The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

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Screenonline:

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp was Powell and Pressburger's second feature for their new Archers production company, following "...One of Our Aircraft is Missing" (1942). The film was their most ambitious collaboration so far, loosely inspired by a popular cartoon series by David Low, lampooning the military establishment as personified by an ageing, buffoonish officer.

Pressburger's script portrays, with a mix of sympathy and exasperation, a well-meaning but hopelessly out-of-date old man, who stubbornly fails to recognise the nature of the enemy and the cost of failure. The film is an implicit criticism of an officer class which insisted on seeing the war as a game, fought according to 'gentlemen's rules'.

The film so incensed Winston Churchill - who saw it as unpatriotic and a threat to morale - that he tried to have it banned and, when he failed, did his best to spoil its success overseas. Nevertheless, Blimp was a great success.

Robin Cross via Channel 4:

In a Britain fighting a ‘total war’, cinema became a key instrument of propaganda. The makers of feature films responded by abandoning the celebration of stiff-upper-lip heroics by toff-ish officer types to refocus on the ‘real’ lives of ordinary soldiers and war workers. This shift of emphasis can be seen in such films as Nine Men (1943), San Demetrio, London (1943) and Millions Like Us (1943) dealing with, respectively, an isolated infantry platoon in North Africa, merchant seamen in the Battle of the Atlantic, and factory workers in Britain’s industrial heartland.
Against the tide

Swimming determinedly against this powerful ‘documentary’ tide was the director-writer team of Michael Powell, a deeply conservative Englishman, and Emeric Pressburger, a Hungarian émigré. The idea for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp sprang from a scene that they had excised from one of their earlier films, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1941), in which the middle-aged rear gunner of a bomber crew reminds a younger airman that he too was hot-headed and idealistic in his youth.

This deleted scene was combined with the eponymous character of ‘Colonel Blimp’, created by the left-wing cartoonist David Low for the London Evening Standard. Low’s Blimp was a portly relic of Britain’s colonial past, bald-headed and blustering at the iniquities of the modern world from the steamy sanctuary of the Turkish bath in the Royal Bathers’ Club.

Powell and Pressburger had originally cast Laurence Olivier in the part of Candy. The actor had wanted to play Blimp as a ‘slashing, cruel and merciless’ figure, a characterisation that would have unbalanced the film.

However, the War Ministry refused to release Olivier from service in the Fleet Air Arm. Pressburger’s screenplay sent entirely the wrong message, it said, focusing ‘attention on an imaginary type of army officer which has become the object of ridicule’, and ignoring the ‘thug element in our German foe’. It warned that the film might encourage defeatism.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill – many of whose own ideas were decidedly Blimpish – became involved in the row. In September 1942, he sent a memo to his minister of information Brendan Bracken asking if the production could be halted: ‘I am not prepared to allow propaganda detrimental to the morale of the army. Who are the people behind it?’

Also see the MovieNite entry on Peeping Tom (1960).