One of the many oddities surrounding The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) is that as critics have come to acclaim it as a masterpiece—perhaps the masterpiece—of British cinema, this marvelously uncategorizable epic of love and war has remained relatively unknown to the moviegoing public. This rueful, fatalistic insight is beyond the ever-innocent Candy’s imagination. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP [1943] [The Criterion Collection Special Edition] [Blu-ray] [US Import] A Thrilling Lifetime of Courage and Love . We live in two worlds, begins the narrator of A Matter of Life and Death (1946), “the one we know and the other that exists only in our imagination.” Michael Powell seems to have been able to go back and forth between these two worlds with remarkable ease. During a pivotal time for Black cinema, John Berry’s beautifully lived-in drama offered a portrait of an African American family that stood in opposition to a long history of harmful stereotypes. Powell may have been part child, but the other part was all-seeing despot. The scene takes on the playful, wondrous beauty of a fairy tale, tiny people in a starlit cosmos. (The exception is the no less erotic but feverish carnality of Kathleen Byron and David Farrar in The Small Back Room.) It is Berlin in 1902 (the first flashback). Critic Gavin Millar wrote that in contrast to the bloodlessness of most British culture, Powell’s work showed “an unashamed expression of artistic passion—from which the British recoil in horror.” There was a sensuality and eroticism, even a perversity, that was very un-English. These almost lovers convey that sense we’ve all had—of a rapport so sudden and complete that we feel we must have known the person in an earlier life. Even the khaki uniforms with their red trimming come alive in counterpoint to Kerr’s red hair as she appears successively as the governess Edith, the well-born Barbara, and the army driver Angela (“They call me Johnny”).

Roger Livesey dynamically embodies outmoded English militarism as the indelible General Clive Candy, who barely survives four decades of tumultuous British history, 1902 to 1942, only to see the world change irrevocably before his eyes. Or is it, finally, a dirge for the loss of traditional English values and the idea of fair play, or a resigned repudiation of those values for the sake of winning a dirty war?

Here was a film that questioned not just the principle of fair play but the idea of righteous war itself. This would have been sometime in the fifties. Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. The color palette is particularly beautiful in Colonel Blimp; less exotic, maybe, than in some of the other films, but even bolder in its departure from the muddy reality of war, with surreal silvery blue interiors and magical snowy landscapes. With humor and verve, Bahram Beyzaie’s Iranian New Wave classic captures a moment in Iranian history when dissent against the authoritarian shah was beginning to percolate below the surface. One of the most spectacular examples of the mastery of that eye is the virtuoso scene of the duel in Colonel Blimp, when Candy has to fight a stranger, Theo, who has been selected to defend German honor after Candy insults the traitor. Colonel Blimp is both moving and slyly satirical, an incomparable film about war, love, aging, and obsolescence, shot in gorgeous Technicolor. Indeed, Hiller must go out to sea at the risk of several lives before the penny drops.

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With his deeply political but unclassifiable debut feature, Med Hondo set out to establish a transformational presence for global African cinema and to accelerate the emergence of a new Africa. Molly Haskell is a critic and author whose books include From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies; Love and Other Infectious Diseases; Frankly, My Dear: “Gone with the Wind” Revisited; and Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films. Considered by many to be the finest British film ever made, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is a stirring masterpiece like no other. Considered by many to be the finest British film ever made, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP, by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is a stirring masterpiece like no other.

After the laserdisc was released in 1988, he would write several celebratory articles.) These were the great days of Technicolor, before it was constrained by photo-realism, when colors were exaggerated, light was painterly. Theo, who has fled Germany to live in England, is both intrigued and sorrowful at the brash charm of this “new woman.” At one point, Candy takes Theo into his den to show him a portrait of the dead wife who so marvelously resembled Edith. Edith, for all her gentility, is something of a radical. They surrounded themselves with an international group of artist-craftsmen—on Colonel Blimp, the miraculous Alfred Junge as production designer, cinematographer Georges Périnal (and Jack Cardiff on other films), Joseph Bato for costumes, and Allan Gray, responsible for the original score—who managed to realize Powell’s wildest dreams of a marriage between art and music, lavish set design and color, as it hadn’t been seen before. The story spans four decades, from the Boer War through the First World War and ending finally in 1942, the Blitz, and the time in which the film was made. Directed by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger. Though more delicate than Wendy Hiller (Powell’s first choice for the role), Kerr’s three women are, in different ways, just as strong-minded as Hiller in I Know Where I’m Going!, or the intrepid Sim in A Canterbury Tale, incipient feminists who provoke as much as they charm. . It is to him and fellow enthusiasts that we owe the rescue of this exquisite masterpiece, as well as an awakened appreciation for its producer-writer-director team. Permission to use army locations and matériel—and to get Laurence Olivier, Powell’s first choice for Candy, released from duty—was denied. Categories, belonging to the rational-adult here and now, are useless when it comes to Powell and Pressburger. We first meet him in old age, when he perfectly resembles the Colonel Blimp cartoon character created by David Low, a portly, buffoonish caricature of the British military brass and upper class. Candy’s fight with the young soldier—an unseemly tussle in the pool—sets in motion our story of generational conflict through the years. Kerr, in her second persona, as the society lady who becomes Candy’s wife right after World War I, is more conventional. Women are a foreign planet to him and as such can remain an opaque and beautiful mystery. And yet what passions we have in life. Among the many superb writers on this film, almost no one I know of—with the exception of Penelope Andrews in the Huffington Post—has paid much attention to Kerr, or to Powell’s women in general. The camera then comes to rest inside a carriage where a man and a woman are waiting breathlessly for the result. In a painfully ludicrous early scene, the flabby general, now reduced to commander of home defense maneuvers, is found sweating in a Turkish bath by impatient young soldiers who, refusing to adhere to the order “War starts at midnight,” invade the sanctuary and “arrest” him on the spot.