The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

This exotic English romance was made in 1943. It was reissued in a restored version last year.

Taking as their starting point David Low's cartoon character, the film-makers created General Clive Wynne-Candy, superbly played by Roger Livesey. As we join the story in 1943, he appears to be nothing more than a pop-eyed, reactionary buffer. But the movie takes us back in time to show how the old grump was once a young blade, a dashing officer of frank and good-natured simplicity who won a VC during the Boer war. His life was changed by his friendship with a German army officer, Theo. There is a tense, sad encounter between Clive and Theo in the British POW camp in 1918, as well as more than 20 years later in Theo's extraordinary closeup monologue about his disgust with Nazified Germany.

Candy is also entranced with an ideal embodiment of woman, played in three incarnations and three generations by Deborah Kerr, co-incidentally a Mayfield resident during the Second World War but that's got nothing to do with the film.

This glorious film is about the greatest mystery of all: how old people were once young, and how young people are in the process of becoming old.

There are clips on Youtube but no trailer, so here is Michael Scorsese (rather amateurishly filmed) talking about the film at a special showing of the restored version at the BFI last year

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wae685GMDUk