Blu-Ray Review: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

I wrote about Criterion's Blu-Ray of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp at Movie Mezzanine. It is hands down one of Criterion's best, featuring a breathtaking restoration that eclipses even the work done on the more boldly colored Archers films in the collection, while the extras are not as numerous as some packages but stuff each documentary or interview full of information. Scorsese dominates, of course, but editor Thelma Schoonmaker may beat him for direct eloquence in voicing the personal attachment this unorthodox epic inspires. Hell, even the damn cover is dynamite.

My full review of the disc is up now at Movie Mezzanine.

Shelf Life: A Matter of Life and Death

I love this inverse Wizard of Oz romance from the Archers, and as an introduction to the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, it hooked me instantly. And since I will take just about any opportunity to rep my favorite filmmaking team of all time, I wrote just a few words about A Matter of Life and Death for Movie Mezzanine. It's on DVD (that is, of course, the point of this column), and I cannot recommend it enough.

My full piece is up at Movie Mezzanine.

The Top 10 Michael Powell (And Emeric Presburger) Films

I do not know if any director has had as formative an influence on the films I love than Michael Powell and his creative partner, Emeric Pressburger. The film that sits in the number-one slot on the list that follows radically altered what I look for in movies, and it remains my favorite of all time. On his own, Michael Powell was an extraordinarily gifted director, an innate visual genius and a conservative in the Fordian mode, reflected in films that looked fondly on a traditional Britain but also displayed an ambivalence, even borderline acceptance of the nation’s fading importance in the 20th century. (His breakthrough, The Edge of the World, recalls Ford’s How Green Was My Valley in its wistful but clear-headed appraisal of a secluded hamlet eroding to modernity for ill and good.)

With Pressburger, though, Powell crafted not only some of the most sumptuously beautiful films of all time, but some of the most resonant as well. Their propaganda films are anything but, and their postwar work celebrates the preservation of their beloved country even as it offers firm, and sometimes critical, assessments of what needs to be done to maintain Britain’s spirit. Even at their most troubling, however, the filmmakers communicate such vivaciousness of life through some of the greatest Technicolor work in history that an optimism blazes to the surface on their aesthetic mastery. The films below are not merely some of the best ever made, they are also some of the most endlessly, exuberantly entertaining.

Black Narcissus

What is it about classical British directors and their upfront focus on sensuality? Chaplin may not have let his ephebophilic predilections spill over into his films, but he couldn't disguise his taste for nubile beauties. Hitchcock, well, I'm not even going to bother wasting the words talking about eroticism in Hitch's works. But there is a difference between eroticism and sensuality, and Michael Powell catered to the latter. Eroticism is naked, brazen, firing every nerve in every erogenous zone all at once. Sensuality has the same endpoint -- sexual overload -- but it goes about reaching this goal through subtler means. The word itself appeals to the senses, to light touches, faint whiffs, half-glimpses, aftertastes and tantalizing whispers. That is how Michael Powell makes his films: unhinged but refined, teasing every part of you until your barriers shut down and you achieve a purity of mental and spiritual orgasm.


None of this may be relevant to Black Narcissus, however, which Powell himself later called his "most erotic film." I contested that point several times during my viewing of Criterion's gorgeously restored Blu-Ray of the film, having just watched their print of The Red Shoes and finding the build-up of subjective artistic expression the most satisfying cinematic experience I can name, as I did the first time I watched that movie. Then I realized I'd forgotten my own annoyance with those who lump eroticism and sensuality together: The Red Shoes beckons and teases until you'll do anything for it, then it brutally denies you because it never gave itself the choice of pleasing an audience. But Black Narcissus has such a sexual primacy to it that every nude scene, hell, every visualized romantic moment, feels empty in comparison.

Made the same year that Britain gave India its independence, Black Narcissus partially demonstrates why British occupancy failed in the first place, but its approach is far from political. In fact, the central conflict of the film only tangentially concerns the indigenous population. The eroticism of the film plays on the exoticism of the environment, a beautiful area in the Indian Himalayas where a group of Anglican nuns come to establish a convent to teach local children and to set up a hospital.

Powell immediately emphasizes the tantalizing nature of the area. The nunnery, perched 9,000 feet up at the edge of a sheer cliff face, is constantly buffeted by gale-force winds that billow through the open windows. The wind casts everything not nailed down into disarray, but it also creates a sort of song as it howls through the corridors, a combination of forceful eroticism of its physical impact with the sensuality of its musical nature. Masters of color, Powell and cinematographer Jack Cardiff (who won the Oscar for his work here because it would simply be too much of an outrage if he hadn't), constantly contrast the brilliantly dyed clothes of the peasants with the off-white robes of the nuns' habits, colored as they are in pasty oatmeal hues. One of the biggest indicators of the underlying effect of the environment's sharp distinction from the plain nuns, and the funniest, is the casually mentioned line that the empty palace where the nuns make their home used to be the king's harem. Faded paintings of Karma Sutra positions dot the walls, not immediately noticeable but always there, a fitting recurring gag on the sexual confusion of these cloistered women.

For the point of Black Narcissus is not simply to emphasize the exotic qualities of a foreign locale but to demonstrate the perils of attempting to remake reality to fit an image. The nuns come to civilize the savages, but they find a generally happy, if superstitious, people who don't carry nearly the sexual baggage that the prim ladies do. Consider the difference between the two prominent males of the film: Dean (Jack Farrar), a government agent who embodies the British imperial attitude of pompous arrogance, often drunk, always clad in revealing shorts and condescending toward the locals. Then there's the young Indian general who arrives at the nunnery in respectable dress, innocently asking to be admitted to their school for girls. The nuns try to explain why it wouldn't do to have a striking young man in their midst, and he amusingly makes a case that they're being sexist by not allowing him to learn. Of the two, the simple Indian is far more gentlemanly and devoted to higher learning.

Yet his presence, and especially Dean's, put the nuns on edge, and we soon see that many may have come to escape their own sexuality. This is certainly true of Clodagh, the young sister superior played by Deborah Kerr, who routinely daydreams of a past lover in Scotland before she took her vows, and it's easy to see why one scene was cut for the American release to appease Catholics. Despite the lack of overt sexual content, it's impossible not to see erotic energy crackling off the screen as Kerr relaxes in a lake, casting a fishing rod as the crystal-clear water reflects the sunlight all around her as if the entire environment matched her post-coital glow. Whatever went wrong with that relationship, however, drives Clodagh to take to her new role with authoritative tasking. The other women also carry their latent desires, such as Sister Philippa, who becomes so intoxicated with the surroundings and the feelings they unlock in her that she inadvertently plants flowers in the vegetable garden, denying the convent much-needed food.

The people of India may be a great deal more formal than the nuns would have guessed, but they, along with their environment, surround the Brides of Christ with pure, vibrant expressions of dormant sensuality, and the Westernization does not tame them so much as infect everything British with the same passion. The children learn English words by looking at a tapestry with drawings of various Western weaponry, which takes on an even greater phallic significance when each killing device is said aloud by kids with no concept of their destructive power. Even the film's construction mashes up British sensibilities with these unfiltered emotions: not one frame of the film was shot in India, a fact Martin Scorsese relates in the DVD commentary with the breathless excitement of a teenager who wants to show his friends something cool he just found instead of the analytical mind of a man who's dissected this film for 40 years and filled his own work with references to it. But it's not hard to understand the director's enthusiasm, as Powell's film feels too alive to be the product of matte paintings, miniatures and studio sets. Yet the truth makes more sense, as the totality of the film's construction allows Powell to maintain total control of color and lighting, able to always create a shot that will yield maximum sumptuousness. Even the casting of Jean Simmons as the tawdry dancing girl works from this viewpoint; I do not mean to excuse the racism of the casting, but Simmons, painted bronze with a nose ring and flowers in her hair, becomes a vision of the ultimate effect of Powell's manufactured Himalayas on those who seek to remake it: the environment absorbs the British, not the other way around. Thus, Simmons' role as seductress takes on a deeper meaning that exacerbates her pull, and when she spontaneously bursts into an erotic dance while cleaning the convent, you wonder why she hadn't already. Even the general, so eager for a Western education, contributes to this effect, purchasing the titular Black Narcissus, a cheap, pungent perfume from England that smells foreign to the nuns by virtue of him wearing it.

Surprisingly, it is Sister Ruth, not Sister Clodagh, who ultimately cracks under the strain of all this thick tension. Where Clodagh came to India to escape memories of tragic romance, Ruth's past is murkier. Her behavior suggests sexual confusion, and perhaps she wished to escape her feelings of insecurity, only to be met by Clodagh. Why she should be so jealous, however, is a bit of a mystery, as she is played by Kathleen Byron and thus, in this writer's opinion, unnecessarily uncomfortable with her looks. (It's an opinion almost certainly shared by the director, whose dalliance with the actress led to her divorce.) But her madness is evident even in the film's early moments, such as the odd look of delight when she interrupts Dean and Clodagh's first meeting with red all over robes gushing over seeing the patient whose blood smears her habit. When Clodagh notices Ruth's desire for Dean, she attempts to calm the nun, only for Byron to leap in a flash and accuse her of wooing the man.

Byron would later attribute much of her performance to the film's lighting, which certainly ranks among the most memorable use of darkness in classic film; there is a clarity to shots with just enough lighting for outlines that it's as hard to believe that 1940s film stock could capture images at such low levels as it is to think that three-strip Technicolor could result in such a bountiful array of colors. But Byron's quote is little more than English modesty: encouraged by Powell to let loose and leave subtlety to some other film, she turns into a silent film monster to rival Max Shreck's Nosferatu, wild-eyed and flashing teeth like knives. Her performance, as with the direction, is passionate but excessively formal above all, modulated through the deliberate pacing of tension until, when Powell frames Byron in close-up as she applies blood-red lipstick, the distinction between Powell's driving direction and Byron's performance vanish, and the combined moment signals that Ruth has forsaken her vows and gone off the deep end before her true freak-out.

To beat a dead horse further, just look at the color in this film. This is not even my first experience with Black Narcissus, and yet I am still as overwhelmed by it. Cleaned up by Criterion and ITV, the new Blu-Ray erases the blurring and fading that marred the original DVD and restores the color to its fullest glory. Watch Clodagh as she prays in a drab room in the palace, only to look up and see the most beautiful blue sky you've ever seen in a high window, with just a hint of sparkling green foliage snaking across the bottom corner; the glimpse sparks one of her romantic memories, but the astonishing contrast of the white walls with the close-up of the window will spark flighty thoughts in the audience as well. More than anyone else, even more than Nicholas Ray -- who serves as a far more accurate comparison to the director than Hitch because the only link between the latter is their nationality -- Michael Powell understood the power of color, and Black Narcissus is the greatest film I've ever seen to deal with the subject of desire. The film's detractors, sparse as they are, criticize the film for caring more for color than plot, something they evidently do not know the director freely admitted. But it is precisely his use of color that drives the story: extroverted as Byron's acting may be, the film draws its tension from the gradual shift in lighting and hue as more and more color seeps into the film even as it grows darker and darker. Films of wounded faith and confused sexuality tend to be somber (think Bergman), but Powell turns serious themes into an emotional roller coaster solely through his disciplined formal progression. It is impossible to tell at the beginning of the film that it will end as a horror-opera, and the fact that you never notice the shift proves that the cinematography layered the film where the straightforward script wouldn't.

For those with minimal knowledge of the Archers, it may not mean much when I say that Black Narcissus makes their previous efforts look incomplete. But Powell & Pressburger already had a number of masterpieces under their belt, and even in 1947 were just halfway through a four-year period that produced as many classics. But the climactic sequence, which choreographs Ruth's murderous stalk through the convent and her final confrontation with Clodagh to the score, shows the director preparing for upcoming musical forays such as The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann, in which he would fully parlay his cinematic sensuality into its purest form: dance and music. There's even a nod to the past in a POV shot of Ruth, incensed by Dean's rejection of her, literally seeing red before blacking out, recalling the "blinking" shot of a man being anesthetized in A Matter of Life and Death. I know I haven't helped matters, but this film is about more than its aesthetic beauty, even though its looks inform everything about it. Like Georges Méliès before him, Powell was a magician, not literally like the Frenchman but certainly artistically, and Black Narcissus is his greatest enchantment. The Red Shoes is the greater experience, removing the latent politics of this film -- though Powell was a lifelong Tory and probably not too invested in seeing India win its freedom -- and reconstituting the sensuality around its purest expression, art, but Black Narcissus is likely the most beautiful film I've ever seen, one that makes me sit back in appreciative wonder during repeat viewings just as Martin Scorsese marvels over the Archers' achievement. I can only hope my own love of the film lasts as long as his.

The Tales of Hoffmann

Considered the last great Powell/Pressburger film by modern appraisers -- The Battle of the River Plate enjoyed a rapturous reception upon its release and was the collaborators' third-most profitable film -- The Tales of Hoffmann marked the duo's most ambitious project yet. Michael Powell always sought to combine the various arts into the cinema, into the "composed film," and he'd made significant strides with his masterpiece, The Red Shoes, which combined his cinematic form and his usual painterly touches with magisterial architecture, music and dance. Hoffmann, as an adaptation of an opera, seeks to incorporate that mix of five of the seven arts with literature, as operas come with librettos. As for sculpture, well, that depends on how poetically one wishes to discuss staging.

As with The Red Shoes, Powell is not content merely to reproduce his artform-within-an-artform merely as a simple adaptation of stage to screen. The dance sequence in the Archers' ballet film blended the effervescence of dance with the magic of cinema, rooting the action on a stage yet jutting off in directions that reality could not follow. That blend of the old style of design -- cut-outs and well-chosen colors and lighting -- with the freedom of cinema is what makes that film, and this one, so amazing. The Tales of Hoffmann at no point breaks from Jacques Offenbach's opera (though Powell does omit some details and plot lines of the original), to the point that its sets are blatantly constructed (some are even surrealistic, influenced by such artists as Joan Miró). Yet Powell and Pressburger make this spare presentation into something so far beyond the original theatrical adaptations, those pictures that simply transplanted Shakespeare et al. to the screen with nary a hint of visual imagination, that it looks more vibrant and tangible than the most ambitious operatic films that followed.

Artifice plays a huge role in The Tales of Hoffmann, from its opening synchronization of rotating weather vanes with the first strains of the score to a shot of actors revolving in a gilded gazebo as if in a giant music box to three separate shots of the playbill that introduces each of the three acts with a brief synopsis and the dramatis personae. One of its final shots shows the orchestra's conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, guiding the film's music. Visually, Powell uses a number of camera techniques that call attention to themselves, such as overprinting and jump cuts. Indeed, the tales of the titular Hoffmann, which begin after a drunken revel in a tavern, seem almost an afterthought, in the best possible sense.

Powell pulls out all the stops from the start, moving from the opening credits and the start of the music to a transcendent sequence known as the Dragonfly Dance, a setpiece from a ballet within the opera. In it, the ballerina Stella (Moira Shearer) dances like a maniac as Count Lindorf (Robert Helpmann, who looks every bit as if he just walked off a German expressionist film) watches with a mixture of lust and malice -- this will factor into the story later. The Dragonfly Dance, an explosion of ecstasy so light that it ends with Shearer seemingly bounding upon lily pads and leaves, is no less impressive a feat than the dynamic sequence in The Red Shoes. It's so good that one wonders why Powell would place it at the start. Maybe he didn't want to bury the lede, as it were, but where else can he go from there?

It all makes sense, though, once Act I begins, as Hoffmann recounts the first of his three epic, tragic romances. Act I occurs within an obviously staged set draped in brilliant yellow, creating a light, frothy mood enhanced by the bubbly music. Hoffmann arrives to find a scientist, Spalanzani (Léonide Massine) having created Olympia (Shearer again), a dancing doll who twirls and leaps when wound up. Another scientist, Coppelius (Helpmann a second time, even more Germanic and expressionistic than the last) sells Hoffmann a pair of magic glasses that make Olympia seem real, as Spalanzani sets off the robotic girl into her dance. Much of this first act plays out humorously, with Olympia dancing frenetically until her gears slow down, only to be wound once more by the deceitful scientists. However, in context of the Dragonfly Dance sequence, Olympia's constant wavering between movement and immobility visualizes a complexity behind what might have been a simple setpiece: after watching Shearer dance so majestically and yet so fiercely from the start, seeing her "powered down" produces a cognitive dissonance.

Powell heightens the effect by filming her almost exclusively in long shot so that, when Coppelius learns that his colleague tricked him out of the profits and returns to dismember the doll, the moment is even more shocking. Coppelius rips apart everything but a leg, which continues to dance, a touch that brings the contradictions of the doll to a close by giving us a Shearer who dances even in death. It also builds upon the Dragonfly Dance by showing the degree to which a male character (invariably played by Helpmann) either subtly or openly controls the female in each segment and brings about her ruination.

That Olympia is a dancing doll instead of a singing one, as per the opera, advances this underlying theme by showing Helpmann break her down into the component that most attracts Hoffmann. Presumably Powell shifted Olympia's talent from singing to dance because he would eventually cover the downfall of a singer in the third act, but the simpler explanation is that dance is more visually arresting than singing; in the first major cinematic version of an opera, Powell turns the opera on its head. Martin Scorsese refers to this shift and its influence on the film as "dance as narrative" regarding how dance becomes the primary method of storytelling. But dance is also the form and the subtext of the film, central to any reading of the movie. Note that, compared to Helpmann, Shearer and Massine, Robert Rounseville is the only singer instead of a dancer with an overdubbed voice, and is it any wonder than Hoffmann himself is the least interesting character in the movie? (Note that he doesn't get title billing in the poster.) Even garbed in outlandish, garish purple that clashes with each of the different, alternately colored sets, Hoffmann exists in Powell's mind simply to link the segments and is otherwise unremarkable.

Powell and Pressburger move the focus of the film further away from the title character in the second act, where Olympia is replaced by the prostitute, Giulietta (Ludmilla Tchérina), the virgin white of the doll swapped for a seductive black leotard. Bewitched, literally and figuratively, by her magician pimp, Dapertutto (Helpmann), Giulietta steals away Hoffmann's reflection and, implicitly, his soul.* Powell contrasts Giulietta with Olympia is a stunning aside following a fatal duel between Hoffmann and another suitor who holds the key to her bedroom: suddenly, Powell separates the woman from the action and switches her black clothes to a white sari, focusing on her jeweled feet as she lightly walks upon the heads of all the men she'd lured to their doom. In that moment, she transforms into Kali**, the Hindu goddess of time and change who represents both fertility and destruction. The most famous myth involving Kali involves her dancing upon the corpses of the slain on a battlefield; by reflecting her, Giulietta becomes a destroyer through her dance where Olympia was herself destroyed by hers. Hoffmann manages to regain his reflection, but Giulietta is already gone with Dapertutto in a gondola that looks more Egyptian than Venetian, as if the prostitute now becomes Isis and Dapertutto Osiris as they ride off-screen into the realm of the dead.

Or perhaps she becomes Persephone and Dapertutto Hades, especially given the use of the Demeter/Persephone myth in the third and final act. Antonia (Ann Ayers) lives on a Grecian island in a home that might wash away at any second but seems as if it will stand forever. Compared to the previous women, though, Antonia cannot express her talent, cursed to die if she ever sings with her angelic voice. The Persephone imagery begins in earnest when Dr. Miracle (Helpmann) arrives, looking not unlike the Grim Reaper (which is of course is the modernized image of Hades but still relevant). Dr. Miracle drugs her in an attempt to coax the young woman into singing, and the drugs give the poor girl intense hallucinations. Her room becomes a massive garden with stone steps, which turn into an endless stairwell in the middle of space as the disembodied voice of Antonia's dead mother coaxes her onto the stage. The entire sequence builds into a frenzy, the initially inviting imagery of Antonia's visions is layered with increasingly unsettling undertones of the dark truth behind her hallucination. And so, tricked by "Death" by the image of her mother, Antonia takes to the stage for her aria (as flames arise to mark her damnation and hands reach up à la Lang's Metropolis), and Hoffmann arrives just int time to see her collapse. As the last piece of Olympia to function was her dancing leg, so too is the last vestige of Antonia's character her voice.

Each of the three acts is itself intriguing, but it is the denouement that collects them into a larger intelligence and emotional reward. Lindorf confronts Hoffmann and rips off the various faces of his disguises, bringing each of the related female characters back to life. They then combine into the character of Stella, dressed in white, and suddenly the treatment of these women becomes more clearly a Christ parable. Olympia, Antonia, even Giulietta (who survives but clearly "belongs" to her pimp by the end) are torn apart for their womanhood, yet in their destruction they defeat death, three like figures who combine into one composite figure garbed in pure white. Powell then splits the frame to show Stella dancing with Hoffmann from four different angles, a pas de deux that becomes even more an emotional payoff through its visual duplication. Yet the director clearly stresses the emotion of the shot over the connection with Hoffmann, to whose reality Powell returns via a tableau vivant of the tavern patrons frozen around their drunken storyteller. As in the original opera, Stella arrives to see her admirer too wasted to stand and leaves with Lindorf instead. But Powell and Pressburger omit the revelation of Hoffmann's companion Nicklaus to be the Muse who inspires and loves her poet; when it comes to Hoffmann's denouement, Powell takes the same stance as the rabbi who relates the story of the goyim's teeth in A Serious Man: "Who cares?"

But let us consider Nicklaus and the actress who plays him. Pamela Brown was the director's love from the moment they met to her early death at 58 in 1975, and her own story informs many of the elements of The Tales of Hoffmann. Brown suffered from crippling arthritis from age 16 that made acting an excruciating experience, and she could perform only under heavy sedatives. Thus, she is reflected in all three of the women who tempt Hoffmann. Like Olympia, she had to be "wound up" before each performance; like Giulietta, her feet represent destruction (Giulietta's of others, Brown's of herself); and the haze of Antonia and her ultimate self-annihilation visualize the effects of the drugs that allowed Brown to kill herself day after day. When Nicklaus sadly closes the curtain (literally) on Antonia's body at the end of Act III, Brown herself might be looking away from her own future in fear. Powell does not reveal Nicklaus as the Muse because he'd already proved how deeply Brown affected him and influenced his storytelling throughout the film. Look at the end of the second act, when Hoffmann breaks the mirror in Giulietta's room and regains his reflection. Powell cuts to a close-up of Hoffmann in the mirror with Brown just behind, her eyes glowing from reflected light. Though in the background, she draws as much attention as Hoffmann until she slips behind the protagonist, symbolically returning Hoffmann's soul and making a larger statement about Nicklaus/Brown's status as the Muse of the project more than a stated proclamation could convey.

That mixture of intensely personal narrative and more bombastic cinematic experimentation in the most grandiose of the older arts marks The Tales of Hoffmann as one of the Archers' great triumphs. Powell's direction is so striking to watch in a time when realism is being paraded about as the surest sign of artistic validation:*** his dancing camera is occasionally limited by the shortcomings of technology, yet the freshness of its movement and staging remains captivating. There is a lightness in Powell's approach, flying in the face of the post-Griffith era in American and British film by clinging to the old bastions of cinematic imagination -- expressionism, Disney, the first forays into special effects cinema at the turn of the 20th century -- a childlike peevishness best typified in the film's final shot, of a stamp that plants a cheeky "Made in England" on the screen.




*Remember that mythical creatures without souls, vampires, do not cast reflections. Even in the real world there exists a correlation between reflection as the soul, such as the belief among some that photographs or any form of image capture steal a piece of the soul.
**Did Powell and/or Pressburger learn about Kali reading up for Black Narcissus? It's a hell of a stretch, considering they shot the film at Pinewood Studios, but the connection between Giulietta and Kali is too strong to assume that they are unrelated.
***Some realist and realistic films are certainly great, but when did visual storytelling become so out of fashion? Even the more visually sumptuous films floating about the mainstream contain a wide gap between those gorgeous looks and the narrative.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

For the first hour of Michael Powell's epic The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I felt slightly uncomfortable at its overt Britishness. Released in 1943, the film contains a number of moments that play up the fading nobility of the Empire, putting positive spins on the country's involvement in the Boer War and the First World War. But once the characters reach the end of WWI, Powell shifts gears, and the first hour is revealed to be a protracted, lush setup to quite possibly his funniest and most satiric film.

Nominally a reference to the satirical comic strip of Colonel Blimp, a comment upon the reactionary jingoism prominent in British attitudes in the '30s and '40s, Powell's film keeps only an approximation of the character's appearance but uses and subverts the characteristics David Low's over-the-top creation to inform the protagonist Clive Candy. We meet Candy as an old general enjoying a bath, when a young officer barges in and "captures" the residents of the mansion as a training exercise. When informed, Candy is furious. "War starts at midnight!" he fumes, but the lad responds that he simply tried to prepare for actual warfare with the Germans. Candy wants to hear none of it and scuffles with the boy.

Powell then jumps back to Candy's own youth as a rising officer, and slowly he and Emeric Pressburger peel away at the silly old man clinging to absurdly dated notions of the "propriety" of war until we're left with a virile young idealist, a hopeless romantic who does not feel entitled to a sense of nobility in his old age but earns it instead. Candy's flashbacks begin with the Boer War, on leave after being award the Victoria Cross. He received a letter from one Edith Hunter, an English schoolteacher in Berlin who writes to the military complaining of anti-English propaganda in Germany over the war. The two meet and, though his superiors understandably refuse to allow this low-ranking officer to meddle in international politics, Candy decides to help out anyway. Unfortunately, his idea of foreign relations involves pranking the German propagandist until he manages to offend the entire German officer corps, to the point that they must draw lots to determine who shall duel him.

To avoid setting off a potential scandal, the two sides agree to announce that the duel concerns a dispute between Candy and his opponent, Theodor Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), over Edith. The duel occurs off-screen, and Powell cuts to a hospital in Berlin where the two recuperate and quickly become friends. Combined with Edith, who must stay with them to keep up appearances, they form a fascinating trio. Edith is fiery and intelligent: when she meets the old-fashioned Candy, she winds up launching into a diatribe about how women are constantly belittled in society, refuting his increasingly meek suggestions of homemaking and governing boarding houses as "jobs" for women. Her spirited and well-organized arguments put the first cracks in Candy's boisterous, cocky facade, which totally crumbles in the face of the well-mannered and kind German officer Theo. When the two recover, Theo, whose English is still rusty, comes to Candy and asks if they are really friends. When Candy agrees, Theo challenges him to a duel for Edith's hand in marriage, failing to grasp that Edith is Clive's "fiancée" only for PR reasons. Candy ecstatically congratulates the two and sets off home, only to realize upon returning how much he actually did love Edith.

Candy is so desperate to find some approximation of Edith that he takes out her sister as soon as he returns to England, only to find her personality reflects nothing of his love. Being away from his more down-to-earth friends brings back the pomposity in Candy, and Powell marks the passage of time between the Boer War and WWI with a wicked montage exhibiting the various kills he makes on international hunts, each with their own little plaque marking the date as if they were significant achievements.

By the time Candy, now a Brigadier General, sees the end of World War I, he's more or less the boisterous, nationalistic codger we met at the start of the film: when the shells stop falling and news of the armistice reaches the trenches, Candy turns proudly to his aide Murdoch and says that the Allied victory is proof that "might is right," that their side won without resorting to the atrocities of the Germans (mustard gas, torture, etc.). The problem is, not five minutes before, he asked a German POW about his old friend Theo and, after he left with no information, another soldier implies that they will extract the news from the POW one way or another. Candy has retained all of his youthful idealism and patriotism, but he's also retained all of his ideas about how things "should" be, and we start to see the lovable romantic slowly fade due to his unwillingness to change, something not helped by his wife Barbara (also played by Kerr), physically and mentally Edith's duplicate, in a romantic gesture makes him swear not to change his ways until the house they live in is flooded into a lake.

Livesey and Walbrook give defining roles as Candy and Theo: I actually wondered who played the old Candy at the beginning until the film wound on and the brash, fresh-faced youth slowly transformed through makeup and his own craft into that bloviating fool in his ivory tower, then ultimately showing that man's lasting beauty and nobility -- at one point, Theo remarks that before he met Clive, he didn't know Englishmen could be so romantic. In that sense, Livesey's more cartoonish role has more layers than Halbrook's even as the latter adds the sort of depth you'd rarely expect to find invested into an enemy combatant in the middle of a war. Upon fleeing to England, this man, who has no real reason to care for the country other than it being a haven from the Nazis, pleads his case to a board that will place him in an internment camp if they deem him a risk. It is one of the most heartbreaking speeches I can recall ever hearing in a film, not a stirring condemnation of Nazi principles or a declaration of the glory of England but a devastating account of loss and regret, a reminiscence of his country's spiral around the drain brought on by external and internal forces, and a sense of hopelessness allieved only when he decides to leave his homeland for the home of his dearest friend.

Anyone who's ever seen one of Michael Powell's features knows his mastery of Technicolor, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp ranks among his most beautiful pictures, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. But where those two used color to gradually build a mood of horror, Blimp builds into a sweeping romantic epic. Red of course plays a large part in Powell's color palette, from Kerr's ginger hair to a miraculously intact café that is so full of red it's practically bleeding. When one of Kerr's characters is not on-screen, however, the colors fade to military drab, emphasizing not only Candy's hardened, reactionary mindset but the loneliness he feels without Edith or someone who reminds him of her. When he's got someone to bring out his charm, he becomes not a caricature of outdated British nobility but a shining example of a core set of values that make Britain great, no matter what lesser ethos to which they might be applied (imperialism, jingoism).

It's somewhat surprising, then, to hear how virulently Churchill and the War Office tried to suppress the film. They pointed to Walbrook's Theo as a too-sympathetic depiction of a German officer, and indeed he demonstrates far more pathos and ready humanity than the more symbolic Candy -- at the end of World War I, Theo openly fears for Germany's future, and Pressburger's script makes plain the role of the Allies and their list of reparations in the shaping of Hitler's eventual rise to power. But Theo represents a good German, one who flees the Nazis to England, where he was a prisoner of war once and almost becomes one again until Candy comes to vouch for his friend.

Churchill might have thought himself, a veteran of the Boer War and a proudly militaristic leader, the target of Powell's satire, and that might be true to some extent. But The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is, and I don't mean this as a criticism, a piece of propaganda. Yes, it balances many of its two-dimensionally pro-British sentiments with examples of contradictory behavior, but that is only because Powell and Pressburger are stripping away the emptiness and the hatred of propaganda until they're left with something that British citizens can truly be proud of as they deal with the constant threat of German invasion. Perhaps the War Office hated it so because it contains a very real sadness concerning war that one doesn't find in propaganda, not an outright rejection of the need for a country to defend itself but a quiet reflection here and there on the ever-growing scale of conflict. When the two are reunited, Theo and Clive talk of the current war, and Clive puffs out his chest by drawing parallels to German techniques in the current war and WWI, rhetorically asking, "Who won the last one?" Theo replies, "We lost it, but you lost something too" and tears down Clive's outdated sense of the honor of war, saying, "This is not a gentleman's war. This time you're fighting for your very existence." One could read a sense of nostalgia for a more falsely noble and sexist time in this, but I think that Theo succinctly captures the madness of it all in a simple statement: "Do you remember, Clive, we used to say: 'Our army is fighting for our homes, our women, And our children'? Now the women are fighting beside the men. The children are trained to shoot. Whats left is the "home." But what is the 'home' without women And children?"

The Red Shoes

From 1909 to 1929, the Ballets Russes, headed by Sergei Diaghilev, effectively reinvented musical theater. Hiring not only gifted and promising young composers and performers but designers and choreographers to elevate ballet to a new artistic watermark, they took late 19th century innovations in tonality and rhythm and used them to break ballet of its rigid, uncomplicated form. Most notably, Diaghilev launched the career of Igor Stravinsky, whose compositions were so revolutionary they quite literally sparked riots. Today, of course, Stravinsky is enshrined as one of the great composers of the modern era, and the influence of the Ballets Russes on theater is still plainly seen in productions.

What Diaghilev and his company did for musical theater, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes did for film. A mixture of ecstasy, tragedy, realism, melodrama, hallucination and passion, it is one of those films that is not a film at all but an invitation into a self-contained world. Once inside, the characters' emotions become your own, their perceptions our reality. It is the finest filmic depiction of music I have ever had the pleasure of watching. I have never seen another film like it, though I can see immediately that many have tried to replicate even a small portion of its genius. I do not mean to slip into superlatives so quickly, but some masterpieces require time to grow on you and some grab you by the throat on the first try, and The Red Shoes firmly belongs in the latter category.

Diaghilev's life loosely informs the character of impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), director of the theater company that bears his name. He is a demanding, cold taskmaster with grueling standards and a dismissive attitude toward those who fail to meet them. After losing his prima ballerina to marriage and in need of a new composer, Lermontov hires two replacements: Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) and Julian Craster (Marius Goring).

From these three characters, two stories emerge, each far removed from the other. On the one hand, we have the story of the dancer and the composer, initially quarrelers but ultimately lovers. Julian's creativity and innovation give Vicky the advanced material to let her fully prove her astonishing talent, and Vicky becomes Julian's muse. The other story concerns the impresario's obsession with his dancer, and how he attempts to force himself between her and Craster. The first is quota quickie melodrama at its finest, filled with enough cheeky wit to let us know that Powell and Pressburger are in on it, but with enough sincerity to make it work as drama. The second is infinitely darker, one that introduces a fascinating psychological element to the film and provides its fundamental artistic message.

That message might strike some as "elitist." Lermontov meets Vicky at a party, where the hosts attempt to foist Vicky on an understandably suspicious impresario. After some funny exchanges and some faux pas, Lermontov gauges his potential new talent in a sort of pre-audition: he asks, "Why do you want to dance?" to which she immediately responds, "Why do you want to live?" "Well, I don't know exactly why, but ... I must." "That's my answer, too."

You see, the film is about art. Films about film/art tend to fall into one of two categories: the pain and joy of creation and its effect on the artist, and the paramount importance of art in the life of the person who appreciates it. The Red Shoes features elements of both, but it boldly combines the two. In this world, art is the fundamental proof of humanity, and of status. Those who can create are the true rulers of the world, and those who cannot are but serfs in control of the masters on the stage.

Ironically, Lermontov, the only character among the theater troupe who is not an artist, understands this more than either Julian or even Vicky. He angrily dismisses his first prima ballerina for falling in love, and when he learns of Julian and Vicky's relationship his wrath is terrifying as it pushes out of the edges of his cold and collected demeanor. On one level, this is Powell and Pressburger's nod to Diaghilev's dismissal of his lover, the famed dancer Nijinsky, out of jealousy when the latter eventually married. But Lermontov's jealousy is not a sexual lust: he simply resents anything that might distract his star dancer from her art. Walbrook's performance is watertight: it's impossible to read his face for either the moment of joy he feels with art or the rage he feels when his joy is threatened. When Craster informs the director that the two are in love, Walbrook's eye twitches ever so slightly. His cruelty is firm and passionate, but always restrained enough to make him truly menacing.

There is also the matter of the ballet. Lermontov tasks Craster with composing a new, more daring score for Hans Christian Andersen's story. Pressburger's script sets the film up not as a musical adaptation but an adaptation of an adaptation. As the film wears on, we see Andersen's tale come to mirror Pressburger's narrative and themes. In explaining the story to Julian, Lermontov draws out its poetry: a cobbler gives a woman a pair of red shoes, which force her to dance and dance and dance. She dances until her clothes are rags and she can barely stand. At last she makes her way to a funeral where a priest helps her. Craster mulls this over, then asks what happens to the girl. "Oh, in the end she dies," Lermontov flippantly replies. That says more about his mindset than his conversation with the choreographer Ljubov, in which he admits he does not understand human love and, when confronted with the truth that he cannot alter human nature, offers, "I think you can do even better than that — you can ignore it."

The ballet itself is one of the greatest sequences in all of film. The structure of the script already set the film apart from all musicals made before it (and most made since), but the actual depiction of the ballet sets the standard for great film musicals even as it sets itself up as the permanent king. The ballet starts normally enough, with shots of the dancers doing their thing on-stage. But when Vicky's character sees the red shoes in a window, suddenly everything changes: Powell uses optical printing to show her character imagining wearing and dancing in the shoes. From there Powell unloads technique after technique that sets the ballet apart. He leaps into Vicky's perspective, at which point the audience shrinks fades into near darkness. The shadow of the male lead is revealed with flashes of light to be both Craster and Lermontov, the two men who struggle for her affections. That same lead also drifts in and out of existence, occasionally present but often represented only by his clothes, which still dance. Powell mixes traditional stage performance with the freedom and possibility of film, and the result is a phantasmagoric burst of euphoria. When Vicky's breathtaking performance ends, Powell plays the audience applause in the audio track but presents us with Vicky looking out not into a crowd but a roaring ocean.

Matthew Dessem notes in his review of the film for his excellent blog "The Criterion Contraption" that the structure of the ballet, and filming it from within Vicky's perspective, informed the boxing scenes in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull. I would go one step further and say that Scorsese -- who helped restore Powell's reputation after the disastrous reception of Peeping Tom sidelined Powell's career for decades, is largely responsible for the preservation and restoration of the director's films (let's hope the recent restored versions and Blu-Rays of this and Black Narcissus make their way across the pond soon) and even introduced Powell to his last wife -- draws upon this one sequence for his very best work. At the top of his game, Scorsese dives into the POV of his protagonists, from Taxi Driver to Raging Bull to GoodFellas; the subjective POV of The Red Shoes practically lays out a blueprint for Scorsese's career.

That subjectivity allows us to see Vicky's true desires. Faced with the choice between the man who can further her career on the one who can counter and foster her creativity, she chooses the latter, but when Lermontov begs her to return (without Julian, of course), the red shoes cast as much of a spell on her as they do on the character in Andersen's story. The end is shocking and heartbreaking, yes, but unavoidable; in this world -- in Powell and Pressburger's world, perhaps -- one must always choose art over human distractions.