It’s a crucial moment in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), and thus all the more conspicuous as it elides the payoff of the long sequence preceding it: as Clive Candy (Roger Livesey) and Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook) begin their duel in 1902 (heralding the start of their forty-year relationship) after a prolonged dithering over protocol, the camera, while observing them from overhead, pulls back into the rafters, and then (courtesy of a dissolve) into the sky above the wonderfully obvious miniature of the gymnasium, a miniature Berlin in the distance, false snow whipping the lens; reaching its peak, it descends back to the cardboard earth towards a toy hansom cab, in which Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr) anxiously awaits the outcome.
A virtuoso shot, and one with more than an echo of the famous “unbroken” take craning into Susan Kane’s nightclub a mere two years previous. But Michael Powell’s willfully grandiose gesture carries far more resonance than Welles’s masterful showboating. Stanley Kauffmann’s rather harsh charge that Welles was “a scene and sequence-maker, not a filmmaker” nevertheless contains an irreducible truth at its core: for a great majority of “ambitious” filmmakers in the first two decades of the sound era, scenes and sequences took precedence over the film as a whole. One need think only of Ford’s overt preciousness of composition in The Informer (1935) or The Fugitive (1947), or Mamoulian’s aggressive playfulness, or Milestone’s uniquely weighty sense of innovativeness to realize that Welles was only the most pronounced (and publicized) example of Hollywood’s erratic but consistent romance with capital-A Art. Innovation in cinema never springs from some pure and untapped creative well. For those Thirties and (more dwindling) Forties Hollywood producers who counted prestige as a subdivision of profit, these occasional ventures into the Artistic were only good business sense.
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Powell and his partner Emeric Pressburger (credited as co-director, actually the film’s chief writer) are noticeably arch about the actual meaning of the duel, though slyly nationalistic at the same time: the Germans are stiff-backed and insistent, the British side viewing the whole affair as decidedly archaic but unfortunately necessary. Colonel Blimp looks back to this earlier era not with fond nostalgia for a better and truer time, but with a pronounced sense of its absurdity. Yet underlying that absurdity is a genuine regard for those who, knowing its absurdity, nevertheless adhered to its strictures—which is either the greatest absurdity of all or the true nobility that so often accompanies it. Candy’s friendly and amused smile to his opponent just before the match that may cost either of them their lives—occasioning a quizzical furrowing of the German’s brow—is not only a bit of “typically British” bravado, but a recognition of the idiocy of their position as well as an appreciation of the utter seriousness with which they undertake the playing out of that idiocy. It would take a dogmatically rigid view of such things not to see the equal weight of both sides of that balance, nor the mysterious, dreamlike quality in the midst of the enervatingly precise preparations which elevates this encounter into romance—a romance founded on the entrance into, and acceptance of, the presence of death.
Naturally, death has no real place in Powell’s masterpiece either, despite the promise of the title. The duel will result in mutual injury, mutual recovery, and mutual friendship, but in that one extra-narrative camera movement, Powell subtly unites the many movements operating within his most ambitious film thus far. It is a narrative movement, eliding the outcome of the duel and increasing the suspense by focusing upon those who wait outside. It is a technical and stylistic movement, evidence of a cross-pollinating influence from the American cinematic flair exemplified by Welles. It is a movement towards fantasy in its delicately lovely miniaturization of a snowbound commencement-de-siècle Berlin even as it moves against nostalgia by the preceding disparagement of the duel itself. And as Allan Gray’s music shifts from an urgent swashbuckling theme cast to the clashing of blades to a wistful and melodic one timed to the gentle blowing of snow as the camera reaches its apex, we are moved away from the disparities of these other movements and invited to reflect upon their confluence, on the curious and curiously beautiful progression of life even as death hangs over it. More than anything, Powell’s intentionally conspicuous shot is an emotional movement, an exemplar of the great tenderness underlying his stylistic flourishes, as opposed to the so often forthright assertiveness of his American contemporaries (the Ford of Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley excluded). No one sequence can encapsulate The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, for its beauty exists as a film entire. In moving his film always forward, however, Powell can still find time for the grace notes, for those spaces of reflection that cause us to consider where all the many movements within this single, gentle flow intersect, and bloom.
Up and Away - Andrew Tracy on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
