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Movies
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Movies, Reviews
Tuesday’s Overlooked Films: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
06.21.11 | Permalink | 4 CommentsThe other day, sportwriter Joe Posnanski was blogging on LeBron James, and how when we root against him, we’re really rooting against a character we see on TV, not against a real person. To make his point, he brings up a (very) minor character from the movie Casablanca. In the film he’s a figure of fun, a self-important ass to be humiliated. But what do we know of his real life?
I thought that would make an interesting story, the unexpected life of someone who to exist in order to be mocked. Then I realized it’s already been done, in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
The film begins in 1945. Preparations for the invasion are well underway. A young officer decides to prove a point by launching a training exercise – and “attack” on London – a day earlier than scheduled. When he captures the Home Guard general staff relaxing in a Turkish bath he’s berated by a pompous old officer, whose outdated ideas about “honor” and “chivalry” he dismisses out of hand.
We then flash back forty years, to 1902, when the pompous old officer was himself a dashing young lieutenant named Clive Candy. Hero of the Boer War, winner of the Victoria Cross, now returned to England. He doesn’t stay long, instead heading to Germany, where he manages to insult the army, with the result that he’s forced to fight a duel. Candy’s doesn’t care much for duelling, and his opponent – chosen by lot – also thinks it barbaric, but it’s a matter of honor, so they fight.
As they recover from their wounds they become fast friends. The German, Theo, falls in love with Candy’s friend Edith Hunter, and fears they must duel again for her hand, but Candy is delighted that his two great friends shall be together. Only later does he realize his own feeling for Edith.
Years pass, and Candy remains idealistic and a bit naive. By 1918 he’s clearly an anachronism, the old man who doesn’t understand the new rules of war. His old friend Theo, freed from a prisoner-of-war camp, can’t bring himself to believe that Candy and the British really are the well-meaning souls they claim to be, and they part on sad terms.
By the start of the second World War he’s not just out of date but potentially embarrasing, yet he’s never lost his sense of dignity. When Theo arrives in England, a refugee now, Candy intervenes to keep him from being interned. When Candy’s regular radio address is cancelled he berates the government functionary who gives him the word before falling silent, then saying, “Sir, my deepest apologies. I know it isn’t you.”
A summary of the plot can’t do this wonderful film justice. Clive Candy is a gentleman of the old school, who prefer to fight fair and lose. Everyone tells him that he’s wrong, that this is a new kind of war, but he never wavers, he never changes, and in the end his side fights fair, and wins.
ADDED: It occurs to me that I think of this film in the same way as Goodbye, Mr. Chips, another film that follows a man through his entire adult life, and I think part of the appeal of these movies to me is that we all want our lives to add up to something. When we’re old and know that there are few days ahead, we’d all like to look back and say, “Yes, I did some good. I changed the world, if only a bit.” I know that sort of thing certainly plays to my own romantic nature.
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Life, Movies
The End of the West, The End of the Western
This past weekend I watched a really good movie called Ride The High Country. An old lawman and gunfighter takes a job protecting a shipment of gold. As he arrives in town he meets an old friend, and asks him if he wants a job helping out. So they, and the friend’s young partner, head off to the remote mining camp to pick up the gold.
Two old cowboy actors, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, star as the two old cowboys, and the movie is really about getting old. Are you the same man you used to be if you can’t do the things you once did? It’s an old-fashioned Western, with just enough melodrama and just enough gunplay, but it got me thinking about another Western – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
That movie debuted just seven years after Ride, and despite the huge differences in style and perspective, they do have some similarities. Both have a sort of sad, elegiac tone. In Ride it’s because these two old men have reached the end of their line. In Butch Cassidy it’s because the new West has no place for outlaws. They will be driven out, hunted to extinction.
I had to wonder, watching these two movies only a month or six weeks apart, if a little of the lament in Butch Cassidy wasn’t for the kind of people who watch the old Westerns. Society was changing, and fast, and even sophisticated cowboy flicks such as Shane semed simple-minded in the world of M*A*S*H.
It’s not too surprising, I guess. Into the middle decades of the 20th century there were lots of people in this country who lived in ways not too different from the cowboys they watched on the screen, and not too different from others throughout the world. But just since 1970 or so, many of the old certanties of life have changed. (Many for the better, let’s not forget.) Out with the old, in with the new.
Now I don’t believe that America ever really loses its innocence – each generation, and each person, loses that on their own – but I do wish we were still a country that could go see a movie about heroes on horseback wearing white hats, and the black-hatted baddies who were bound to lose in the end.
Well, there’s still Rango. That’s something.
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Books, Movies
Quiller Beats Bond
10.05.09 | Permalink | 9 CommentsIn the past year I’ve become a big fan of the Quiller novels of Adam Hall, a pseudonym of English novelist Elleston Trevor (most famous for The Flight of the Phoenix).
Quiller is unusual for a fictional spy. He’s extremely taciturn, with no personal relationships outside of work, and no real friends in it – only people he respects. Despite this, he frequently shows compassion to those wounded, physically or emotionally. When in the field he’s all business. He never engages in casual conversation, he probes for information. He seems to be an expert on just about every subject, especially martial arts, and has such a complete knowledge and mastery of his own physiology that he can, for example, make himself faint it required.
Now, none of that is really so unusual, but Quiller is also deeply neurotic. He loves living on the brink, but at the same time it wears away at his nerves so that he’s always at the breaking point. He frequently lies to himself or ignores his own better judgement to find the guts to continue. And there’s not a speck of humour to be found in these books, only grim irony.
Physically he’s left undefined but I always pictured him as slightly built but wiry, blonde, and generally nondescript.
Contrast that to Bond, the philandering clubman, always quick with a quip (moreso in the movies). Bond certainly sees to his business but, compared to the aescetic Quller, he certainly indulges his vices, with considerable relish.
While watching the cheesy early-80s Bond flick Octopussy the other day, it occurred to me that there’s a spy out there right now who matches up to my image of Quiller in just about every way: James Bond. The “rebooted” franchise, with its darker tone, its emphasis on skill instead of seduction, and, most of all, its Bond in Danial Craig, is just about exactly the way I’d pictured Quiller.
Go read the books, though, they’re really unique, and with the “Harry Palmer” novels of Len Deighton, really make up a sort of alternative universe of spies to the one we normally think of.
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Movies
Bob Le Flambeur
I bow to no one in my love for French director Jean-Pierre Melville, but I didn’t care much for Bob Le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler, or Bob the High Roller). While the techical aspects are not up to the standards of his later work (mostly due to the miniscule budget and improvised filmmaking), it’s the general feeling that I didn’t go for.
Melville’s later works are almost clinical in their detachment from the characters, observing them without making much of a judgement. But in this film, Bob is presented as a very sympathetic character, sort of the kindly uncle of the criminal class. He used to be a thief, a bank robber, but after a few years in Le Grand Chateau he went straight, and stayed that way for 20 years.
Now, after a run of bad luck, he’s flat broke and without prospects. Then he hears that the safe in the Deauville casino sometimes contains as much as 800 million francs…
Throughout the film we see his kindness to others. He’s friends with a policeman whose life he once saved by knocking aside a pistol just as the man behind it pulled the trigger. We see him hanging around a diner, and learn that he loaned the woman behind the counter the money to open it. We see his friendship with young Paolo, son of a former colleague.
And we see the way he picks up Anne, who’s well on her way to becoming a streetwalker, and installs her in his apartment. But not for himself – instead, he practically pushes her into Paolo’s arms, doing something for both of them.
For lack of a better word, the film is romantic, not in the sense that it’s a love story, but in the way it views Bob’s character. What’s most powerful in Melville’s later films is the blank-faced fatalism of his main characters. Do they feel things, sometimes powerfully? Yes, but they don’t let it show. Bob wears his heart on his sleeve, and honestly, it makes him a little less interesting.
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