Original subtitles

This is it.

Sir?

Sir?!

Go away.

General Wynne-Candy?

Released in 1943,

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is a most peculiar epic,

which is exactly what makes it a masterpiece,

one that evades easy categories.

It is about ageing. It is about respect.

It's about the passage of time and the effect

on not just a single person, but on many people,

and in fact society and attitudes.

It is about nostalgia, it is about patriotism,

and that changing nature of it,

and it's about love.

It has so much to say about the changing

British colonial mindset in the 20th century.

It has so much to say about

both the affection and melancholy for the past,

and the desperate need to kind of yank that into the present.

For one thing, it's a film that... it changes for you,

depending on how old you are when you watch it.

So the first time I watched it, I was a lot younger and I saw

the film in a completely different way to the way I see it now.

And that I think is the marvel of the film, is that...

as you go through life, you can return to it again and again

and see a different story and see a different lesson,

and see a different moral.

It crosses half a century

from the Boer War to World War II,

while remaining deeply ambivalent about British tradition.

It is a war story, but features no battle scenes.

An epic that lives between historic events.

A saga that searches for moments of truth.

Fertig?

Ready?

Los!

What's going on here?

Invasion, sir.

But, you damned young idiot,

war starts at midnight!

Haven't you been told?

Oh, yes, sir. That's why we're here.

But may I ask on what authority?

On the authority of these guns and these men, sir.

Authority?! Authority?!

How dare you, sir!

Created by the formidable imaginations

of director Michael Powell and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger,

it is ostensibly the life story of the British major general,

Clive Wynne-Candy, played to the full by Roger Livesey.

Introduced in a Turkish bath, a bumptious image

of the newspaper cartoon character, Colonel Blimp,

we travel back in time to watch his life unfold.

Candy is revealed to be far from a caricature.

Indeed, his story is heartbreaking.

I'll punch your head for that, young fellow!

You young puppy! Put 'em up. Take that.

The title is curious.

The main character is named Candy, not Blimp.

Colonel Blimp was a parody,

a bellicose military reactionary invented by cartoonist, David Low,

whose misadventures ran in the Evening Standard during the '30s.

The film, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,

obviously has a very peculiar title.

Who exactly was Colonel Blimp?

Colonel Blimp was a cartoon character.

He was a satirical cartoon character, created by

a left-leaning New Zealand cartoonist called David Low

in the Evening Standard.

And he was... just one-frame cartoons

in which the Colonel would be delivering some...

lunatic sort of set of...

answers to a particular question,

like, "I've got to tell you the government's quite right

to suspend liberty so that we can ensure liberty

so that we can suspend liberty... Gad!"

And off he'd go like that, with his big moustache and his bald head.

And he was... he symbolised this kind of concept

that was around in Britain at the time,

that there's a buffoonery to imperialism

that they felt we had moved on from.

Colonel Blimp was a household name in England of the 1930s and 40s.

And it had kind of gotten into common parlance

to refer to a certain kind of bloated, old-fashioned,

conservative, imperial military order,

and those sort of opinions on politics and world events.

It ran for ages. He was always depicted in a Turkish bath,

wrapped in a towel, spouting out opinions.

He had a big walrus moustache and a huge stomach,

so he was a deeply, deeply unattractive caricature.

This ran for some years and quite often, in fact,

the jokes and the opinions

were aimed almost... well, certainly indirectly

at Lord Beaverbrook himself, who owned the Evening Standard.

So Low quite often ran into trouble

with some of the remarks that Beaverbrook took rather personally.

But he was also the kind of officer

who led the British forces over the top in World War I,

and slaughtered them, you know, in their hundreds of thousands.

So he was a symbol of the... this class of fool,

who was perceived to be leading Britain

into the same old mess, in a way.

So why do you think Powell and Pressburger chose that name?

Because it isn't a film about Colonel Blimp at all,

but what use do they make of that caricature?

Well, at the time that they were making the film,

Colonel Blimp was hugely popular in the Evening Standard.

I mean, this was Britain wrestling with defeats in the war

that had been brought about by poor planning and by...

And this is 1942. 1942, yes.

So it's early in the war and we were on the back foot,

and, you know, there were some terrible things occurring

and the British were not all-in behind the leadership.

My grandfather signed up and there was this kind of low-level mutiny

at the beginning of the Second World War against the officer class.

It was very much the mood in the country,

was this quite febrile atmosphere.

Puppy! Gangster!

You laugh at my big belly, but you don't know how I got it.

You laugh at my moustache, but you don't know why I grew it.

Blimp is more of a perception.

The concern that, around 1942,

the British Army was still burdened with pig-headed officers

left over from World War I.

To London's Denham Film Studios

comes a group of Canadian repats to see how big-time movies are made

in Great Britain's Hollywood.

On Sound Stage Five, a feature picture is in the making.

Michael Powell, the co-producer of the picture, plays host.

Powell knows Canada too.

He directed the picture 49th Parallel

in the dominion a few years ago.

The Canadian Army newsreel cameraman shooting this story

worked with him on that picture.

Pressburger and Powell had formed their own company,

The Archers, through the Rank Organisation

and they were... they were looking for material.

They had done films together, they did the 49th Parallel,

as well as One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing,

and they were looking for something that had...

was going to have a big impact.

Not necessarily a propaganda movie,

because there were quite a lot of those being made at the time.

Of course, this is 1942,

England and Britain was under threat,

London in particular was being bombed.

So they needed to find something that addressed

the current status of Britain,

but in a way that was not obvious.

We start out by seeing the caricature,

pretty much as the public would have imagined it at that time.

We see Roger Livesey sweating in a Turkish bath

with his large moustache, and then we see him surprised

by some younger officers who are doing a sort of

practice military, tactical kind of manoeuvre.

And he's very annoyed by this

because it is not done within the hours

that he was expecting it to be done.

Set in a contemporary time and he is describing...

he's having a bit of an argument with this younger man

and he's describing about how this young man could never have any idea

of what it was like for him 40 years ago.

That is our cue to then go back 40 years

into the life of this man, Colonel Candy.

And so, it sort of undermines the caricature

by the fact of it almost immediately showing you him

when he was young and dashing.

It allows you to be a little more sympathetic towards him

because he's not just a blustery old man,

he's actually a very young and dashing and heroic officer,

we see at the beginning of the film. It takes us all the way back

to the Boer War when he was a hero in South Africa.

Made with vivacious style,

here are two superlative filmmakers at the height of their daring.

Years after Martin Scorsese first saw it on American television,

he thought he had dreamed it up.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp only makes sense when experienced.

How do you know what sort of a fellow I was

when I was as young as you are? 40 years ago!

40 years ago...

40 years ago...

Quiet! Quiet!

People are trying to sleep!

Suggie! Hoppy, me old horse!

Since when are you in London? Got back yesterday, sick leave!

- Uh-huh. - I say, I've been searching for you all over the city!

- Yes? - I'm terribly sorry to hear about your leg.

Jumping Jehoshaphat! They're both there!

What the hell do you think I'm standing on?

I thought you had a wooden leg! Why should I have a wooden leg?

They told me in Bloemfontein they cut off your left leg!

Calm down, old boy, I'd have known about it.

Quiet!

This is a biopic like no other,

consciously a counterpoint to the realist propaganda of the times.

It is an exploration of nationhood,

but also of life itself.

It is a film aiming to grasp the intangible.

Love, loss, friendship,

fate, and the tyranny of time.

What it means to grow old.

Churchill suspected it was bad for morale,

but this is a satire that also mythologises Britain.

31 years

since I last landed here.

I learned a lot in these 31 years.

Many things have happened to the world.

And to both our countries.

But one thing that has lasted

and grown throughout that long period,

has been the goodwill and good understanding

between the English-speaking people.

That good understanding,

now as it was 31 years ago,

is the object

which I have at heart.

It caused, of course...

By the time that the idea was mooted

and they were in preparation for the film,

Prime Minister, then Winston Churchill,

caught wind of this and was furious,

because he felt that it might be A: unpatriotic,

it might be lampooning the army,

and also, it may be that it was lampooning himself

because there was some thought that Colonel Blimp himself

was a kind of caricature of Winston Churchill.

So they had a lot going against them,

but I think, probably like many real strong artists,

and these two have always been strong artists,

the more opposition you get, the more you want to do it.

And they persevered in the face of quite incredible odds

to make the film.

Inspiration actually came from an earlier Powell and Pressburger film,

One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing,

when an ageing crew member informs a youthful comrade,

"You don't know what it's like to grow old".

Pondering the idea,

Pressburger began an extraordinary history

of a man who has grown old.

With a mix of understatement and surreal theatricality,

he used nostalgia to undermine the notion of nostalgia.

Powell and Pressburger had a storyline that they had cut,

it was a short scene really, a sub-story from a previous film

called One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing.

It's a conversation between an elderly... well, elderly?

Older rear tail gunner, and a young pilot

about women and about life.

And at one point, the elderly tail gunner says,

"Well, you remind me of me when I was your age

and you're going to grow up into me."

And the pilot mocks him.

And then gradually, it was a little line in the film

which gradually develops and they had to cut it out.

But they were fascinated by this idea of

age and experience versus youth and idealism

and they were developing it into a film called

The Life And Death Of Sugar Candy.

There is a small bit of dialogue between two characters in that film,

where a younger man and an older man are kind of at this,

you know, have this moment of strange misunderstanding,

where the old man expresses that the younger man could never

have any idea what it's like to be like him.

And apparently Pressburger turned to Powell and said,

"I think we should make a film based on that idea,"

which is that young men can never know what it is to be an old man,

and an old man can never really express

that experience to the younger man.

Almost this idea of knowledge being gained,

but it's almost unable to be shared,

or it only can be shared when it's too late.

So much of Colonel Blimp is not just about

the political or military elements of it,

but about this sense of obsolescence,

about this sense of age, about this sense of

kind of grasping at dreams and ideals

that slowly unravel and get away from you

as you grow older.

They got together and decided that they could actually do that.

It was a very, very interesting time for them

to take not only the character of the reactionary Colonel Blimp,

but also the idea of respect

and tradition for someone

who frankly sort of deserved it, but wasn't getting it

because they were mired in the old-school ways.

Pressburger himself used a great deal of his own history

as an emigre of course, from Hungary, before the war,

he used a great deal of his own experience in the script.

And between them, they came up with the extraordinary film,

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

But they realised that Blimp was a brand.

Blimp was someone that everyone really completely understood

about an elderly fool, really, but...

And the key thing about the title is The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

And critically, no spoilers, but critically,

the character of Clive Wynne-Candy, does not die.

He survives the film. What dies, is his own blimpery,

his own lockstep with the idea of being Blimp.

So Blimp in a sense, is a character who

really traps Wynne-Candy in his life.

And he manages, at the very end of the film,

to shed and kill this sort of thing that's holding him down,

this set of ideas. So Blimp, he really is about

sort of an imaginary set of ideas, which is crippling our hero.

The film essentially depicts three eras of Candy's life.

The aged man in 1942 to whom we are introduced

and to whom we will return,

the young officer in a sparkling Berlin of 1902,

where he will meet his dashing German counterpart,

in Anton Walbrook's Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff,

a lifelong friend in waiting.

And a weary Candy at the close of World War I,

becoming unsure of the world.

Each era is marked by his complex relationship with a singular woman,

Edith, Barbara and Angela,

all played by the same actress, Deborah Kerr.

It's about so many things that is very hard

to sort of whittle it down to a couple of lines. I'll try.

It is about an enduring friendship

between a German and a British man,

who should be enemies, and have been enemies,

or fought on opposite sides. It is about...

It's a love story about the woman who sort of comes between them.

But really, it's about the...

changing society of the British character.

It is a thoroughly British film,

it is both a satire on Britain,

and at the same time, a celebration

of the traditional values.

It's an extraordinarily well-poised film

in terms of how it can... it gets that across.

A great deal of it is incredibly funny.

And that kind of humour set against a background

of three wars, I mean, three devastating wars,

is very, very difficult to pull off.

What's this?

VC, sir. Where did you get it?

South Africa, Jordaan Siding.

You're Candy. Sugar Candy!

Yes, sir. Ha!

Good show, Candy. Thank you, sir.

Clive Wynne-Candy, known throughout as Candy,

essentially our Blimp figure, was originally gonna be Laurence Olivier.

But you can't imagine it without Roger Livesey now, can you?

No. Roger Livesey has... I mean, I think,

you know, comparisons are odious, but I think that the vulnerability,

the intrinsic vulnerability of Wynne-Candy is something

Roger Livesey brings to the screen from the opening sequences really.

He never has the kind of peacocking that quite often some of the actors,

some of the stage actors of that day, would bring onto film,

Laurence Olivier being one of the stage actors of that day.

And so, I think it took a very particular kind of actor

to give humility to...

and love and vulnerability

to a character who is based on a cartoon.

You know, I mean to take this person

who makes a series of just stupid decisions,

and is quite cartoonish in his beliefs,

and from the very first scene,

show his vulnerability and show you,

through the use of his eyes... He's a very filmic actor.

You know, a lot of British actors particularly of that time,

a lot of all actors, but British actors particularly,

were struggling to adapt to the camera,

to act with their eyes and with their faces.

They were still very big and very loud.

And he understood, you know, implicitly,

how the camera didn't need anything from you.

All it needed was a slight move or a change of expression.

All it needed was for you to feel it

and it would come across on your face.

What good fortune it was that Laurence Olivier

was mysteriously detained in the Air Fleet Arm,

and Powell turned to Roger Livesey to play Candy.

Livesey hilariously evokes Candy's flaws and foibles,

a fog horn of British pomp.

But in shivers of epiphany and vulnerability,

he reveals a prisoner of tradition.

And he ages convincingly,

even willing to shave his head for the outraged walrus of 1942.

Like all the great characters of Powell and Pressburger,

he comes ecstatically to life.

Can I... Can I give you a lift?

No, thank you, sir. We've got a cab. Right. St James's Palace!

Right, sir.

I hope you two boys enjoy your leave.

You've earned it. Thank you, sir.

Mind yourself in the door, sir. Boy!

Another hansom. The old horse thief.

I shall read now the protocol.

You will start only at the command "Los".

You must stop the combat if you hear the command "halt",

whoever may say it.

The film's most daring gambit was to portray a good German

in the middle of World War II.

Thanks to an impeccable Anton Walbrook,

Theo is an astonishing creation.

Like Candy, he is a reflection of a more honourable past,

a German appalled by the Nazis.

Walbrook was an Austrian Jew, who had fled to Britain.

Like his character, and like Pressburger,

he knew what it meant to have lost a homeland.

Theo's speech to the Enemy Alien Tribunal

becomes a haunting soliloquy on the tragedy of Europe.

Anton Walbrook plays the German officer called Theo,

who becomes the sort of adversary and then friend,

and in many ways, the moral force of the film,

to Colonel Candy.

He himself was gay and Jewish and had fled the Nazis,

so both he and Emeric Pressburger,

who was Hungarian and had fled the Nazis,

brought a real kind of understanding of the stakes.

But he also brings this wonderful, elegant,

sad, articulate role to the screen

in such a memorable way.

He represents the dignified, old-school, aristocratic,

fair-minded European past.

He represents something which the 20th century

would effectively make non-existent over the years.

This was an incredible gamble, of course,

but he is the one who was able to be the mouthpiece

for the changes that are needed.

He is the one that actually goes through.

He is, first of all, a Prussian officer.

He is then reluctantly drawn into something, the duel.

They then form this friendship, which across the decades,

and especially after the First World War,

when he is a prisoner of war and he realises that he's...

his nation is vanquished, and he takes it personally,

he also sees the weakness of the British,

the weakness of the British which he's...

when he's leaving his internment to go back,

he tells his sort of fellow soldiers around him,

his fellow prisoners, he said, "They are children.

They are boys playing cricket."

And that is quite bitter because, you know,

they had been defeated by children, by boys playing cricket.

This merges and it goes on and develops

in the most sophisticated way so that finally,

when he does return to England, because he says,

"I was homesick. Homesick for England."

This is a German. He said, "Because I wanted

to return to a decent country with decent people."

Not Nazis, he's anti-Nazi.

And he tells...

Finally, he tells Clive, his best friend,

how wrong he has been and how muddle-headed he is,

and how he cannot continue in this idea

of chivalry in war, of fair play,

when fair play is off the table with the Nazis.

Another central theme is that of friendship,

which has a kind of meta-resonance in the fact

that it's a film made by Powell and Pressburger,

two extraordinary friends.

Firstly, how brilliant is Anton Walbrook as Theo?

And how crucial is it that it's also Theo's story?

Yes, I mean,

this is called The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,

and it's that it would be the story of the man

who goes through this particular journey.

And it's also the story of the good German,

the German who is to be trusted,

who is honest, who is human, humane,

the German of Beethoven and Bach and poetry,

but who is appalled as Nazism grows

and eats away what he holds dear.

And so Theo's story, I mean,

perhaps slightly banal because it's such a powerful speech,

it's such a well-known scene, it's such an important theme in the film.

This is the Enemy Alien Tribunal? Enemy Alien Tribunal,

where he is being interrogated by the British

when he arrives on British shores, and they want to know why he's here

and they're suspecting him of being a spy.

And he, eventually at one point, says, "Listen, I'm...

I'm an honest man, I don't lie,

but I haven't told you the whole truth.

And he explains what's happened to him.

And that is that he was in love with Deborah Kerr,

and he believed in her.

And she kept wanting to come back to England

and he kept saying, "Later, later, later."

And all around him, the Nazi menace was growing

and his children were, you know,

absorbed by the Nazi Party and became Nazis

and wanted nothing to do with their parents.

And just when he was about to accept her promise

and they were going to move to England together,

she died, and their children didn't even come to her funeral.

My wife was English.

She would have loved to have come back to England,

but it seemed to me that I would be letting down my country

in its greatest need, and so she stayed at my side.

When in summer '33, we found

that we had lost our children to the Nazi Party,

and I was willing to come,

she died.

None of my sons came to her funeral.

The brilliant concept of having the three female leads

played by the same actress connects them spiritually.

They had been written with Wendy Hiller in mind,

but when Hiller became pregnant,

a gift arrived in the shape of Deborah Kerr.

Kerr does something miraculous.

She shows us that society dame Edith,

devoted nurse Barbara,

and quick-witted military driver Angela

are so much more than Candy's ideal.

Deborah Kerr was only 20 when she plays this triple role.

She plays three different, distinct characters

through three different periods of time,

but always as the apple of our Colonel Candy's eye.

And he never really gets the girl.

He's either in the wrong place,

or he's just never quite forthcoming enough,

or he's too old.

But it's very interesting to watch her personify

these three different women, clearly the same person,

but just so different in bearing and stature.

And yes, some of it's costume, some of it's hair,

some of it's make-up, but to begin with,

she plays this early 20th-century governess,

who is clearly very smart and capable,

but is very much constricted by her era.

And then as time goes on, she's a World War I nurse,

and then finally she becomes a driver for the war effort

in contemporary times, in the 40s.

And so she's always a very smart and fiery character.

So what we see by her playing all three of those roles,

is this idea of the ascendency of women and women's roles

in the early 20th century, especially by comparison

to the slight decline that our protagonist has over these years.

The thing about Kerr is that she responds so beautifully

not just to the three different roles,

but to actually the camera itself,

she is clearly destined to be a star from then on.

And she has the ability to transform herself

into three different characters,

all of whom, of course, share her look

and her idealised sense of the woman that

Candy has put on a pedestal in his head.

It is staggering to acknowledge the film was made at Denham Studios,

with a few locations in London and the Home Counties.

Berlin, World War I, and London society are wonderful sets.

Powell's cinematic shorthand is extraordinary.

He syncopates time, defying the statutes of drama

by reducing major events to a montage or a newspaper clipping.

Famously, the camera retreats

from Candy and Theo's seemingly pivotal duel,

up through a skylight

and down to the carriage that contains a nervous Edith,

for she is what matters.

One of the most remarkable shots maybe in cinema history,

next to Orson Welles' use of tracking shot in Citizen Kane,

or later in Touch of Evil,

is probably in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,

where the camera moves up and away from the duel.

It moves up and away from the action, mid-action,

up through the ceiling and then enters,

by magic, the carriage.

And what you really get with this,

is I guess a sense of the omniscience,

a sense of the fact that this is not something

which is existing in the here and now,

but something which belongs to memory and dreams,

and how the memory doesn't always linger

on the parts that we might narratively find the most important,

but more the emotional truth.

How things wander from moment to moment, or memory to memory,

and how the connective tissue of those things doesn't always

make pure logical sense.

It is a showy camera movement,

but it expresses something. It's meaningful too.

It was an open secret that the project

incurred the wrath of Winston Churchill.

Goaded by the Ministry of Information,

Churchill actively sought to suppress the film,

certain it was unpatriotic,

even suspicious he was the Blimp in question.

Maybe there was something in that.

Powell was unsubtly informed that if he went ahead with the film,

he would never get a knighthood, but he went ahead all the same.

And 1942, as we've mentioned,

is a complicated time in which to release a film.

But it's a film that spoke very directly to its era as well,

and it incurred the wrath of one Winston Churchill in doing that.

Yes, I mean, there is an argument, of course,

that Winston Churchill, who fought in the Boer War

and all the way through, may have felt

that there was a slightly personal attack going on

in that script on him. It's open to interpretation.

What he certainly did think was that this was not

the kind of patriotic film he wanted showing.

It was not a sort of "get up and into the trenches

and defeat the Hun" kind of film.

So he initially wanted it banned,

and this, I think in a way, the story of what happened next

is also the story of the film itself.

And there's a debate where they say to him,

"Well, we don't really think that we can because...

surely what we're fighting for

is we're fighting for the liberty to make films like this.

That's the difference between us and the people we're fighting,

is that we will have films that mock ourselves."

And that's the... I think that's the critical part

in a way of what the film itself is saying.

How important it is to hold on to the ability

to mock yourself and to have the confidence

to put out a film that says,

"We may be at war, but we're not perfect."

What is this strange, beautiful film really about?

Well, it is a warning against misty-eyed devotion to the past,

yet it is about loss.

Lost love, lost youth, Pressburger's lost Berlin

and a sense of honour lost to a cruel world.

It is said that the power of cinema

lies in the change of emotion on the human face.

Perhaps then the essence of this vivid,

ironic, passionate epic

is in the heartbreak in Edith's eyes

when she realises Candy is letting her go,

a secret only we can see.

Goodbye, Clive. Goodbye, Edith old girl.

I hope we'll meet again some time.

I'm sure we shall.

Ah, you've worn well, old chap.

You've still got my mark, I see. You still need a moustache.

When were you captured? July 16th.

You were lucky you missed the worst of it.

I would prefer to have been unlucky. That's what you think.

Have you heard from home? Have you got any children?

How about Edith? What shall I answer first?

Edith is alright as far as I know,

and yes, we have two children.

Boys, eh?

Now, that one's exactly like Edith.

Karl. Yes, he is, isn't he?

At the centre of the story is one of the director's most cherished themes.

The friendship that endures between two very different men:

the stalwart Candy and the formal Theo.

In this central bond,

we see the connection between the great dreamer Powell

and his partner Pressburger, who had fled Berlin

and taken shelter in a country he had come to love.

Theirs is an art carried aloft by friendship.

There is an international friendship

and relationship at the heart of the collaboration

between Emeric Pressburger, who was Hungarian,

and Michael Powell, who was English,

and our characters in the film. Theo of course is German,

but what they all have in common, in the looser sense,

is that they all felt like, or feel like outsiders.

For our protagonist, Colonel Candy,

it's because he feels outmoded, antiquated.

He feels a man apart from the way things are moving.

And for Theo, for the Anton Walbrook character,

it's very much because times have marched on without him

and the fascist regime has,

you know, the spectre has risen

and you either kind of became a part of that or were cast aside.

So that's, you know, within the world of the film.

When you talk about the creative side of things,

you have these two people who, one had fled from the Nazis,

and the other, whilst, you know, belonging to the English...

ruling class, I guess you would say,

he had a sensibility,

which was always a maverick, outsider, artistic sensibility.

He was, for lack of a better way of putting it, a bit of a weirdo

by the parlance or the thinking of the time.

And so, these two gravitated towards each other and saw a connection.

And I think there is a little bit of that in the film.

Theo, my dear chap.

Let's have a good look at you.

By God, you've kept your figure better than I have.

I'm a bit of a bay window.

You see, sir, I wouldn't be surprised

if this fellow really disliked us. He comes to England twice

in his life, the first time he's a prisoner,

and the second time, he's just about to be one.

Do you sense that, you know, amongst its numerous themes,

there's a sort of... that Michael Powell is saying

to the British people, you know,

"We've got to lose our innocence, we cannot be children anymore."

And Candy throughout, he's named Candy,

is something of a child.

And it's sort of a message from Powell to grow up.

We've got to realise, and these are Theo's words almost,

that this enemy, you know,

is not someone we can be honourable with.

I agree. I agree it's about the loss of innocence,

but I also think that it values innocence enormously.

I think this film thinks there is something precious

about those moments of innocence.

There is something precious about Candy at the beginning of the film

when he doesn't really understand what's going on and blunders around.

And this is, in a way, what he's trying to get back.

He has to give up the rigid sets of beliefs that he has,

which have just been ingrained into him,

and rediscover his curiosity and his innocence.

But also, to understand

that to do this, to keep that innocence safe,

to keep the innocence safe,

you have to do absolutely everything by all means necessary,

because this is precious, you've lost it,

you've got to get it back, and the way you have to get it back

is to do anything you can to keep the innocence safe.

Misunderstood on release and disastrously cut in America,

for years, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

only existed in abridged form.

Missing its masterful flashback structure

and much of its ironic detail, its majesty was lost.

Championed by Martin Scorsese,

the original 163-minute version

was restored to its full glory as late as 1985.

It's now revered as the virtuoso work

of Powell and Pressburger.

It is certainly the pinnacle of Powell and Pressburger's

extraordinary output of films, extraordinary.

And the fact is, it's their first one in Technicolor.

But I think that they poured everything into it,

it's not just the techniques,

it's not just the wonderful filmmaking,

but it's something personal.

There's something personal from both of them.

Clive Candy, was without doubt,

based on Michael Powell.

His sort of sense of optimism, his sort of wonderful love of life,

his sort of... You know, there is a great deal

of Powell himself in that character.

Pressburger, of course, put a tremendous amount

of his own experience as a refugee in an emigre into it as well.

Now, when it came out, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,

it's fair to say it was pretty misunderstood,

and certainly on its American release,

it was the victim of some drastic cuts.

It was something of a lost film for many years, wasn't it?

Well, yes. The cuts included, for instance,

taking away the flashback element of the film,

so that it was seen as purely a time's arrow narrative arc,

which loses, I think, the point.

Because the point of the film is that he's looking back.

If you lose that, it's not really...

you don't really get the sense of what it's about,

it's just a story of some bloke wandering through the 20th century.

It really undermines it.

What emerged from the past was a film that feels incredibly modern.

It is almost impossible to pin down,

taking the medium along wildly unconventional paths.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp shows us what film can aspire to,

visually, structurally, and thematically.

Not for nothing is it considered to be the British Citizen Kane.

It was also a huge influence on Scorsese's Raging Bull.

Martin Scorsese was a lifelong Powell and Pressburger fan.

He loved them from childhood, he was enchanted by The Red Shoes,

but Colonel Blimp was always one which was more difficult to access

and to see in its proper condition.

He actually ended up befriending Michael Powell

later in Powell's life,

and so they often spoke

about Powell's films and the intentions he had for them.

Finally Colonel Blimp was restored and re-released in the 1980s,

which was when it really got its proper due,

and it was sort of internationally recognised

as one of their greatest, if not their greatest, films.

Michael Powell would actually marry Martin Scorsese's long-time

creative collaborator and editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.

And so, between Schoonmaker and Scorsese,

the pair of them spearheaded the campaign to fund

the restoration of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

And they have worked tirelessly to restore

and celebrate the films of Powell and Pressburger.

Although it's about a national and the history of that character,

the passion, the nostalgia,

the tradition and so on and so forth,

it is actually universal. These themes are universal.

And I think that is also reflected in the people who made it,

because Michael Powell of course, is British,

but he was surrounded by a crew and cast

and designers of international status.

In a way, the truth of the film is...

in your life, there will be the most important moments

of your entire existence, which you may miss.

And if you're not careful,

if you don't keep a very close eye on what's going on around you,

if you fall into just assumptions and patterns,

if you just roll along blithely

without thinking and being alive,

you will miss the most important moment of your life.

And once that's gone, you'll never get it back,

no matter how hard you try.

And you may try all these different things,

but there are certain things that will happen

that you will lose it if you're not careful,

and you will never get it back. And that's the lesson

it teaches you each time, is just... just be present,

be awake, be alive, because it's all there for you now.

And if you did lose it, don't worry,

because life will always give you something else.

Just make sure that you're prepared to shed

all of your preconceptions when necessary

and embrace the beautiful thing that life has for you.

Ultimately, the power of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

lies in how it makes us feel.

We are both uplifted and haunted by this creation.

This is a story about the difference between imagination and reality,

which is exactly where the world of film is to be found.

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