The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Director: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

1943 / 163min / DCP

From the Boer War to the London Blitz, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp employs an ingenious flashback structure to guide us through 40 years in the life of General Clive Candy (Roger Livesey, embodying the pompous cartoon character created by David Low) and of Britain herself. Covering Candy’s three great unrequited romances (each played by Deborah Kerr) as well as his long friendship with his German opposite number, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), Powell and Pressburger’s luminous Technicolor epic survived Winston Churchill’s attempts to interfere with its production—the film having been deemed insufficiently jingoistic for wartime—to become “very possibly the finest film ever made in Britain.” —Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

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