What The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp reveals about Michael Powell

In November last year, Martin Scorsese regaled an audience at the British Film Institute in London with tales of Robert De Niro’s method madness.

Why? Because he was introducing a special screening of a new, digitally restored print of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and the 1943 film – which jumps through four decades in the quixotic life of Roger Livesy’s career soldier Major General Clive Candy – was a formative influence on Raging Bull.

“I told Robert De Niro about it and he was very interested in Roger Livesy’s make-up,” recalled Scorsese, picking up the story of how he arranged a special dinner for himself, Michael Powell and De Niro in his apartment on 57th Street ahead of shooting Raging Bull.

“He was questioning Michael that night, asking all about the weight gain and the use of padding and the balding and the ageing 40 years in the picture. He was asking: ‘How? How? How?’ And Michael finally said to him: ‘It’s called acting.’” Scorsese laughed. “Obviously, they had different styles...”

It was an amusing story, but also an apt and poignant one given both the theme of the film and Powell’s subsequent fate within the film industry. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is, after all, about a maverick and daring young firebrand who, after a long, distinguished and innovative career is casually tossed aside by the very institution he has served with honour, dignity and, yes, more than a little rabble-rousing insouciance.

Given the way Powell was both warned off making the film by the Ministry for Information, who feared it would upset Churchill (it did) and, later, how he was all but banished from the film industry after making the controversial Peeping Tom in 1960, it’s hard not to retrospectively see a few parallels between the film and the way its director was so easily dismissed when the times changed and his ideas were no longer considered palatable.

But just as the wondrous story is a deeply humane reminder of nuances, subtleties and complexities that make up a life (Candy is viewed as a relic by the younger generation, but is gradually revealed to have many more layers to him), so too is the film an eye-opening reminder of how sophisticated and cutting-edge Powell was as a director and Pressburger was as a writer and producer.

Watch the restoration, which is re-issued in cinemas this Friday, and it’s like watching a movie from some idyllic filmmaking future, so dynamic is its camera work and so lacking in clichés are its characters and narrative ideas.

At the BFI screening Scorsese outlined how Powell and Pressburger’s willingness to ditch big events and focus on smaller character moments gave him the confidence to drop a key fight scene from Raging Bull, showing instead only its build-up and aftermath.

“The influence,” said Scorsese, “was in the storytelling.”

But it also went deeper than that. For years, Scorsese was one of the few people within the industry who would speak up for Powell. Now, thanks to work of Scorsese’s Film Foundation, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is in such a pristine and complete state that it can finally speak for itself.

• The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is in cinemas from Friday 18 May.

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