Sunday 15 September 2013

Citizen Blimp

An English Citizen Kane : Powell & Pressburger's 'The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp' (1943)  

Putting aside personal opinion  it's difficult to argue with 'Citizen Kane's' status as the most lauded film in cinema history. For 50 years 'Kane' has topped the British Film Institute's 'Greatest Film of All Time' poll, and similarly it sits on top of the American Film Institute's '100 years of movies' list.

So, it is a bold claim indeed to compare what is probably Powell & Pressburger's fourth best known film (after The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life & Death and, perhaps, Black Narcisuss) to Welles' meisterwerk.  Not only would I argue that 'Blimp' is every bit as good as 'Kane' but there are a number of striking similarities between the two films.



                  



Both are life stories of fictional characters; Clive Wynne-Candy and Charles Foster Kane. Yet both Kane and Candy are more than that; they are are archetypal figures representative of their respective nations. 



Major General Wynne-Candy, the 'Blimp' figure, is a man out of time, a military man of the old school, whose values of fair play, 'clean fighting and honest soldiering' are outmoded in an era of modern warfare.  He is also, clearly, nineteenth century Britain, struggling to find an identity in the modern world.


Wynne-Candy: A man out of time




Charles Foster Kane has often been interpreted as a pastiche of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Whether this is true or not, only Orson Welles (and perhaps Herman J. Mankiewicz) could say, yet Kane is clearly a parody of a certain type of American: the rich, materialistic, power-hungry businessman. 'He was born poor and raised by a bank' as Welles himself put it. In short, he is The American Dream turned nightmare.


Kane in his Xanadu palace/prison



Both films begin with their titular character in old age and then proceed to tell their stories in flashback.  In 'Kane' Welles famously uses the device of a snow globe to initiate the first flashback...



Various reporters are given the task of unraveling the meaning behind Kane's mysterious last utterance, "Rosebud". It is their investigations that provide the framing device for the film's many flashbacks to Kane's past. Snow is repeatedly used as a visual metaphor in this.
   


In 'Blimp' we first meet Wynne-Candy in the Turkish baths of his gentlemen's club during WW2. Retired he is now head of the Home Guard, but finds that playing by the rules, even in a home guard training exercise, isn't the modern way.





Here Powell and Pressburger brilliantly use the water of the Turkish baths as the flashback device. Candy emerges out of the Turkish baths 40 years previously in the prime of his life, at the end of the Boer War. The story unfolds chronologically from this point as we follow him through three wars.

Now, at this point I should confess Citizen Kane, though a great film, isn't my favourite film. While no-one can deny it's technical brilliance it is, for me, a film lacking in heart - it's difficult to warm to. Maybe that's part of the point. The mature Kane is an unlikeable character, one incapable of forming meaningful relationships. This is demonstrated in a brilliant montage sequence where we see Kane and his wife breakfasting together over a number of years, literally becoming further apart. 

                                   





In contrast 'Blimp' is a film full of heart, one that admittedly at times borders on sentimentality, yet it is also technically brilliant. 

Roger Livesy gives a barnstorming performance as Clive Wynne-Candy. Pompous and arrogant, yes, but it's hard not to sympathise with the character. As much as Powell & Pressburger are satirising the reactionary old guard they are also paying tribute to an era of lost decency and honour that Candy represents. 

During the Boer War scenes Candy meets the love of his life, Edith, played by Deborah Kerr, only for her to slip through his fingers. Rather like Scottie in 'Vertigo', Candy, dedicates himself to finding an exact replacement for Edith (coincidentally Vertigo is the film that has finally supplanted Kane in the B.F.I's Greatest Films Of All Time list). Which he finds in Barbara, also played by Kerr.  In the third, present-day WW2, sequence of the film this ideal is represented  by Candy's driver, again brilliantly played by Kerr. Rather surprisingly Kerr was given top-billing on some of the film posters at the time, perhaps because Roger Livesey was something of an unknown at the time (Laurence Olivier having been the first choice for the role).









Yet, arguably, Candy's most important relationship isn't with the Kerr character/characters, but with the German he loses Edith to, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (brilliantly played by Anton Walbrook).  His rivalry with Theo becomes a lifelong friendship that transcends the world wars.  One of the most moving scenes in the film, in any film, is the speech Theo gives when pleading for asylum from Nazi Germany. 




Of course there was an obvious propaganda purpose to the scene, and many others in the film. There is also clearly an autobiographical element, on the part of the screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, a Jewish-Hungarian who fled to Britain in 1935. Yet drawing a clear distinction between a German and a Nazi was a brave thing to do in 1945. It was too much for Winston Churchill who thought this sentiment might damage the war effort and proceeded, unsuccessfully, to try and ban the film.  He did manage to refuse the release from military duty of Powell's first choice for the role, Laurence Olivier, but this is no great loss. 






The final scenes of the film return to the imagery of water that began Candy's story. Staring into the bombed and flooded remains of his house he at last realises his time has come, and recalls the words he spoke to his wife as they stepped across the threshold, "now here is the lake and I still haven't changed..."

There is of course a  supreme irony in that  Churchill himself  was very much a Blimp figure, not just in appearance and bluster. Like Candy  he  too  was a man out of time at  the end of  WW2, swept away in the  general election of  1945 on  Labour's tide  of  social reform. 

A new world beckoned. But maybe something was lost along the way.