Telegraph 03.08.05

[favorov]

An enduring vision of a life worth dying for
By Christopher Howse

I have just been rewatching the series of films made by Michael
Powell and Emeric Pressburger around the time of the Second World War, and I'm
struck by how applicable their idea of Britain is to us now, beleaguered as we
are by terrorism and the promise of more to come. I'm not sure, though, that
their vision is altogether a comforting one.

The terror that visited the England of their films came from the
air. Suddenly, halfway through the film A Canterbury Tale, amid the lyrical
shots of the Kent countryside and the ancient stonework of Canterbury
Cathedral's tower, Bell Harry, the camera turns to the streets of the medieval
city and all we can see are the empty sites where timber-framed houses and shops
used to be, burnt to the ground in Luftwaffe raids.

Powell was born 100 years ago this summer at Howletts (where the
zoo park is now), half an hour's walk down the Roman road from Canterbury. Part
of his view of Britain is purely sentimental: plough horses, Scottish ceilidhs,
old inns, elm trees, thatched houses, chirpy cockney children, sleepy railway
stations.

But in his partnership with Pressburger, his Hungarian Jewish
refugee screenwriter, Powell gained a reputation as an adventurous, sometimes
more than experimental, film-maker. One has only to remember the shot in A
Canterbury Tale of a cluster of hands trying to rub the sticky leavings of "The
Glue Man" from Sheila Sim's hair, or the surprising scene in the camera obscura
in A Matter of Life and Death, to see the unconventionality of the partners'
approach.

Despite their innovatory technique, Powell and Pressburger's
vision of Britain was at heart a conservative one, and the key to it lies in The
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). This is a film that Churchill tried to
get banned. The stated objection was that the film satirised the British
military establishment as "blimpish", but no one who has seen it could take that
as its message. Yet if Churchill ever did get to see it, he would have wanted it
banned on quite different grounds.

The Blimp of the title was the invention of the Leftish newspaper
cartoonist David Low. Colonel Blimp in Low's cartoons was a rotund,
stick-in-the-mud figure with walrus moustaches, dressed in his towel at the
Turkish bath. Powell's Blimp shares only the appearance and his name in the
title. (The blimpish character in the film is called Clive Candy.) The whole
film, in flashback from a scene in the old officer's Turkish bath, explains what
has made this Blimp the man he is, since his youthful days winning a VC in South
Africa.

Blimp's argument, poignantly portrayed by Roger Livesey in 165
minutes of story, is that war is only worth fighting fairly - no poison gas, no
torture - because it is to be fought in defence of civilised British standards
of behaviour (what people today call "values"). He helps his former enemy, the
anti-Nazi Theo, gain asylum in England as a refugee from Hitler's Germany. At
the end of the film, Blimp has become an unwanted dinosaur, outmanoeuvred by a
new generation for whom "total war" means not sticking by any rules.

When the film came out, the critic of the Left-wing News
Chronicle, wrote: "I fell in love with Blimp - a witty and quite sensible
soldier, who would lose a war with dignity and might win it with a little luck."
That was the sort of thing Churchill could not stand. He wanted victory and he
wanted total war. It was only Brendan Bracken's advice that to ban the film
would be illegal, and more to the point, would draw attention to its argument,
that persuaded Churchill to leave it alone.

But there was something even more extraordinary in Powell and
Pressburger's approach. It was the idea of death. When the Blimp film was
released in America, "Death" was excised from the title. There was a war on,
after all, let's not be gloomy.

Two years later, Powell and Pressburger were making another film
with death in the title. A Matter of Life and Death starred Livesey again, and
David Niven as an pilot who "should" have died in a crash, and has to argue his
case for surviving before a court in heaven, because he wants to stay on earth
with the girl he has fallen in love with (Kim Hunter). Again in America, death
was too much for the title, the replacement being Stairway to Heaven, inspired
by the astonishing special effect of a giant escalator into the sky, rigged up
in the film studio, and inspiring in its turn, perhaps, Led Zeppelin's
classic.

The message of the film is that death is not to be avoided at all
costs. David Niven is happy to be shot down in flames in the course of duty. It
is only love (romantic love, perhaps) that makes him determined to live. But it
is the self-sacrificing death of Roger Livesey (killed in his extraordinary
motorbike gear, hurrying for help) that weighs in the heavenly verdict to give
the airman a stay of execution.

Taking the evidence of Powell and Pressburger's wartime films, it
is not too much to claim that they saw death on the right, romantic and losing
side as better than victory on the side of greed, modernisation and injustice.
Colonel Blimp, his wife (Deborah Kerr) dead and the house of his childhood
bombed into ruins, finds that the morale-raising broadcast he is due to make, on
the need for fair play in war even at the cost of defeat, is cancelled by the
government advocates of total warfare. The enemy is within the gates.

Another choice of the losing side is made by the heroine (Wendy
Hiller) of I Know Where I'm Going (1945), who gives up cocktails, swimming pool
and betrothal to an industrial magnate in favour of damp and decay on a Scottish
island amid a dwindling way of life.

The film was a reworking of the first feature film Powell had
directed on his own, The Edge of the World (1937). Shot, in lovely black and
white, on location on the isle of Foula, it centres on the death on the high
cliffs of a young islander who had wanted to leave the island way of life. But
the story ends with the whole community petitioning to be evacuated from their
beloved island, unable to follow the way of life their forefathers knew.

The Britain of Powell and Pressburger was passing: plough horses
replaced by tractors, lanes by tarmac, fishing smacks by trawlers, honourable
combat by total war.

Their cinematographic refrain is the same as that of the English
defenders at the Battle of Maldon (AD 991) against the heathen Vikings: "Resolve
must be the harder, heart be the keener, spirit must be the greater, as our
strength lessens." And they were all killed.