cinefest - Internationales Festival des deutschen Film-Erbes

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1942/43)

Inhalt - Synopsis

Der britische Offizier Clive Candy ist ein Soldat alter Schule, der sein Leben lang dem Ideal folgt, auch im Krieg nach fairen Regeln zu kämpfen. Als junger Mann nimmt er am Burenkrieg teil und wird hoch dekoriert. Als er erfährt, dass ein Deutscher Gerüchte über britische Kriegsverbrechen verbreitet, fährt er auf eigene Faust nach Berlin, um die Ehre der britischen Armee zu verteidigen. Es kommt zu einem Duell mit einem preußischen Offizier, der sein lebenslanger Freund wird, aber auch die Frau heiratet, die Candy liebt. Nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg trifft er ihn als Kriegsgefangenen wieder, später als Flüchtling vor dem Nazi-Regime. Candy, inzwischen General, findet eine Frau, die seiner großen Liebe ähnelt, doch beide Frauen sterben. Im Zweiten Weltkrieg sind Candys Ansichten über ehrenhafte Kriegsführung endgültig veraltet: Er wird in den Ruhestand versetzt und bei einer Übung der Home Guard von einem jungen Leutnant überrumpelt, der sich nicht an die Regeln hält.

British officer Clive Candy is a soldier who has dedicated his life to traditional ideals to fight with a fair set of rules, even in war. As a young man he is highly decorated after taking part in the Boer War. When he learns that a German has been spreading rumours about British war crimes, he travels to Berlin on his own account to defend the honour of the British army. He duels with a Prussian officer, who becomes his lifetime friend, and then marries the woman who Candy is in love with. After World War I he meets his friend again, first as a prisoner of war, later as a fugitive from the Nazis. Candy, now a general, meets a woman who reminds him of his true love, but unfortunately, both women die. In World War II Candy’s ideas of honourable warfare are drastically out of date: He goes into early retirement and at a training of the Home Guard he is taken by surprise by a young lieutenant who does not care about the rules.

Zeitgenössische Kritiken:

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp [...] is like the conversation of a clever and plausible talker with the gift of the gab; that is to say, it holds the attention, it is interlarded with excellent jokes, it has patches of feeling and patches of making do, and it goes on for a long time. In another respect, too, it resembles the wily talker; it persuades its audience by appearing to advance one argument while edging in the direction of another. [...]
Its hero (for we have no cause to refuse him the title) begins as a likeable young V.C. with enough enterprise to nose beyond the business of soldiering, but not enough wit to succeed in his adventure. He grows into a middle-aged general still honour-bound, still pursuing the shade of the romance which earlier eluded him; he ends as a charming old stranded walrus, pathetically humiliated by his inability to understand or accept the new all-in technique. The moral of his career is left uncertain; with one voice the film censures his beliefs, with another protests that they are the beliefs of all upright men. The portrait presented, in fact, is the portrait of almost any decent, slow-witted, romantic Englishman, with this difference; that not all decent, slow-witted, romantic Englishmen would show the humanity towards a German refugee shown by this Colonel Blimp.
Dilys Powell: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
The Sunday Times, 17.6.1943

Now for the kicks. It is too long, and I don't care if it did cost twenty-five million pounds (or something like that), that's nothing to do with the point. A short film costing tuppence might knock it sideways. It is too long, moreover, because no-one decided exactly what they wanted to say with it! I don't know now, and I have thought about it hard, whether the point was that Old Blimp was a jolly good sort and ought to have been given a good job in this war, or that he was a feeble old buffer but SWEET, and good enough for the Home Guard. After all, the H.G. is not a dustbin. Or even whether David Low needs counteracting, and we can now realise that Old Blimp is a DAMN GOOD SORT and feudal England not so bad. Or Tories are really gentlemen and sound at bottom! You can pay your money and take your choice. And all that is a grave fault in a propaganda picture, which is what »Blimp« is, or supposed to be.
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Tribune, 18.6.1943

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is one of the most expensive and ambitious films ever made in England. It cost some $1,000,000 and it runs, even as cut for U.S. distribution, two hours and 26 minutes. Its very leisurely pace – almost that of a novel rather than a drama – may mystify the American cinemaddict, but the leisure is put to such good use that the chances are it will charm him instead. For The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is an uncommonly rich and pleasant study in character, both human and national. It brings to the screen the greatest English character since Pickwick: cartoonist David Low's walrus-whiskered epitome of unenlightened self-interest.
In Low's famed cartoons, Blimp acts out in black&white by one class and political reflex after another, the whole tragi-comic history of a special kind of British stupidity. The screen's version of Blimp, in rosy Technicolor is not a Low specimen of humanity at all, but one long apologia for the better side of the Low character. Watching on the screen how the old man got that way, you would never suspect that the Colonel and his kind had anything to do with bringing on the Second World War. Even insofar as Blimp is shown to be old-fashioned and short-sighted, this is simply because he is the soul of gentlemanly honor.
But if the movie is incomplete without the gently savage cartoons, by the same token the cartoons are incomplete without the affectionately explanatory movie. Many liberals and leftists are going to feel that Blimp has been whitewashed into a Dear Old Boy – as indeed he has – but David Low himself, who advised on the characterisation and make-up, is well satisfied. Says he: »Blimp is a symbol of stupidity and stupid people are not necessarily hateful. In fact, some stupid people are quite nice.« [...]
The picture would be no great shakes as a story if at every point, through a dozen means other than those of plot, it did not make itself illuminating, touching, and delightful. The tortuous protocols in preparation for the duel, and the duel itself, between the brave but reluctant contestants, is as pretty a satire on diplomacy and war and national character as the movies have achieved. Candy's relationship with his beloved girls, reticent, boyishly idealistic and far more deeply felt than the eye can see, is a moving exposition of a kind of love the movies rarely pay attention to. The life history of the subtle German and the sanguine Englishman culminates in a beautiful study of two kinds of old age: one seasoned through suffering, the other invincibly innocent. Long as it is, Blimp seems short, for it is done with a constant feeling for lightness and for style, and it is wonderfully well acted.
The New Pictures (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp)
Time, 2.4.1945