seas may not run dry or the rocks melt with the sun, but there is cataclysm on the horizon and the old world will wash away. Then you'd better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone . . . From the very start of the story, the times they are a-changing. Newly arrived in Berlin to refute anti-British propaganda—without the permission of his superiors—Candy nearly sets off an international incident when his confrontation with one of the nastier propagandists inadvertently offers insult to the entire German Army. Eighty-two officers promptly demand satisfaction; for Candy to refuse would be a political disaster. The year is 1902, but the audience hears echoes from twelve years ahead as two officers of the Imperial German Army and two officials of the British Embassy sit down with a book of rules and plan the duel between Candy and his lot-drawn opponent, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), right down to the last polite detail:
"Do you prefer to strip the upper parts of the bodies of the combatants, or do you prefer them in shirtsleeves?"
"Shirtsleeves. I see here that Paragraph 133 says, 'A few hours previous to the duel, it is advisable to take a bath.'"
"Only the principals. Not the seconds."
"It's a very strange sensation to be preparing a duel between two people who've never even seen each other."
"It happens sometimes. Marriages also."
And as it turns out, this duel will seal Candy and Theo to one another for the rest of their lives. While Candy grows a mustache to cover his scarred mouth and Theo heals from the cut across his forehead, the two play bridge and converse in smashed-up English and German and presently, oddly and importantly, fall in love with the same woman: the governess Edith Hunter, whose letter originally brought Candy to Berlin and whom the British Embassy uses as a cover story for the duel, and whom Candy gladly gives away to Theo only to realize too late that he also loves her. Thereafter she will recur throughout the film like another trick with time, played in each incarnation by Deborah Kerr. When he meets her in World War II as the nurse Barbara Wynne, he courts her even before he knows her name, because she is the double of his lost love twenty years ago. In the present day, she's his driver Angela Cannon, called Johnny by her friends, hand-picked by Candy out of a pool of seven hundred candidates for a reason she doesn't know, but which is immediately apparent to the audience and to Theo. The film leaves open whether the three women are doppelgängers in more than Candy's wishful gaze—Theo does not see Edith duplicated in a portrait of Barbara, but his first glimpse of Johnny's face in a wash of headlights startles him—but the effect is the same. Time pleats back on itself, so that he can meet her over and over again, but he only ever had one chance.
More straightforwardly, his life will cross Theo's with elliptical regularity, like La Grande Illusion (1937) taken one step forward in history. While he cannot get word of Theo when stationed in Flanders in 1918, Candy returns home to find that his erstwhile German friend has spent the last two years as a prisoner of war in Derbyshire; is snubbed by Theo when he attempts a visit to the P.O.W. camp and some months later is called up from Victoria Station by an apologetic, enthusiastic Theo who is going home; invites him over for what proves to be a dinner from hell with various British dignitaries and finally, in 1939, becomes all the family Theo has left when he flees Nazi Germany. They orbit one another, Candy in his old idealistic security, Theo in his wryer, sadder realism, and Churchill must have found it just another strike against Powell and Pressburger that the most perceptive character in the entire film is the German.
But this is the great trick of the movie: that we still care about Clive Wynne-Candy. By all rights, Theo with his complications and his losses and his essential—if occasionally exasperated—fondness for his English friend should steal every scene out from underneath him, because Candy is very nice, and very honorable, but frankly he's not the brightest bulb in the marquee. I don't mean that he's stupid. He hasn't received all his promotions and honors for nothing. But he doesn't think much about what he does. His duel with Theo, which kickstarts all the plot threads that we'll follow up into the present day, comes about because he insults an entire coffeehouse full of officers because he's in the Café Hohenzollern because he doesn't want to make Edith feel worse after he's told her that he can take no political action in Berlin despite his presence there against the orders of his superiors . . . Et cetera. He doesn't recognize his feelings for Edith until after he's pledged "the happiness of my fiancée who was never my fiancée and the man who tried to kill me before he was introduced to me." He knows an Indian rope trick when he sees one, but he marries her anyway. And he reminds me a little of the Archchancellor of Unseen University, whose mind runs rather like a locomotive: once it gets onto a certain track, it takes some effort to switch it over onto another. The ways in which he was brought up to think, he only calcifies into as he grows older. He doesn't question that the world will run as it always has, by the same rules, with the same results. Whereas Theo has always been something of an iconoclast: an officer of the Imperial German Army who does not believe in fighting duels, who marries an Englishwoman in the aftermath of the Boer War and the run-up to World War I, and from the beginning he knows that wars are not the gentleman's game their generation has all been brought up to play. Candy's as naive about his own countryman as about the enemy. "It means that Right is Might after all," he exults at the cease-fire. "The Germans have shelled hospitals, bombed open towns, sunk neutral ships, used poison gas—and we won. Clean fighting, honest soldiering have won." This is the same man who once left some German prisoners alone with a captain who would clearly work them over as soon as his superior was out of the room; not as some kind of good-cop-bad-cop interrogation routine, but because it never once seems to have crossed Candy's mind that anyone in the British Army might own brass knuckles.
It's an odd, innocent sort of egotism—the assumption that because he's a decent man, or at least tries to be one, the rest of the world must naturally work the same way. And it is this attitude that drives Theo up the wall, that Candy is a decent man, a good friend and a fine soldier and a loving husband and all sorts of other positive attributes, and yet it's as though that very goodness is a gigantic wraparound blind spot. "The war's over," he says to Theo at the dinner from hell in 1919. Jovial, well-meant, hideously off the mark: "You're a decent fellow and so are we." But Theo snaps back, "I am not a decent fellow! I am a beggar, like all the rest of the professional soldiers in our army. A beaten country can't have an army. So what are we going to do?" and Candy is exactly as confused as when his friend would not speak to him in Derbyshire. For him, the war is over. Why don't the Germans feel the same way? What have they got to be sore about? Hello, groundwork for World War II.
I suppose this is another aspect of the film that Churchill objected to: that The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp lays some of the responsibility for the Nazis at the feet of England and the sanctions imposed on Germany at the end of World War I. Yet I still can't see it as anti-British. For God's sake, Theo emigrates to England because as much as he loves his Vaterland—and because he believed that one must stand by one's country, remained there long past the point when he should have packed up and gotten his family out—his happiest memories seem linked to his wife's homeland. "In this very nursing home," he explains, "I met my wife for the first time. And I met an Englishman who became my greatest friend. And I remembered the people at the station in '19, when we prisoners were sent home, cheering us, treating us like friends, and the faces of a party of distinguished men who were kind and tried their utmost to comfort me when the defeat of my country seemed to me unbearable. And very foolishly I remembered the countryside, the gardens, the green lawns, the weedy rivers and the trees she loved so much. And a great desire came over me to come back here, to my wife's country." There's the sense of place, that here a refugee feels more keenly than a native. And it is timeless, to be cherished and loved and preserved, rather like Candy himself, but not in the confident blindness that claims that if one fights fair, then so will one's enemies. Theo doesn't despise his friend for his old-fashioned, gentlemanly ideas. He just wishes Candy could learn to see past them: outside his own head: into the future. And in the final minutes of the story, he does. Sic transit gloria Candy. But we've got a marvelous film to remember him by.
I need to learn to write these analyses when I'm not so tired . . .
no subject
Its accompanying essay contains some useful information on the production history and Churchill.