Invaders of the heart… 49th Parallel (1941), BFI Cinema Unbound

You think we hate you, but we don't. It is against our faith to hate. We only hate the power of evil which is spreading over the world. You and your Hitlerism are like the microbes of some filthy disease -- filled with the longing to multiply yourselves until you destroy everything healthy in the world.

 

No, we are not your brothers.

 

Screening on the BFI’s 35mm copy, 49^th Parallel featured a host of stars lining up for their party piece propagandist soliloquy. It’s the skill of The Archers, and especially Emeric Pressburger, who won an Oscar for his script, that none of this felt undeserved or preachy. Sure, Laurence Olivier’s French-Canadian accent made Dick van Dyke’s cockney sound as authentic as Ray Winston in Sexy Beast, but he certainly took one for the team. This was the duo’s third film and it did the job in terms of impressing North America going on to become the most successful British film to date in cinemas.

 

Of all the big hitters it is the Austrian Anton Walbrook who hits the hardest, the words of one enforced migrant expressed through the acting skill of another with such passion that I only realised I was holding my breath halfway through as his character, the leader of a group of Hutterite Christians explained how, though German, they had only found peace and freedom in Canada, with Europe and the fatherland only offering suppression. His speech is in response to one from Eric Portman’s Lieutenant Hirth, a late-comer and true believer in the Nazi cause, who assumes his own rhetoric, mimicking Adolf, will lead to a roomful of “Heil Hitlers” only to completely misjudge the mood.

 

Walbrook’s Peter is a man of peace and strength who forgives the Nazi’s as he condemns the hatred of their ideology in words that again ring true as the World slips towards extremism. I considered just quoting the entire speech… just a few days away from remembrance Sunday and will slaughter ongoing across the world and democracy never more under threat than in the US and even the UK. We never learn.

 

Eric Portman and his men react to Peter's speech

Portman does make for a deliciously evil Nazi though and is central to the film’s treatment of the German’s who escape the sinking of U Boat 37 which gets trapped in Hudson Bay after sinking a Canadian cargo ship. His commander is killed and his superior officer, Lieutenant Kuhnecke (Raymond Lovell), more intelligent and less dogmatic takes charge of a group of six, including Vogel (Niall MacGinnis) the most sympathetic character, and other more typical Nazis.

 

Pressburger fills out even the Germans with personalities but they gradually leave a trail of death and destruction along Canada’s 49^th Parallel as they try to fight, steal and lie their way to Vancouver and from there a rescue in a Japanese ship. On route they first encounter Olivier as Johnnie, le trapper and the excellent Finlay Currie as the factor at the Hudson Bay trading post. There’s “Nick, the Eskimo” played by Ley On and, as with native Canadians elsewhere in the film, he and his tribe are treated as a real characters with agency and who influence the narrative. Pressburger was keen to include all Canadians in his tale and, accent aside, Olivier plays his part well, humorously dismantling Hirth’s earnest belief in his Fuhrer.

 

The Germans steal a plane, brutally killing two Canadian airmen and a number of Inuit, but one of the tribe manages to shoot one of them before the take off. And then there were five. Crashlanding after running out of fuel, Kuhnecke is also killed leaving just four men to trudge on and find the German Hutterite farming community, being greeted by a young girl called Anna (Glynis Johns) before gaining some acceptance with the help of Vogel’s baking skills. After the failure of Hirth’s oratory the group decide to leave and Vogel is invited to stay… and he is executed for desertion and just not being Nazi enough. And then there were three.

Laurence Olivier and Finlay Currie

The group loses a further member during a well-worked scene at an “Indian Rally” in Winnipeg, when, the Mounties take to the loud hailer, knowing the men are about and describing them as the crowd of native Canadians and to look hard at the person next to them. One of the German crew panics and s caught. Every such scene serves the polemic and shows, in this case the power of a united people against “invaders”.

 

Perhaps the strangest encounter is when Hirst and his last surviving colleague encounter and English writer in the wilds, Philip Armstrong Scott (Leslie Howard) who with his relaxed almost whimsical observations on the war being so far away and the importance of art, which will transcend history. All of this is anathema to Hirth, who can only see weakness, decadence and cowardice. After the camp is asleep the German’s jump Scott, tie him up and force him to watch his books, his own papers and his Picasso being burned. Their escape does not go to plan though, and Scott proves he does indeed have the steel they think he lacks appreciation for the arts does not make an Englishman weak.

 

Events conclude at Niagara Falls when Hirth, so close to freedom in neutral USA, meets his match in a Canadian soldier played with relish by Raymond Massey – an actual Canute! It’s another high-octane cameo and a stirring conclusion to this passionate and well-constructed propaganda. As usual with their war films, Powell and Pressburger allowed more depth to their characters than the brief probably required and yet this is exactly what makes them so watchable all these years later and which made them more powerful at the time.

 

Leslie Howard

After all, even Hirth admits that it’s governments and systems that are to blame for the way people are forced to act although as both Peter and Raymond Massey’s Andy Brock explain, it is their freedom to do something about this that defines society. There is no such choice under fascism.

 

Apart from editing from one David Lean there is fine cinematography from Frederick Young, F.R.P.S. which makes the most of stunning locations from the north-west coast to the mountains inland and Niagara’s mesmerising falls. It’s a travelogue of “one of the three great democracies” and as if our souls could not be stirred any more, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ debut score completes the task. 49^th Parallel works on a grand scale to perform miniature operations on the heart.

 

Interestingly American censors cut 19 minutes from the film, including Hirth’s speech when he claims that "Eskimos are like Negros" and "semi-apes, only one degree above the Jews", which had to be taken out to avoid offending segregationists in the American South... some of the views on race were too close to their own. Remarkable. The film was entitled The Invaders for the US, which is apt as the Archers smuggled in a lot of deeper meaning of their own.

 

Raymond Massey

Twice Upon a Time (1953)

 

Andrew Macdonald joined the BFI's James Bell in introducing his grandfather Emeric’s only solo directed film and in reminding us that The Parent Trap was a big film in his family, also pointed out that he never saw his forebear as a directorial sort; as someone who would enjoy the final say. Twice Upon a Time written and directed by Pressburger in 1953, has rarely been screened and the BFI’s transfer of a positive was one of the first screenings since the fifties which hadn’t been included in previous retrospectives.

 

It is, as Andrew says, a children’s film but one filled with his grandad’s wit and character wisdom and which takes an unlikely scenario and makes us smile.

 

Actual twins, Yolande and Charmian Larthe play two children separated when young and split between two divorcing parents played by Elizabeth Allan as Carol-Anne Bailey and Hugh Williams as James Turner. Charmain plays Anne, daughter if Carol-Anne and Yolande is Carol, daughter of ballet composer James. The story is told in flashback by the family doctor, Dr Mathews (Jack Hawkins) as the two discover each other on a skiing holiday with their schools. They soon get close, realise what’s happened and decide to trick their parents by playing each other… it’s a lovely film and Emeric, with the aid of several Archer’s regulars, succeeds in crafting a decent film.

 

Not an experience he ever wanted to repeat though and it’s the mark of maturity that you stick to what you do best and he was a writer of great force and imagination. Again, thanks to this sprawling season, we are all getting more familiar with what Emeric and Michael did best.

Simply red? The Red Shoes (1948), BFI, 100 Greatest Films

You have to take that film with a huge tin of salt, because there was never a ballet company anywhere which was like that. I'm sure no dancer of any generation ever had this supposedly appalling problem ending in suicide, if you please - between real life and the ballet.

Moira Shearer*

 

What is there to say about this film that hasn’t already been said? Something you could say for pretty much the rest of the Sight and Sound 100 Greatest Films the BFI are showing across January and February, a once a decade opportunity to re-explore the cannon as reinvented or reinforced by some 1600 film critics (almost as many Tory Party members it takes to elect a new leader...). Powell and Pressburger have to be in there and it’s impossible to rank their films although clearly, the electorate have…

I watched the screening at the BFI and then watched it again with wife, daughter and mother-in-law who remembered her impressions on seeing it on screen in 1948 when she was just 16. Two different audiences and it was fascinating to compare over the day. I’m not sure how many of the packed audience watching on NFT 3 had previously seen the film but, after a chatty disturbed start with some early laughs at the quaintness of the dialogue we settled down in silence as the film engaged minds and sensibilities.

It's hard not to become engrossed in this film as Powell and Pressburger create such an intense atmosphere with dialogue from the latter that challenges our norms of polite discourse. Anton Walbrook’s Boris Lermontov manages to be extraordinarily rude, maniacally controlling and also strangely vulnerable. He carries natural authority and with trademark restraint manages to underplay a role that could so easily fall flat through an excess of grim single-mindedness. Boris just needs to find beauty in his art and even the prospect of being danced to in the inappropriate surroundings of an after-show party is too much for him to bear. He reminds me so much of Jose Mourinho.

Lermontov is not the only jarring character; even Moira Shearer’s Vicky Page is frank and awkwardly single minded, first in the way she talks back to Boris after he disapproves of her being asked to “audition” for him at an after show party and then as she insists on greeting him personally on stage during her first day at the ballet, she’s young but she’s strong. Walbrook may well give a star turn but in Shearer’s cinematic debut she is the centre piece, the star who is to be born and the focus not only our attention but also admiration; she is a ballerina acting the role of a ballerina and her dancing is not something you can “act”.

Powell had seen Shearer performing with the Sadlers Wells Ballet (later the Royal Ballet) aged 20 and had pursued her for his film for something like a year. The dancer herself was less than impressed with the idea especially as she saw the story as a bit daft. She was on her way up, dancing in the shadow of Margot Fontaine and about to get her first prima roles, how could this film help her with her ambition?

Powell eventually got his woman but only after he hired a group of leading ballet dancers to form the core cast and after the Royal Ballet said that Shearer would be welcomed back after the filming. After she came back she felt the film didn’t help her in what was already a highly competitive corps de ballet but, interestingly, her stature increased as she continued to develop technically and to be offered not only the classic leading roles but also a ballet written especially for her, created by the great British choreographer Frederick Ashton. She danced the title role in the premiere of his Cinderella in 1948 having already ed his seminal neoclassical ballet Symphonic Variations in 1946, along with and along with Pamela May and Fonteyn.

Anton encourages

She soon found that filming ballet is quite different from performing on stage, and this was not all to her taste. Firstly there were the stages which had concrete floors, “… death to the calf muscles!”, then there was the disjointed nature of filming and “…the long waiting while cameras, lights, playbacks, etc, were organised. Eventually they would be ready and expect us to leap instantly into the air, but we were now cold and had to limber up yet again. No - filming ballet is not easy.” Quoting a lecture she gave in 1949, The Daily Express had her complaining The chopped-up sequences allowing perhaps only half a minute's dancing at a time made it very difficult and a very miserable experience. You can see how the film-making experience would have been completely counter to her ingrained discipline and practice. And yet, she made it.

Another deciding factor in her decision to do so was the casting of Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine and Ludmilla Tchérina, three ballet dancers with impressive pedigrees. Shearer had worked with Helpmann and Massine a number of times and also with several of the corps de ballet dancers and this familiarity shows in certain moments when they practice, rehearse and put in the hours with professional commitment. All of this makes the film stronger and the reality of the dance sustains the fantasy all around.

I had been a more rounded performer at the time I made it or that I would have done it two or three years later, when I think I would have done justice to it. Still, I've seen 'The Red Shoes' a couple of times in the past 10 years, and I must say that for all the creakiness of the dialogue and situations, it has a certain period charm… Moira Shearer, The New York Times, 1988

Powell had cast a young ballerina on the way up as, a young ballerina on the way up… he also cast the most extraordinary cinematic hair… Jack Cardiff’s cinematography is stratospherically good as usual but he achieves so much in being able to capture the natural tone of the actor’s golden strands as well as her Scottish freckles and powerful pale skin. These observations are made after a comparison of said tones with those of my wife Catherine, a Grade 6 ballerina in her day and no less fierce than Ms Shearer in her opinion and drive!

Powell may well have been cold, but Pressburger was not and the cast and crew created something far greater than the sum of the parts… despite himself, in Moira’s view he was cold, lacking warmth and humanity, and yet the director led in this wonderful cinematic creation with his crew excelling from painter Hein Heckroth, completely out of his comfort zone and yet providing astonishing production design along with costumes, and Arthur Lewis art direction. As with the gaggle of real dancers on set, the real filmmakers gelled and teamworked a gem.

It's tempting to draw a line from the film to Shearer’s eventual career choices but she really does sound like a no nonsense lass from Dumfries … the offers continued for years, including unlikely ones like El Cid with Charlton Heston. But I've always found my marriage and my children infinitely more important than any career, so no great decision had to be made…

Robert Helpmann and Moira Shearer

No red shoes were to compel Moira away from the path she had chosen. That’s the reality but there is still so much to unpick from the fantasy. Red Shoes remains one of the greatest cult films of all time and part of that, a big part, is because of the sheer skill and humanity that Shearer bought to the film. She was to dance for Powell twice more, once in The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and with a light-hearted cameo in the otherwise sinister Peeping Tom (1960) but she had four children by then and had found a different life.

Red Shoes is such an enduring fable, dramatizing the choices we make in life and its darker corners are mysterious enough to reward repeated viewing. Although, each time, I’m not the one who has to watch myself dance, but, in many ways, that is the heart of the film’s meaning even if, from the start, the star herself had such mixed feelings.

Let’s leave it to The Daily Express to add some of it’s now famed balance to Moira’s view of her film  with Emeric Pressburger responding to comments she made in 1949, I will make no comment. Miss Shearer has the right to criticise like everyone else. I don't know why she is doing it. But she must have a reason.

So much to unpick and I look forward to Pamela Hutchinson’s book on The Red Shoes being published later this years. There’s so much more to learn for a film that never grows old and wins over every new generation.

You can pre-order the book now direct from Bloomsbury, there will be more opportunities to see and discuss this film as the year unfolds.

*From a 1994 interview reproduced in An Autobiography of British Cinema, Brian McFarlane (1997), Methuen/BFI (pp 532-5)

**Quotes sourced from the excellent Powell and PressburgerPages site. 

Léonide Massine offers you a choice...

Be careful what you wish for… The Red Shoes (1948)

 
`Why do you want to dance?' `Why do you want to live?'

A film about ballet for people who don’t necessarily like ballet, a populist “art” film and a fairy tale where the magic is provided by human drive and imagination… The Red Shoes isn’t straightforward at all but then what Powell and Pressburger film ever is?

The centre piece of the film is the 17 minute Red Shoes ballet which abandons any pretence at theatrical reality by taking off into a cinematic flight of fantasy that Gene Kelly could only dream of. The film is magically real – perhaps the very peak of The Archers’ trademark style and one that confused their distributors so much that they never gave it a proper premier in the UK. Unable to reconcile the adult content in what they presumed was a family film, Eagle Lion all but buried The Red Shoes until a record-breaking response in New York lifted it to international success and eventual recognition as one of the greatest films ever made.

From this distance you can still understand their response and this film isn’t as far away from Peeping Tom as you might think, as Moira Shearer’s presence in the latter may well prove. Miss Shearer was a prima ballerina with the Royal Ballet, perhaps second only to Margot Fontayne in London at the time. So, unlike Black Swan for example, here we have a actress who can actually - really - dance and who moves with the dangerous grace founded on the bruised flesh and cracked ankles of a thousands days’ practice. She is authentic and fascinating: a delicate beauty, whose sensitive features are crowned by a mass of rust-red curls and set atop a body perfectly poised: you can really only be this way if you have no other choice.

Moira Shearer,

Moira may also be simply one of the most beautifully-filmed redheads in cinema history. Jack Cardiff was the man and his cinematography is revealed by the recent Criterion Blu-ray to be even better than I had imagined. The extremes of porcelain white and red are almost impossible to photograph sympathetically, especially against the sumptuous backgrounds used by Powell but Cardiff’s depth of field reveals even Shearer’s freckles.

My wife, a redhead herself and no mean ballet dancer in her youth, was suitably impressed – solidarity of colour and tone. The reds… they know more than they let on.

Robert Helpmann, Moira Shearer and Léonide Massine

Shearer is not the only dancer in the film and there are notable parts for Ludmilla Tchérina as Irina Boronskaja, Robert Helpmann as Ivan Boleslawsky and Léonide Massine as Grischa Ljubov. Powell effectively put together his own company for the film and this plays a major part in the authenticity: these characters knew how to act around each other.

But the non-dancing cast was also well-chosen and none more so than Anton Walbrook who’s Boris Lermontov manages to be maniacally controlling and also strangely vulnerable. He carries a natural authority and with trademark restraint manages to underplay a role that could so easily fall flat through an excess of grim single-mindedness. Boris just needs to find beauty in his art and even the prospect of being danced to in the inappropriate surroundings of an after-show party is too much for him to bear.

Anton Walbrook and Léonide Massine

But the dancer in question is one Vicky Page (Shearer) who has already caught his eye over a ladle of punch: she agrees with him and impresses with her own determination to perfect her craft – as the above quote reveals, she has no option but to dance. Is she really as single-minded as her statement suggests: is dancing all she can do with her life?

Vicky’s inevitable rise is held back by Powell as she joins the ranks of hopefuls in Lermontov’s troop and we’re immersed in the life of the ballet. Also involved is a young composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring) who has impressed the great director with a composition that has been ruthlessly stolen by his music teacher. Lermontov points out that it is better to be capable of producing such a work than to have to steal another’s creation and commissions him to write a new ballet, The Red Shoes…

Marius Goring

The ballet is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale which provides the perfect metaphor for the broader story of creativity versus life and other interests. Pressburger had originally drafted a treatment in the late thirties and now, after the changes in tone made necessary by their wartime cinematic service, the Archers were ready to make such an escapist film. Being them, this fantasy focused on the reasons we make art: is it possible to share a passion for creation with love or can attainment only be achieved through sacrifice?

Simple enough questions on the face of it but Powell and Pressburger succeed in walking the line between clarity and complexity and, in Moira Shearer, they have an acting presence capable of expressing actual hard-won genius on screen. Everyone else is posturing (albeit skilfully) but she demonstrates the end product… she’s the real deal.

The music by Brian Easdale is another element that has to be as good as the story demands: his music is the soul of Craster and an expression of his love for Vicky. Brian takes this near impossible brief  in his stride though and his compositions are wonderful, especially for the Red Shoes ballet itself – the only section he didn’t conduct, that was left to the mighty Sir Thomas Beecham. Easdale went on to win the Oscar for Best Original Music Score: the first Britain to do so.

Some films get lodged in the “canon” by reputation alone but The Red Shoes is one in which every major component is no less than excellent… it’s a film about ballet sure enough but also the most basic questions of life: this is why it continues to resonate and to retain its power.

 If you don’t already have it and you probably do… the Criterion Collection version is superb and the UK Blu-Ray uses the same transfer (I think?). Movie Mail has the latter plus DVDs whilst you’ll need Amazon.com for the former. You can also buy Brian Easdale's soundtrack on CD.

“Why do you want to watch classic film…?'  because they're entertaining. Not quite as good is it...?

The art of war... The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

'No people in the world other than the English would have had the courage, in the midst of war, to tell the people such unvarnished truth…' Anton Walbrook to Winston Churchill (allegedly…)

Of all the war films made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger perhaps none challenged the notion of propaganda quite so much as Colonel Blimp. They didn’t want simple preaching but to engage their viewers in their own rational support for war. There are no simple atrocities, no easy clichés and there are even Germans to admire: following on from Eric Portman’s character in 49th Parallel – a brave soldier doing what he must for his country.

Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook

Perhaps Pressburger’s European view gave them “balance” but I don’t think he was alone in thinking that in order to truly win support for the war you had to help people really understand it and not just generate hate. You also had to respect the opposition and to differentiate professional soldiers from the Nazis: ”the single most evil concept ever bought to life by the human mind”.

In Colonel Blimp extra spice is added by the Archers’ ostensible attack on the traditionalist “Blimps” running the forces who were more wedded to misguided concepts of honour than the need to fight like-with-like against a new generation of enemies who are entirely unrestrained by principle and the Rules of War.

Blimp in the bath

Naturally, elements of the establishment were confused... The fact that Colonel Blimp had been a cartoon strip specialising in buffoon-bashing didn’t help and nor did the good Colonel’s vague resemblance to Britain’s larger than life Prime Minister…But it was never that simple: it never is in the films of Powell and Pressburger.

Colonel Blimp starts off showing us the old and the complacent: stubbornly sticking to the way things should be done… but then it shows us how this man came to be. Turns out he was far more daring, far more dashing than even the young Captain who decides to humble him by attacking six hours before their manoeuvers are due to start.

Protean charmer...

Powell cleverly swims us back in time after Blimp, (Clive Wynne-Candy - played by protean charmer Roger Livesey) pushes this upstart into the bath at his club then emerges out the other side forty years and several dozen promotions lighter. He’s a hero from the Boer War recently awarded the Victoria Cross and  he sets off to Germany in order to help a young Englishwoman who has sought his help in silencing a pro-Boer propagandist: Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr – we’ll see more of her…).

Deborah Kerr 1 and Deborah Kerr 3...

Candy can’t help but get into trouble driven on by chivalry and his sense of duty. He ends up having to fight a sabre duel with a German officer, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook) another who respects honour above his own life and even his natural distaste for the duel. This scene is so well done, as the build-up is shown  in painstaking detail…all the rules of the Prussian duel-book are followed and then, as our two men engage with elegant flashing blades, Powell’s camera lifts up and far above the gymnasium, as snow falls in picture-book silence over the scene around the hall.

The duel...

Cut forward a few hours to a hospital in which both men are recovering, Candy from a slice across his upper lip – eight stiches - and Kretschmar-Schuldorff from a gash on his forehead – 12 stitches… a score-draw, honours almost even. Edith is persuaded to stay on to help provide a cover for Clive’s unauthorised adventure: the fight is to have been over her honour and not the respective armed forces of Britain and Germany. How elegantly the rules are obeyed by both sides.

Anton Walbrook and Deborah Kerr

If it wasn’t clear by now, it soon is apparent that these two military men share similar values. In spite of speaking little of each other’s language the two soon become firm friends with Edith as an interpreter, card companion and romantic interest… Clive is too unaware to notice but even as he congratulates Theo on his engagement to Edith he realises that he has made the most awful mistake…

Clive leaves but he never stops loving Edith. As the year’s roll on and into the War to End All Wars… he keeps seeing her face and eventually marries a Yorkshire nurse Barbara Wynne (Deborah Kerr), after the war, who looks very much the same.

Deborah Kerr 2 and Roger Livesey

Clive encounters Theo in defeat at a prisoner of war camp and the two eventually re-connect as Clive and his other victorious friends try to persuade the German that there’s life after defeat…

Time shifts forward shown by the growth of Clive’s hunting trophies in his den… a succession of Zebra, Rhino, Elephants and other now endangered species attach themselves all showing the locations of their “bagging”  -  a clever device: how else to show the extent of Empire?

Livesey and Laurie

Another shift to 1943 sees Clive considerably older and now relegated to the Home Guard. He’s still aided by his former driver from the Great War: Murdoch played by the great John Laurie…without whom no P&P film would be complete! His new driver is altogether younger and better looking:  a redhead called Angela "Johnny" Cannon (Deborah Kerr again…).

So, women have gone from agitating for men to help them, getting stuck in as war nurses and finally to active combat (albeit as a driver) – so equal they even have men’s names…

"Johnny’s” boyfriend is the over-eager young man who shows Clive and co that you now need to break the rules of war in order to win and this is a message reinforced by Theo as Clive encounters him again as a refugee trying to escape the Nazis.

Theo is detained by suspicious immigration officers and gives a moving account of just how low his country has fallen under the rule of men he barely considers German. This was highly personal not just for the Austrian Walbrook but also for the Hungarian Pressburger whose grandson, Kevin Macdonald, confirms just how close to home the feelings expressed were.

Wake up calls...

Theo too feels that Clive and many Britons needed to adjust to the requirements of fighting total war against an enemy that would do anything to win: never mind kicking off early. Clive cannot take it in and refuses to accept his redundancy even after he gets side-lined… Yet, it’s the death of the Blimp but not of the Colonel … his self-respect is re-focused and he knows there’s still a place for his values only if he puts his faith in those of the younger generation.

Like all Powell and Pressburger films, Colonel Blimp leaves much to ponder but by treating its audience with such respect it leaves them thinking even at a time when the government just wanted them fighting. Yet the majority of those who saw the film would have been on the Home Front and would have needed such rational fare to help sustain them through the closing years of this bitter conflict… a time when the game genuinely did change and Britain did indeed have to find itself anew in the World that remained.

The admirable Anton

The three (five!?) leads are magnificent, Deborah Kerr playing three women kind of based on one, with such conviction that you might be confused if you didn’t already know her face so well. Anton Walbrook acts in such powerful silence that he draws the eye in almost every scene: so sad and angrily-dignified, he sees much more than Candy, having lost early enough in life to learn the skills of adaption.

Then there’s Roger Livesey, initially so unrecognisable as the dashing Laird of Kiloran from I Know Where I’m Going, but who clearly relishes the chance to play a character with less depth and more journey… Were P&P addressing the nature of heroism? Was Candy too insensitive to be a real hero or just blinded by absolute certainty and belief in the greatness of his country?

Old and middle-aged Candy

The Archers, as always, manage to celebrate Britishness whilst also poking holes in its contradictions. But you’re always more hurtful to the one you love and above all they believe in the fairness as much as the fighting spirit: trusting in both.

All filmed in amazing Technicolor by the magical Jack Cardiff, Colonel Blimp looks freshly minted in the recently-released Blu-Ray edition. It comes with an old-fangled DVD and a half hour documentary on the film along with comments on the restoration from Archers mega-fan Martin Scorsese.

I haven’t seen the film for a while and it’s never looked better: Powell and Pressburger on Blu-Ray…you know it makes sense!

It’s available from Movie Mail and all Amazons at very reasonable prices…