O Canada

Film: 49th Parallel
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I find propaganda films an interesting sub-genre of film. 49th Parallel is unquestionably a propaganda film, and absolutely one that is specifically geared toward American audiences specifically as a way to drum up support for the war. Unlike many a later film that humanizes the average German soldier, the bulk of the Germans in this film, particularly the lead German, is portrayed as an inhuman monster. Such is the nature of propaganda, after all.

The premise is an interesting one. In the early days of the war, a German submarine approaches the Canadian coast. A group of six men from the submarine go ashore as a raiding party. Just as they come ashore, a squadron of Canadian planes spots the sub and bombs it, sinking it, stranding the half dozen sailors in the middle of nowhere in the Canadian wilderness. They resolve to get to the American border and find a German embassy, since at the time, America was still a neutral country.

One of Our Aircraft is Missing

Format: DVD from Coal City Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

I’ve mentioned before that when I was a kid, war films were my go-to genre. I wasn’t specific enough. I specifically loved films about World War II. There’s a little part of me that gets excited when I encounter a film of the period that I haven’t seen before. Such was the case with One of Our Aircraft is Missing. I hadn’t heard of this before I made my current Oscar list, and it didn’t take me too long to request it from the library. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the film. Truth be told, I expected this to be something like a police procedural, albeit a military one. You know, missing aircraft, investigation of what happened…

But that’s not it. Instead, we have a bomber crew of a plane known as “B for Bertie” shot down on a bombing raid over Holland. The crew bails out and five of the six men land close enough to each other to make a small unit, with hopes of finding the sixth man. They are eventually found by people from the local Dutch village and are brought back to meet Else Meertens (Pamela Brown), the local schoolteacher and an English speaker. After a few tense moments, the Dutch citizens pledge to help the English. They do this by disguising them in Dutch clothing and smuggling them through the town.

Heaven Can't Wait

Film: A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

If people ask me why I watch movies from a list based on what other people think is worth watching, I point to films like A Matter of Life and Death (alternately titled Stairway to Heaven in the U.S.). This is not a film I’d have picked up without being told I should watch it, and I couldn’t be happier that I spent my time with it tonight. This is not just a charming little fantasy, but a very smart film, one that beautifully blends fantasy and reality, deals with questions of law, justice, and love, and manages all of this neatly and efficiently. It also gives me another look at the great Roger Livesey, who I need no excuse to watch.

The film takes place at the tail end of World War II. Pilot Peter Carter (David Niven) is trying to limp home, but knows his plane can’t make it. His crew has already bailed out, and his radio operator (Robert Coote) has been killed. Peter radios in and contacts American radio operator June (Kim Hunter) and tells her what has happened. He also tells her that he’d love to meet her for real, but that he’s going to jump out of the plane. Normally, that’s not a big deal, but his chute and the remaining chute on board have been destroyed. He knows it’s a death sentence, but he’d rather jump than burn. And so, wishing only for time to truly meet June, he jumps.

Get Thee to a Nunnery!

Film: Black Narcissus
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

While I haven’t reviewed it yet, I’m going to go on record now as saying that I really, really hate The Sound of Music. Imagine my displeasure when I discovered that there was another movie about nuns on the list. More nuns, and not the comical one from The Blues Brothers. I admit that I reacted poorly to this, even when I discovered it was a Powell and Pressburger film. I’ve learned to trust these two gentlemen. But still…nuns….

I needn’t have worried. Black Narcissus is a devastating film that, yes, is about a collection of nuns, but these aren’t the type who sing while dancing along Austrian hilltops. Instead, this is an intense film, one that goes right to the heart of the sort of thing that Powell and Pressburger seemed to love more than anything else: the darker parts of the human psyche and how those bad things are expressed in the real world.

We start with Sister Clodagh (pronounced KLO-da, and played by Deborah Kerr), who lives in a convent in Calcutta. She has been instructed to take another group of nuns into the Himalayas and start a new convent there. Going with her are Sister Briony (Judith Furse), Sister Blanche (better known as Sister Honey, played by Jenny Laird), Sister Philippa (Flora Robson), and the sickly and potentially unstable Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron). Off they go, and they arrive at what used to be the home of a harem.

Here they are assisted by a trio of people. First is Angu Ayah (May Hallatt), the caretaker. She is a crusty old native woman who doesn’t much understand the reverend sisters. Second is Joseph Anthony (Eddie Whaley Jr.), a six-year-old child who speaks English, and thus can act as an interpreter for the sisters for the school they intend to set up. Third, and perhaps most important, is Mr. Dean (David Farrar), the local representative of the British government. He is unpleasant and cynical, and predicts the sisters will leave before the rains come.

Despite his unpleasantness, there appears to be a bit of attraction between Dean and Sister Clodagh. There’s also a significant one-way attraction between Sister Ruth and Dean. Things become more complicated when Dean drops off a young woman named Kanchi (Jean Simmons) who has been bothering him. When the new young general (Sabu) arrives for teaching, all manner of lusty thoughts are happening inside the convent, where they don’t belong.

The environment proves to be a hindrance to the women. The natives turn against them when Sister Honey attempts to treat an infant despite Briony’s warning not to. The baby dies and the people believe the sisters are responsible for the death. There is significant attraction between the young general and Kanchi despite her low status. Sister Philippa, who was to create a vegetable garden for the sisters plants flowers instead, and asks to be transferred.

Through all of this Clodagh is dealing with her reasons for joining the order in the first place. She loved a young man intently, and she (and the rest of the people in her Irish village) assumed that the two would be married some day. However, he had other plans that involved going to America and not taking her with him. Strung along and now dreadfully embarrassed, Clodagh joined the order as a way to leave first, and to hide her shame.

But it is Sister Ruth who takes up the last part of the story. She is completely infatuated with the sometimes-drunken, always rude, but still dashing Mr. Dean. She accuses Clodagh of the same infatuation, although Clodagh denies this. It’s in this scene (which actually happens before a number of the events mentioned above) that Black Narcissus takes its first hard left turn into something very dark. It’s evident in this scene that Ruth isn’t all there. She’s bordering on madness and obsession, although she hasn’t slipped into it completely.

The culmination of the film is Ruth’s departure from the convent, her confession of love to Dean, and his rejection of her. Ruth, naturally, puts all of the blame where it doesn’t belong, and acts as you might expect someone paddling with both oars a foot above the waves. I’ll say this—if nothing else, when Sister Ruth brings the crazy, she brings it in spades and with little bells a-ringing. She becomes something possessed by the end of the film, and is actually terrifying enough to send a small jolt down the spine.

Beyond this being a surprisingly gripping drama for being about cloistered nuns, the cinematography is truly something special. None of this was filmed on location, and the glorious mountain peaks the loom in the background of most outdoor shots were simply expertly created matte paintings. Most of the time, it’s impossible to tell.

Like any great drama, this film is less about the situation of the plot and more about the characters who act through it. As such, as a tale of loss, obsession, and guilt, it still manages to resonate despite its age. I expected very little here, and got far more back from a film about nuns high up in the mountains. I really should learn to trust great directors with their story rather than doubting them because of it.

It’s worth discussing the rather odd name of this film as well. “Black Narcissus” is the name of a perfume that the young general wears. Narcissus, according to mythology, was a beautiful youth who became enamored of his own reflection in a pool of water. That’s a level of introspection and self-study that both Clodagh and Ruth could understand.

Why to watch Black Narcissus: A realistic depiction of madness, passion and isolation.
Why not to watch: Well, it is set in a convent.

Oedipus Wrecks

Films: Psycho, Peeping Tom
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop (Psycho); DVD from personal collection on middlin’-sized living room television (Peeping Tom).


So now that I’ve reached 20% done on this cinematic expedition, it’s come time for me to finally watch something by the great master of suspense cinema, Alfred Hitchcock. I’m generally a fan of the maxim “Go big or go home,” so Psycho it is. There’s no question that Psycho is one of the great films in suspense/horror history. It’s been spoofed, made homage to, copied, and parodied, but it’s never been duplicated. It is certainly Hitchcock’s most famous film, although not anywhere near his best in my opinion. Regardless, it’s a landmark cinematic event, and a first viewing of this film is always something special. It’s also a film that really trades on its shock ending. Consider the rest of this entry under a spoiler warning—if you’ve never seen Psycho, you should stop reading now, because the shock ending is worth it.

Now that we’ve gotten rid of those who haven’t seen this movie, we can talk a bit more freely. If you think for a minute about what you can recall from Psycho, you’ll probably think of two to four scenes—the money scenes, as it were. These are the shower scene, the death of the detective on the stairs, the reveal at the end, and the final sequence in the asylum. Because of this, it’s easy to overlook just how damn good this film is everywhere else. There’s a lot to notice here, and a lot that’s worth considering even without those four critical sequences, and the fact that there is so much here worth seeing shows just how good a filmmaker Hitchcock really was.

The film starts like typical Hitchcock. A young woman named Marion (Janet Leigh) embezzles $40,000 from her employer. It may not sound like much, but this is 40 grand in 1960 dollars—roughly a quarter million in today’s money. She takes the money so that she can pay off the debts of her boyfriend Sam (John Gavin). She drives out of Phoenix on her way to California to share the new wealth and (she hopes) start a new life with him. Along the way, she trades in her car for a new vehicle, and eventually stops at the Bates Motel for the night.

Here she meets Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), who is quiet, awkward, and under the thumb of his domineering, disturbed mother. Norman displays his collection of taxidermy birds to Marion, and he’s obviously taken with her. But then, while she is taking a shower, Marion is brutally slain by Mrs. Bates in one of the most famous sequences ever filmed. The rest of the film is the search for the missing Miss Crane, lead by her sister (Vera Miles), the boyfriend, and private investigator Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam), who also meets the knife point of Mrs. Bates in another, not-quite-as-famous-but-just-as-great scene on the staircase.

Of course, the biggest moment in Psycho beyond the shower sequence is the reveal—Mrs. Bates is long dead, and is another of Norman’s taxidermy projects. Norman himself is the killer, dressed up as mother and wielding a massive kitchen knife. It’s a great shock moment, one that is memorable permanently after being seen only once, and it’s what really makes the film.

The genius of this film, though, is that throughout, up until the very end when we discover precisely why the film is called what it is, our sympathies rest almost entirely with Norman. When he ditches Marion’s body by sinking her car into a nearby mudhole, there’s a tense moment when it stops sinking. The first time I saw the film, I can remember wanting the car to sink to protect Norman; he seems like such a nice guy.

The ending, though, pulls the rug out from under us. Norman isn’t a nice guy—he’s massively disturbed and scary, and the trick that Hitchcock has managed is to get us to sympathize with a complete lunatic.

There are subtle things at work here. Marion, in the opening scene where she is getting dressed after a little afternoon horizontal boogie with her boyfriend, is wearing a white bra and carries a white purse. Later, after she has stolen the money (and is thus bad), her bra is black, as is her purse; her actions dictate the color of her wardrobe. The misdirection is also brilliant. Marion Crane is the focus of every scene up to that point in the film. The few times she isn’t on camera, we’re seeing things from her point of view (the first shots of the Bates house in the rain, for instance), or she is the focus of the scene (Norman spying on her through the hole in the wall). To have her ripped from the film less than halfway through is a risky move, but it’s also startling and brilliant.

I can’t imagine this film in color. The black and white is so good and so moody that it’s really the only way the film should be viewed. The music is also perfect for the film, consisting entire of stringed instruments throughout, especially in that critical shower scene.

That scene is worth an extra look, incidentally. It shows nothing and implies everything. There is no noticeable nudity, and we never seen the knife actually enter flesh. We see no wounds, and the only real blood is running down the drain or on Marion’s hands. And yet, it is so well done that we feel like we’ve seen everything. This scene is a dissertation on direction, style, and editing.


While Psycho is a great film, I’m a bigger fan of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. That seems strange to say, but it’s absolutely true. While Hitchcock makes his audience sympathize with a deranged, homicidal maniac, Powell takes it one step further. In Peeping Tom, we know in the first ten minutes that the character Mark (Karlheinz Bohm) is the killer. We watch through the lens of Mark’s camera as he kills a prostitute, films it, and then we watch with him as he looks at the tape.

We learn a little bit about him from here. He works as a focus puller for a film studio and does some cheesecake photography on the side. He also owns the building he lives in, and takes in boarders. Specifically, he rents to young Helen Stevens (Anna Massey) and her blind mother (Maxine Audley). Mark avoids them pretty assiduously until Helen’s birthday when she introduces herself to him.

Mark is immediately taken with her, and she with him, in no small part because he is so shy and awkward. Helen asks to see some of Mark's films as a birthday present, and he lets her in on one of his terrible secrets. His father, who left him the house he owns, was a psychologist whose main research was on the subject of fear. To investigate fear, he experimented on Mark, doing everything he could to terrify the boy and test his reactions. He shows her some of his home movies, including his mother’s funeral and the best gift his father ever gave him: his movie camera.

Helen, it turns out, has written a children’s book about a magical camera and wants Mark to take the photographs for her. He doesn’t want to, because everything he photographs he eventually kills, and he has started to care very much for her. In one very telling scene, he plans to go out with Helen, but first must deal with setting aside his camera, almost as if he is being unfaithful to his mechanical eye.

There are a couple more murders, including one of a young woman (Moira Shearer, from Powell/Pressburger classic The Red Shoes) who is acting on the movie Mark is working on. We learn a little more about Mark’s method of killing when he threatens Helen’s mother, and ultimately, we learn the entire truth at film’s end. The reality of his murder method is so fascinating and so bizarre, that I don’t even want to put it under a spoiler warning—it needs to be experienced.

The genius of this film is that, like Psycho from the same year, we are made to sympathize with a serial murderer. In Psycho, though, we are misled. Here, we know from the very beginning that Mark is the killer. However, Bohm plays Mark so sympathetically that the audience can’t help but feel something for him and, like Helen, want everything to come out well for him eventually.

Even more, all of the murders are filmed from Mark’s perspective. Essentially, the audience is made complicit in the killings, since we experience them voyeuristically through the eye of Mark’s camera. These murders are made to look like we have committed them as much as Mark has. While we may not approve, we are, in terms of the way the camera is used, just as guilty as he is.

It is this fact, the sympathetic killer who makes us a part of his killings, that caused the universally unfavorable reaction to the film upon its release. Actually, that’s understated. The outcry against Peeping Tom was so great that it destroyed Powell’s career and he eventually emigrated to Australia, giving up the film business almost entirely. It wasn’t until a good 20 years later when other filmmakers like Martin Scorsese cited the film as a major influence that it was given another chance.

As it turns out, Powell was simply ahead of his time by a dozen years or so. Had he produced the film in 1970, it would have been hailed as visionary, and by 1976, it would have been tame and almost trite.

It’s hardly a perfect film. It’s never explained, for instance, why Mark, who claims to have been born in the house he lives in, has a German accent. But this is a detail that can be overlooked. It’s a strong, powerful film that can still manage a shock, particularly at the ending. Bohm’s portrayal of Mark is tremendous, and Anna Massey is great. She’s oddly attractive—there’s nothing about her that screams beauty queen, but she’s perky and cute, and impossible not to like here.

Anyway, I like this film more than I like Psycho only because Powell went further than Hitchcock did. Both deal with mild-mannered killers with Oedipal issues (Norman with his mother, Mark with his father). Hitch went far afield and was applauded; Powell went further and it cost him everything. Damn shame. More people should know this movie.

Why to watch Psycho: Hitchcock’s first real foray into horror.
Why not to watch: Bad sequel, worse sequel, unmentionable prequel, stupid remake.

Why to watch Peeping Tom: You owe it to Michael Powell’s reputation.
Why not to watch: Mark’s unexplainable accent.

The Angels Want to Wear Elvis Costello's

Film: The Red Shoes
Format: VHS from Putnam County Public Library through interlibrary loan on big ol’ television.

I went into The Red Shoes believing it to be a musical, and that really is the easiest way to classify it. It is not, however, a musical at all, but a dance movie in the classic sense. In fact, it is even more of a dance movie than the classic Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers or Gene Kelly films of the same era. While those films frequently turned on dance numbers, there were just as frequently singing parts and much of the plot hinged on what people sang at each other. Not so with The Red Shoes. There is no singing here (except to demonstrate other parts of an orchestration), and ballet takes center stage, both literally and figuratively.

The film takes its name from a story of the same name by Hans Christian Anderson. In the fairy tale, a young girl encounters a pair of magical red shoes. She puts them on, and the shoes make her dance. At first, she enjoys herself, dancing herself silly. At the end of the evening, when she is tired, the shoes refuse to stop dancing; they are never tired. She dances and dances until, finally exhausted and unable to do anything else, she cuts off the shoes (and her feet still in them) and dies horribly. Sorta warms the cockles of your heart, doesn’t it? So cheery.

Fortunately, there is no foot removal in this film. We start instead at the performance of a new ballet being attended by a group of students. One of these is Julian Craster (Marius Goring), a young composer, who discovers as the show begins that the music is quite familiar. It appears that the music of the ballet, ostensibly written by his instructor, is actually his own work. He goes the next day to see the man who runs the company, Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), who hires Craster as an assistant.

Lermontov also takes on a young woman who claims that for her, dancing is like living—she isn’t sure why she must do it, but she must. This is Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), who despite her wealthy upbringing is no dilettante. Lermontov recognizes that beneath her still untrained exterior there lurks a true dance prodigy, someone who can set the dance world on its ear. When the star of Lermontov’s company gets married, it is Victoria who becomes the new prima ballerina.

Her first major triumph is an adaptation of “The Red Shoes,” with a score written by Craster. She puts everything into the performance and the rehearsals, and while Lermontov believes she has a long way to go until she is truly great, she is well received. He promises her the dance world, with shows in every major city in Europe and America. Sadly for Lermontov, Craster has promised her something else—a lifetime of love and his devotion. And thus we come to the point of the film. Will Victoria leave the dream of becoming a truly great dancer for a life with Craster, or will she devote herself to the stage, shunning everything else to become the greatest dancer the world has ever seen?

The film is surprisingly effective at times, and surprisingly ineffective at times. The romance between Victoria and Julian, for instance, just seems to happen because it’s supposed to. There’s no build up, or at least not much of one, and it feels short changed, if not flat out cheap. On the other hand, Victoria’s relationship with Lermontov is nicely established. Lermontov is a true Svengali, and a terribly wicked man determined only to get exactly what he wants when he wants it. He stops at nothing to get Victoria to stay with him, stooping even to true cruelty.

Much of the film is the stage production of the ballet of the title. Here, the film both hits and misses for me. It’s absolutely a stunner, and Moira Shearer is a hell of a dancer. She made her living mostly on the stage, and while I understand that, it’s also very much a shame that there’s not a lot of footage of her in films of this sort. She’s absolutely incredible as a dancer, and despite the fact that she made only a half dozen films or so—and many of those without dancing parts—she’s one of the best to ever star in a film.

The ballet itself, though, is surreal. Much of what is happening on stage simply couldn’t be staged the way it is, and so I find that for me, much of it doesn’t work. For instance, when she puts on the red shoes, she simply appears in them, and they tie instantly. My kids are both in ballet, and I’ve seen people put on pointe shoes—it isn’t instant. The stage shifts into bizarre landscapes and backdrops, yet is always a stage. In fact, the only way the sequence makes sense (aside from people appearing and disappearing instantly and the whole “instant shoes” thing) is to understand that much of the scenery at least is taking place in Victoria’s head. There’s precedent for this—Craster tells her that she’ll be able to see what he wants her to with his music. For me, that’s the only way this ballet makes sense as both a cinematic piece and a piece being performed in front of an audience on a stage.

Beyond this, I’m not totally thrilled with how simplistic the story really is. Victoria’s decision doesn’t happen until the very tail end of the film, and it doesn’t even become obvious that she has a decision to make until just before that. It works here slightly better than it might otherwise because so much of the focus is on the dancing itself, which is really how it should be with this movie.

In short, don’t watch The Red Shoes for the plot or the acting. Watch instead for dance performances that are rightly considered some of the best in the history of musical cinema.

Why to watch The Red Shoes: Truly epic dance sequences.
Why not to watch: Simplistic plot.

Character Vs. Plot

Films I Know Where I’m Going!, His Girl Friday
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on big ol’ television (Going), DVD from DeKalb Public Library on itty bitty bedroom television (His Girl).

Depending on who you ask, there are only a few real stories in the world. Some will tell you that there are only seven basic plots. Joseph Campbell made a big deal of the fact that there’s really only one story. Whichever of these ideas you subscribe to, there’s a good reason why the same characters, the same plots, and the same ideas show up in movie after movie.


I Know Where I’m Going!, a Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger collaboration, is an early example of a woman torn between what she wants and what she thinks she wants. This movie gets released about once a month, frequently starring Kate Hudson. Here’s the basic set up: a woman goes off in pursuit of marriage to a successful guy she probably doesn’t love, but who can set her up with a life of ease and privilege. One the way to her impending wedding, acts of God and man prevent her from meeting up with her husband-to-be, but she does encounter an attractive, romantic bachelor who she is both repelled by and attracted to. She spends the entire movie trying to decide between the two men—the one she obviously loves and the one who can give her the life she’s always dreamed of.

In short, I Know Where I’m Going! is a film you’ve almost certainly seen at least a dozen times, and there are no surprises here except for some of the set pieces like the massive whirlpool that threatens our heroine at the end of the film. In this case, the woman in question is the headstrong and difficult Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller), and the young, poor suitor is Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey). He is a poor Scottish laird, unable to enter his own castle due to a terrible curse. She is promised in marriage to a wealthy industrialist about the age of her father.

They meet because she is headed to an island on the Hebrides to be married to the old man, but the classic Scottish weather prevents her from getting there. Instead, she’s stuck on a different island with Torquil, a guy with a name that only Powell and Pressburger could even attempt to foist on an audience.

The plot is cute, but there are no surprises here unless you’ve never seen a romantic comedy in your life. From the moment Torquil walks on screen, the end is a foregone conclusion. And that would be fine if I gave much of a rat’s hindquarters about the characters, particularly Joan.

Quite frankly, I don’t like Joan. She’s bitchy, superior, and unpleasant. Most of the press material and many of the comments I’ve seen on this movie call her headstrong—as far as I’m concerned, that’s nothing but a euphemism for spoiled rotten. She’s sassy and brassy, and if she were a man, everyone would call her an asshole, but since she’s a woman, we’re supposed to be charmed by her. Wendy Hiller has virtually no chemistry with Roger Livesey, and frankly, I blame her, but that’s only because I really enjoy Roger Livesey. His voice is exactly what I think of when I think of upper crust British, and I could listen to him read a menu and be entertained by it. Frankly, in this film, Torquil is a much better match for Catriona (Pamela Brown), a local girl who is far more interesting than Joan could ever hope to be.

With better chemistry between the characters, or frankly with a character better than Joan Webster, I can be compelled to care about a story I’ve seen a dozen times. I enjoy both versions of Sabrina, for instance, even though I know exactly how it’s going to end every time. There’s a joy in seeing things come out the way we want them to. I’m as much a sucker for that as the next person. But not when I think there are better endings to be had out there. It doesn’t help that the theme song is horrifying, and made my dog twitch until it finally ended.

So what’s going for it? A few things. The Scottish countryside is beautiful, and beautifully filmed here. It’s also fun to see Petula Clark (as Cheril, the young girl with the giant glasses) as a young child, long before she sang “Downtown” or “Don’t Sleep in the Subway.”


But not every retreaded plot means for a dull movie. His Girl Friday features version 2.0 of the love triangle in I Know Where I’m Going! We again have one woman and two men, but things are a little more complicated. The basics are the same. Hildy (Rosalind Russell) is a newspaper reporter who is recently back from an extended vacation. The reason for the vacation was a quickie Nevada divorce from her husband and editor, Walter Burns (Cary Grant). This divorce was entirely one-sided—Burns didn’t want it, doesn’t want to accept that Hildy has really divorced him, and wants her back, both in a marriage and on the paper.

However, Hildy has shown up to break some news to Walter. First, she doesn’t want back on the paper; she’s retiring. Second, the reason she’s retiring is that she’s getting married again, to a stable, but excessively dull insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy). Now that you know the players, you should be able to figure out what happens. Walter does whatever he can to throw a wrench in the works between Hildy and Bruce, and also does everything he can to get her back on the paper. It doesn’t hurt that there’s a whale of a story going on at the moment.

A man stands accused of killing a police officer and is about to be executed. Walter Burns wants to save the man, and he needs Hildy to write the story. She finally agrees because Walter says he’ll take out a massive insurance policy on himself to give Bruce a fat commission. And, naturally, everything conspires to work out a happy ending for, well, at least Walter and Hildy.

The difference here, even though the story is pretty straightforward, is the characters themselves. Unlike Joan, Hildy really is a firebrand. She’s quick, she’s funny, and she’s just a little bit nasty. Walter is a conniving jerk, but he’s doing it because he can’t imagine his life without Hildy by his side. What’s great is how much of a match she is for him. She knows that Walter will pull particular stunts to prevent her and Bruce from boarding their train to Albany, so she takes all of their collective money and has him hide the commission check. Sure enough, Bruce is falsely arrested based on a tip to the police from Walter, and everything he owns is confiscated—but she’s outfoxed her ex, because the money and the check are safe.

We want these characters to be happy. They match each other and do so well. Even more, they can keep up with each other. As the story spins out of control and things continue to get crazy around them, they are the only ones who seem to know what is going on. They’re both frenetic, and both completely alive when something exciting is going on around them. They deserve eac other, and more than anything, we want them to end up were they should be.

The retread plot doesn’t matter here, because anyone who’s ever seen a romantic comedy before has a pretty good idea of where things are going to end up when the short running time finally winds down. We’re not watching this for the plot, but for the people going through the familiar story. If we like the people, we like the story, and Walter and Hildy are too clever and too fun to really dislike.

In short, good characters make even the most tired plot entertaining, and it never hurts to have Cary Grant.

Incidentally, if you’ve ever seen the Coen Brothers film The Hudsucker Proxy, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s role as Amy Archer, the hard-bitten, tough reporter looking for a scoop is very much a sop to Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Leigh is a good actress, but in a side-by-side comparison, she’s no Rosalind Russell.

Why to watch I Know Where I’m Going!: There’s comfort in a familiar story.
Why not to watch: Why would anyone want the unpleasant Joan to end up with everything she desires?

Why to watch His Girl Friday: Snappy banter and fun, smart characters.
Why not to watch: Everyone talks at once.

A Hidebound Hero

Films: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Format: DVD from Mokena Public Library through interlibrary loan on big ol’ television.


Change is difficult, but in today’s world, it’s something that comes faster and faster all the time. We learn to adapt to change because we live in a world where we have to. This hasn’t always been the case, of course. There was a time in the past when the world changed slowly, and it became easy to become comfortable, particularly for those of the wealthy class.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp concerns itself with Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey), a British officer of the old model. While the first few minutes of the film take place in the mid-1940s at the height of World War II, most of the film takes place in flashback. However, those first few moments are important. We learn that the British Home Guard is planning a training exercise. “War starts at midnight” is the phrase, but a contingent of troops believes it would be more instructive to start the war immediately, acting more in the manner of the current modes of war.

This causes a stern, arguably extreme reaction from the man leading the Home Guard, General Wynne-Candy. To help us understand how Candy, frequently called “Shuggie” or “Sugar” Candy, became the tubby old general he did, we flash back a good 40 years to the Boer War, when Candy has returned from service in South Africa.

The story here is too long to go into details—the restored version of the film clocks in at just under three hours. What is important is the personage of Candy, the important women in his life, and the man who begins the film as his enemy and ends as his greatest friend. The first woman and the friend he meets almost immediately. Returning from the Boer War a decorated hero, Candy learns that a man in Germany has been casting slurs against Her Majesty’s troops. Candy travels to Berlin, meets up with Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr), and fights a duel with Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook). Both men are wounded—Candy takes a slash to the face that causes him to grow a mustache—and wind up fast friends. Both men also fall in love with Edith, but Candy doesn’t realize he loves her until much later, after she has married Theo.

Candy marries Barbara Wynne (also Deborah Kerr), a nurse he met on the last day of World War I in France. The two have a quick courtship and an evidently happy marriage, in part because Barbara is the absolute image of Edith. In the 30s, Barbara dies in Jamaica.

During World War II, Theo is a refugee from Germany, Edith having died in 1933. Candy has been forcibly retired from the service, but signs up with the Home Guard to make himself useful and to use the years of military expertise he has gained fighting in a number of wars. It is here he meets the final woman in his life, Angela “Johnny” Cannon (Deborah Kerr for the hat trick). He had selected her as his driver out of 700 girls, again because she is the image of Edith, and in this case, his late wife.

What happens with Wynne-Candy is less important than his reaction to various events in his life. His reaction is, essentially, nothing unless it is to lash out against the changes that he cannot fathom and a world he no longer understands. He represents a sort of old-school guard of soldier who not only believed that war was an honorable profession, but lived the truth of it. Once a battle was over, once a fight was done, it was possible, even likely, to become good friends with your former enemies. At the end of World War I, he says to his aide Murdoch (the underappreciated John Laurie), “Right makes might.” His meaning is the England won, despite the treachery of the German Army—in the face of poison gas, the bombing of free cities, and tricks that an honorable foe would not attempt, Britannia still came out on top. Essentially, the Allied victory did nothing but reinforce his world view—that a man could still be an honorable soldier of the old school.

Time passes in interesting ways in the film. Since the bulk of the movie is concerned with Candy’s military service, the times between the wars are passed in montage. It is evident, for instance, that between the Boer War and World War I, Candy spent his time traveling and big game hunting. The years pass not with a flipping calendar but with the sudden appearance of a series of animal heads on the wall of his den. Additionally, even significant events like the deaths of Barbara and Murdoch occur not in front of us, but merely as clippings from a newspaper, as if to say these events were not important enough to show.

Most interesting of all is the fact that the biggest moment of the film occurs when Candy is not present. Attempting to enter England during World War II, Theo gives an impassioned speech about why he left Germany, one of the most moving few minutes of film created in the 1940s or since. However, Candy misses the speech, in a way preventing him from understanding that his way of looking at the world no longer works.

Candy is an anachronism, a dinosaur, a horse and buggy in a world of cars, and everyone but Theo tries to insulate him from that reality. When Johnny becomes aware of her boyfriend Spud’s (James McKechnie) plan to circumvent the war game, she tells him he can’t because Candy is such a dear old man and it wouldn’t be fair. While possibly true, Spud’s entire point is that the time for playing fair has long since passed.

It’s worth commenting on the name of the film, since it does not appear to refer to anyone in the movie, and since the film ends with Candy standing tall and offering a salute. “Colonel Blimp” was a cartoon character in the U.K. from the 1930s to about the 1960s. Colonel Blimp was the personification of the ultra reactionary military leadership, unable to change, see reason, or even make sense. His statements were filled fire and brimstone nonsense along the lines of “By Gad, sir! Mr. Smith-Smythe is right! The only way to preserve a free press is to shut down the newspapers and prevent them from talking against us!” The film is not so much about the life and death of Clive Candy, but the life and death of this type of thinking.

It’s also worth noting that this film was created in 1943, at the height of World War II. Censors in England and Churchill himself tried to get the film banned, and prevented Laurence Oliver from playing the role of Candy. What’s most shocking in the film is Theo, who is, sympathetic, the voice of reason throughout, and German. The film was written and directed by the dynamic team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; Pressburger, it should be noted, was a native Austrian who emigrated to England.

I did not know what to expect with this film, but I’m very glad I chose to watch it early in this countdown.

Why to watch The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp: A great, gutsy story and incredible performances by Livesey, Kerr, and especially Walbrook.
Why not to watch: You fear change.