Features

Now, looking back, it is possible to assess how far the best films of the period have endured, how some now appear faded or hopelessly dated while others seem to have acquired a greater reputation than that which they enjoyed at the time of their initial release. And this is precisely where the major films of one production company, and four in particular (all made in TechniColour), come gloriously into their own.

The backgrounds of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were very different. Powell, born in 1905, was a man of Kent; Pressburger, born (as Imre Pressburger) in 1902, was an Hungarian expatriate. Powell was a director who had slogged his way through the quota-quickie jungle of British films of the 1930s. (According to Ian Christie in his fascinating Powell-Pressburger study Arrows of Desire no fewer than 19 such features by him have been lost). Pressburger was a screenwriter who had worked in the German and French film industries from 1930 and came to Britain in the middle of the decade. His first British commission was The Challenge (1938). And it was the flamboyant, in some ways irresistible, Alexander Korda who brought them together to work on The Spy in Black (1939), starring the German actor Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson. The production credits read: 'Directed by Michael Powell, Production Company Harefield, Presented by Alexander Korda, Produced by Irving Asher, Screenplay by Emeric Pressburger from Roland Pertwee's adaptation of a novel by J. Storer Clouston'. Yet Christie gives a more precise indication of the Powell-Pressburger collaboration: 'with Korda's blessing, Pressburger and Powell worked on the script together with the stars...'

There followed three more collaborations: Contraband (1940), 49th Parallel (1941), their first major success (with Pressburger winning an Oscar for his script) and One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942). Then, in 1943, came their first film under the banner of The Archers, with its distinctive pre-credit image. This was The Silver Fleet. Yet Powell and Pressburger were only the producers. Vernon Sewell and Gordon Wellesley were jointly responsible for both the direction and the screenplay.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp In the same year as The Silver Fleet came the defining moment in the history of the collaboration between these highly gifted but always controversial artists. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is the first film to bear the credits which even today excite their admirers 'A Production of The Archers'; Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Put bluntly, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) may be the finest film ever to come out of a British studio. At the very least it is a particularly interesting, intelligent and idiosyncratic work by any standards and, bearing in mind when it was made, far more telling as a piece of propaganda than the usual flag-waving epics. It is also, ultimately, a very moving film with a great generosity of spirit.

Blimp was the bewhiskered character whom the New Zealand-born cartoonist David Low made famous as the embodiment of a rather blinkered type of military conservatism. In the film he becomes Clive Candy, who in 1902 is a Boer War VC hero on leave in London. He goes to Berlin, unofficially, with the intention of helping a young English governess, Edith Hunter, to counter anti-British propaganda but finishes up by insulting a German regiment and having to fight a duel of honour with one of the latter's officers, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, who has been selected at random. Both of them survive and they become close friends. Ironically, Candy, having unconsciously fallen in love with Edith, loses her to his new friend. The film then traces, at length, both the relationship between the two men and the consequences of Candy's lost love during the next 40 years with, of course, the complications of two world wars. It culminates in Kretschmar-Schuldorff, now a lonely refugee from the Nazis, convincing Candy that the latter's notion of fighting a 'clean' war, as he did in South Africa and the Western Front, is now outmoded as a way of defeating Nazism.

This is a film which works effectively on four levels: as a love story - the governess becomes Candy's 'ideal woman'; so he marries her double, a nurse in the First World War, and later appoints another double as his driver in the Second (when he becomes a stalwart of the Home Guard); as a story of friendship, which is portrayed with great sensitivity; as a satire on stiff-necked militarism (on both sides); and, most importantly to its wartime context, as a brilliantly deceptive piece of propaganda - the German is shown as far more perceptive than Candy and to be the 'good enemy' (in the middle of the war!) who shows the way to an Allied victory. It is fascinating to learn that the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and his Information Minister, Brendan Bracken, did much to frustrate the film's making. They are said to have ordered sizeable cuts because they considered its message defeatist. Roger Livesey, particularly, and Anton Walbrook are quite superb as the two friends and the young Deborah Kerr, playing all three variations of Candy's 'ideal woman', is herself ideal in the part. The film may, indeed, be the Archers's masterpiece and the film critic David Thomson's description of it as 'a beautiful salute to Englishness' is entirely apt. In the Time Out Film Guide's Centenary Top One Hundred Films it shared 23rd place with Some Like It Hot and Taxi Driver.