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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 . . .
glitch
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Er? It should be
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I need to watch Blimp again. It's been years since I last saw it.
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Churchill knew perfectly well that we bore part of the blame for Versailles, he wrote a book about it. What's the story with him and the film?
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Yes. Especially if it's what I had back in December...
Which reminds me. What would you like to be fed?
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I recommend it very highly. After A Canterbury Tale, it's my favorite Powell and Pressburger so far; and I hadn't expected to love it so much.
What's the story with him and the film?
He tried to stop it from being made—some of the DVD extras include memos on this subject between him, his Minister of Information Brendan Bracken, and Michael Powell—and after it was released, attempted to interfere with its showing. (Of course, you ban a film, people come from Gdańsk to see it . . .) He seems to have considered it critical of the British military and generally damaging to wartime morale. For years the full print wasn't even available. It was finally restored in the 1970's and recently released on DVD by Criterion, and you should rent it.
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I'm very omnivorous and flexible. I am not a fan of brussel sprouts. Surprise me?
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Thank you . . .
I need to watch Blimp again. It's been years since I last saw it.
What do you remember of it?
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I do remember being amazed at how Livesey managed the transition from fat, old Candy to trim young Candy- and all, presumably, without the prosthetics they'd use today. Usually when a character is asked to age 40 years there's some part of the process that doesn't convince (for example it bothers me in Brokeback Mountain how the "middle-aged" Heath Ledger still has the dewy-fresh skin of a man in his 20s) but Candy manages all of Candy's ages with absolute conviction.
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Thanks. Don't ever catch this.
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I'll try.
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When the script first went up for approval, the War Office wouldn't vet it, so the Archers stole the military equipment they used (and put it back where they found it, after). Churchill stormed into Anton Walbrook's West End dressing room and asked if he supposed the film to be good propaganda for Britain; Walbrook, an Austrian refugee himself, said that "No people in the world other than the English would have had the courage, in wartime, to tell the people such unvarnished truth." Churchill wasn't mollified, went to the premiere, missed the point and booed. According to the correspondence collected on the DVD, he seems to have thought that the film a) thought that persons such as Candy/Blimp actually existed in the British Army and b) that the film was criticizing the Army for allowing them to be there, while c) making the German more pragmatic, realistic and generally sensible. C) is true, but bitingly ironic, and said German also calls Nazi-ism the "greatest evil ever created by the human mind"; a) and b) are blatant misreadings.
Churchill's ban failed to hurt the film on first openings, but was highly effective in both not allowing the film out of the country and not allowing it to play later on, after the first theatrical run had passed. It's a three-hour film, but was only available in a ninety-minute cut till the late 1980s. Which is why most people have never heard of it.
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Its accompanying essay contains some useful information on the production history and Churchill.
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If you do watch it again, I'd love to hear what you think.
I do remember being amazed at how Livesey managed the transition from fat, old Candy to trim young Candy- and all, presumably, without the prosthetics they'd use today.
Yes. I was reminded of Citizen Kane and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, both of which track characters acrosss decades of their lives, and this was more seamless than either.
the impartial injustice of the universe
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I know! No cruise and no Vikings. I want a refund.
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Sorry to hear that. I've been seeing news anchors in the north east who also seem sick. Surely a coincidence . . . ?
Now I need to see The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp so I can read the rest of this post. How did you like The African Queen? I rather liked it--I usually like John Huston. I recommend The Misfits (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055184/) especially.
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Keep the money! Keep the money!
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Actually, there was a sort of mini-epidemic in Boston in January and I wouldn't be surprised if it's spread to the rest of New England by now.
How did you like The African Queen? I rather liked it--I usually like John Huston. I recommend The Misfits especially.
I loved The African Queen: the plot turned into total silliness at the end, but Humphrey Bogart completely deserved his Oscar and now I'll have to see A Streetcar Named Desire so I can tell whether Katherine Hepburn should have gotten hers, too. I haven't seen The Misfits in years, but I remember that I liked it very much. I think it was my introduction to Marilyn Monroe.
The Man Who Would Be King (1975) is John Huston's, yes? I love that movie.
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If you want to see a John Huston movie that starts out sort of serious, but then gets astonishingly silly fast, check out Beat the Devil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_the_devil). Huston became so bored with the book the movie was based on that he and screenwriter Truman Capote started making things up as they went along. People are strongly divided on whether or not it's a good movie--I think it is, especially for Peter Lorre.
It's public domain, so you can watch it here. (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9052568461937082317&q=Beat+the+Devil+Humphrey+Bogart&hl=en)
Humphrey Bogart completely deserved his Oscar and now I'll have to see A Streetcar Named Desire so I can tell whether Katherine Hepburn should have gotten hers, too.
I love Katharine Hepburn, but Vivian Leigh's role was probably more demanding, so I'd say the Oscar was fairly awarded. But I'd also say that, though Humphrey Bogart is great in that movie as always, the Best Actor Oscar ought to've gone to Marlon Brando, who was not only great in A Streetcar Named Desire but also essentially revolutionised the acting profession single-handedly. Even more than in On the Waterfront, Brando is absolutely captivating in Streetcar.
I haven't seen The Misfits in years, but I remember that I liked it very much. I think it was my introduction to Marilyn Monroe.
That's a great way to get introduced to her. It's easily my favourite Monroe performance. Some Like it Hot is great, but The Misfits is one of the greatest movies of all time, in my opinion.
The Man Who Would Be King (1975) is John Huston's, yes? I love that movie.
I haven't seen that one myself. I'll have to look into it . . .
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That's awesome, actually.
People are strongly divided on whether or not it's a good movie--I think it is, especially for Peter Lorre.
I love Peter Lorre; I'm willing to give it a try.
I haven't seen that one myself. I'll have to look into it . . .
Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Rudyard Kipling. It's phenomenal.
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I also noticed an interesting, minor thread with the Deborah Kerrs about opportunities for women. Edith complains to Candy about how women who don't marry have very few career option. By the third Deborah Kerr, she's happy to be called "Johnny" and she's sort of a soldier. I thought it was interesting how easily Candy and Theo take the transition. Theo laments about how one used to fight for the women and children at home, but I don't sense any real resentment towards Johnny. I think it's one way the Archers point out that the men, even Candy, are not so much defined by their conventionality as they are by their decency.
but frankly he's not the brightest bulb in the marquee. I don't mean that he's stupid.
He does seem to have a certain canniness. Like maybe a good leader who can recognise his own limitations and can take advice from his subordinates and friends without feeling diminished. This may come from his presumption that most people around him are decent people, but there is, I think, a certain wisdom in that as most people do see themselves as decent. This could be one reason the people who initially scoff at his behaviour tend to end up being his good friend.
Yet I still can't see it as anti-British.
Certainly not. It's more effectively pro-British than any propaganda could ever be. When making an argument, most people know that stacking some weight against oneself can very often lead to great rewards. That we don't see the young Home Guard Officer get his comeuppance at the end only makes us love Candy more.
But it's no wonder Churchill didn't get it--politicians and art rarely mix well. Even the best of them are all thumbs.
There's the sense of place, that here a refugee feels more keenly than a native.
Anton Walbrook's so brilliant there, in that one long take. I think one reason that speech was so effective was that he was speaking from the perspective of one the audience might regard as a terrible, potential enemy at this point. Where Candy is a caricature of old England revealing humanity, Theo is a caricature of the enemy revealing humanity. The antithesis of the Nazis in wartime Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons, and it makes me think of the utility of dehumanising propaganda in wartime. It's interesting to see nowadays the Bush administration trying to force-feed propaganda about "The Terrorists" and the "Islamofascists", but finding our culture has become too complicated and our media too critical to create a consistent image of evil for everyone.
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.
I don't think Candy assumes that everyone will fight fair because he does. I think the issue is brought to a head when Candy says it would be better to be defeated fighting fair than to win fighting unfair, and Theo points out that's not worth much if you're fighting for your own existence.
It's on this point that I think we desperately miss people like Candy to-day, as our own government seems to perceive itself as invariably "right", no matter what it does.
Anyway, very nice analysis, no matter how tired you were at the time. I'm glad I finally got a chance to read it. Colonel Blimp came in the mail last night at my mother's house, and I rushed over to get it, in no small part because I wanted to read this post.
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I hadn't quite picked up on that. (Thank you, brain. Next time, leave a forwarding address.) Neat.
I thought it was interesting how easily Candy and Theo take the transition. Theo laments about how one used to fight for the women and children at home, but I don't sense any real resentment towards Johnny.
No; I don't think it's there. And that's one of the ways in which we understand that while Colonel Blimp no doubt would have harrumphed about women's places, Candy is not all the reactionary he looks.
This may come from his presumption that most people around him are decent people, but there is, I think, a certain wisdom in that as most people do see themselves as decent. This could be one reason the people who initially scoff at his behaviour tend to end up being his good friend.
If nothing else, he is intensely difficult to dislike. There are reasons for Theo still to be his friend after forty years.
That we don't see the young Home Guard Officer get his comeuppance at the end only makes us love Candy more.
Yes. I love his closing remarks on the dinner invitation he once turned down, and how he'll hand the favor on. "Yes, I think I will invite him to dinner. And he'd better accept!"
But it's no wonder Churchill didn't get it--politicians and art rarely mix well. Even the best of them are all thumbs.
If you haven't already watched the extras on Churchill and Colonel Blimp, do so. The memos are ridiculous.
Anton Walbrook's so brilliant there, in that one long take.
Both of his speeches, when he explains his love for England, and when he finally loses patience with Candy, are incredible. He has lines like, "This time you are fighting for your existence against the most devilish idea ever created by a human brain—Nazism," and they don't ring falsely as propaganda, they sound like a passionate and dispossessed man who has lost one country he loves already and doesn't want to see the other destroyed. "Who can describe hydrophobia better than one who has been bitten, and is now immune?"
(And it makes sense, however terribly, that his sons have become Nazis: especially half-English in the aftermath of World War I, either they can be seen as the enemy, like their mother and their father with his suspect loyalties, or they can be good, very patriotic Germans.)
The antithesis of the Nazis in wartime Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons, and it makes me think of the utility of dehumanising propaganda in wartime.
Powell and Pressburger's 49th Parallel (1941) is about to come out on DVD, and I'm very curious to see it—apart from the presence of Eric Portman, I cannot imagine that their "anti-isolationist propaganda" was of the standard sort. (The same goes for One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942), but that one doesn't yet seem to be on DVD.) A Canterbury Tale was also, I believe, commissioned as propaganda, and look how normally that one turned out.
It's interesting to see nowadays the Bush administration trying to force-feed propaganda about "The Terrorists" and the "Islamofascists", but finding our culture has become too complicated and our media too critical to create a consistent image of evil for everyone.
No, but I fear it works well enough for some . . .
I don't think Candy assumes that everyone will fight fair because he does. I think the issue is brought to a head when Candy says it would be better to be defeated fighting fair than to win fighting unfair, and Theo points out that's not worth much if you're fighting for your own existence.
Okay: yes.
Anyway, very nice analysis, no matter how tired you were at the time. I'm glad I finally got a chance to read it. Colonel Blimp came in the mail last night at my mother's house, and I rushed over to get it, in no small part because I wanted to read this post.
Thank you. I'm very glad you liked it—both the post and the film.
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GENERAL WYNNE-CANDY is so like Colonel Blimp in appearance that he must certainly have been the model who inspired David Low.
He IS Blimp.
Here is the great face, the sweeping moustaches, the ivory-domed head, the noble belly, even the little crease on his fat chest.
In BLACK AND WHITE, Colonel Blimp is an awe-inspiring figure; but in TECHNICOLOR! No wonder SPUD hesitates. He is sweating, not only from the heat.
He stands a moment looking down at his sleeping prize. Then he gently taps him on the shoulder.
. . . Do you remember in Kipling's 'The White Seal', when the diminutive Kotick by his barking, wakes Sea-Catch, the great Walrus; how Sea-Catch starts awake, banging his neighbour with his flipper and coughing and spluttering 'Eh? How? What?'
Even so wakes General Clive Wynne-Candy.
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That was great--I need to take a moment here to disagree with something I said before my second cup of coffee; "When making an argument, most people know that stacking some weight against oneself can very often lead to great rewards." That's not right. What I was getting at was that people respond better when you seem honest, and you don't try to conceal your deficiencies.
If you haven't already watched the extras on Churchill and Colonel Blimp, do so. The memos are ridiculous.
I'm looking forward to viewing the extras, and to listening to the Michael Powell and Martin Scorsese commentary. Though if it's anything like the one on Black Narcissus, there's not much commentary going on in the commentary. It'll be interesting listening to Powell breathing, anyway. I just haven't had much time, lately, as I've been working on my new project. By the way, if you're willing, I could e-mail you some of what I've been working on. I could use an intelligent sounding board. Though if you're too busy yourself, I'd completely understand.
Powell and Pressburger's 49th Parallel (1941) is about to come out on DVD
That sounds interesting. It just occurred to me--do you think the relationship between Candy and Theo might have perhaps been similar to that of Powell and Pressburger? I think it was in one of A Canterbury Tale's features where someone described Powell as being the one with wilder, more fantastic ideas, while Pressburger would sometimes talk his collaborator down with a more realistic view.
A Canterbury Tale was also, I believe, commissioned as propaganda, and look how normally that one turned out.
Yes, though I definitely sensed, especially at the end, a very Go Fighting Allies! aspect. It's sort of like the Archers were told to make a movie about how great England is, and they made a movie about how much they loved England.
Did I mention that I found the shooting script? It is full of brilliance.
You hadn't mentioned it. The bit you quote here is indeed brilliant--there's a real charming excitement in the words.
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Understood. I think I took the comment that way, anyway.
I just haven't had much time, lately, as I've been working on my new project. By the way, if you're willing, I could e-mail you some of what I've been working on.
I would love to see the new project. Send away!
It just occurred to me--do you think the relationship between Candy and Theo might have perhaps been similar to that of Powell and Pressburger?
I would believe it. I'd be very surprised if, at the least, Pressburger had not written some of Theo's dialogue from his own sentiments: he left Germany because of the Nazis in 1932 and came to England in 1935.
(This article also agrees with you.)
Yes, though I definitely sensed, especially at the end, a very Go Fighting Allies! aspect.
I still think it's the only film I've ever seen that could end with "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and not fall apart utterly.
It's sort of like the Archers were told to make a movie about how great England is, and they made a movie about how much they loved England.
Yes. And for that reason I think the film is much more effective: listening to someone tell you why they love something is much more of an inducement to consider it seriously than if they simply tell you that you'd love it, too.
The bit you quote here is indeed brilliant--there's a real charming excitement in the words.
I'm also fascinated by the more serious character descriptions, like the introduction of Theo. When first described before the duel, he's "a tall, ominous figure in his slightly fantastic uniform, he has, as yet, no personality beyond being the chosen representative of eighty-two serious-minded indignant Ulan officers." Only when he and Frau von Kalteneck come to play bridge with Candy and Edith in the hospital does he acquire that differentiation:
THEO speaks no English, or at least very little. He is very good-looking and about four years older than Clive. He is an excellent officer of the more thoughtful type. If he were not a soldier he might have been an artist. In one thing he is very much a German: he is thorough in everything he undertakes. He makes many friends and is a good friend himself. It is his own decision which has led to this meeting with his former opponent. The WOMAN is his girl-friend. Their association is not rooted in deep feelings but on a simple physical basis. If one of them were to say one day: 'I am leaving you because I have fallen in love with somebody,' there would be no tragedy about it.
The WOMAN is about thirty. Extremely clever, of the best Berlin society: 'eine moderne Frau' but in a very different way from EDITH, who believes sincerely in the importance of her beliefs. FRAU VON KALTENECK, on the contrary, would be much happier if she did not have to ride or hunt or be a sportswoman. She speaks good English and from the first moment is interested in CLIVE.
I'm not sure I would have picked up on all of that on first viewing—and, in fact, I didn't—but I love that it's still there in the text.
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Ah, thank you, you're very kind. It'll take me a few minutes . . .
(This article also agrees with you.)
Interesting. It would seem the relationship goes even further than I thought.
I'm interested in this idea of a combative collaboration that's at the same time not bitter. Listening to the commentary for Double Indemnity, I was amazed to hear about how fractious Billy Wilder's relationship was with Raymond Chandler--and yet they produced such a brilliant script, and their writing styles seemed so well suited for each other. Such collaborations must be intense tight-rope acts.
I still think it's the only film I've ever seen that could end with "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and not fall apart utterly.
Hehe.
I'm not sure I would have picked up on all of that on first viewing—and, in fact, I didn't—but I love that it's still there in the text.
I noticed Edith automatically attaching to Theo as Theo's girl automatically attached to Candy. For some reason, I didn't realise the woman was Theo's girlfriend, but it makes sense now. With censorship at the time, they certainly couldn't have been explicit about a casual physical relationship between the two.
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I've only collaborated with other writers a few times:
I noticed Edith automatically attaching to Theo as Theo's girl automatically attached to Candy. For some reason, I didn't realise the woman was Theo's girlfriend, but it makes sense now.
That's what I didn't pick up on either, and it's a neat, incomplete parallelism: they end up switching off, but only halfway. (And another character distinction: I don't think Candy would be capable of that kind of relationship, friendly, physical, where neither partner's the love of either's life. He falls for Edith, marries Barbara, picks out Johnny, all for love—he's a romantic.)
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That's a good point. By the way, did you receive my e-mail?
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I did, and you should have a response by now—I'm looking forward to the first issue.