Saturday Night at the Movies: Knowing What Time It Is

A Timely Classic

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had about enough of comic adaptations on the silver screen. Avengers 46, Spiderman 23 – haven’t we suffered enough? Well, I’m afraid you’re out of luck, for I’ve got another one for you tonight. I’d apologize, except it may be the best movie you see this year.

I mentioned last week that Brief Encounter is considered by many the greatest British film. I am not among them, so I thought I would share with you my nomination: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Though not as well known as many other fantastic British movies, it certainly ought to be. It is a beautiful, funny, touching, and action-filled meditation on what it means to grow old and what it’s like when the “progress” of the world leaves your values behind.

Picture the most two-dimensional cartoon military figure you can imagine, along the lines of a character from the Beetle Bailey newspaper comics from back in the day, except even more outlandish, a figure of fun, used as a cultural byword to ridicule fat, pompous, “reactionary” old soldiers. Now imagine making a movie about this soldier and turning it into one of the most heartbreaking, sympathetic portrayals ever filmed. Garfield as envisioned by Kurosawa. Believe it or not, that is what the great British filmmaking duo of Powell and Pressburger did with Colonel Blimp, who at the time was a well-known caricature of an out-of-touch army man. Winston Churchill even tried to ban the movie from being made, because, relying only on the reputation of the comic instead of the finished cinematic product, he thought it was going to be used to mock the military and subvert the war effort.  

Trust me, it does anything but. Nor is it a celebration of the military. It’s all far more complicated than that, a tale of patriotism, honor, friendship, and love.

I do not want to cheapen the movie with a modern political tie-in, yet there is one theme that resonates especially loudly. Behold a German refugee trying to convince his civilized British friend, a veteran of the Great War, that the nature of the enemy has fundamentally changed:

Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff: The enemy is different, so you have to be different, too.

Clive Candy: Are you mad? I know what war is!

Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff: I don't agree.

Clive Candy: You...!

Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff: I read your broadcast up to the point where you describe the collapse of France. You commented on Nazi methods--foul fighting, bombing refugees, machine-gunning hospitals, lifeboats, lightships, bailed-out pilots--by saying that you despised them, that you would be ashamed to fight on their side and that you would sooner accept defeat than victory if it could only be won by those methods.

Clive Candy: So I would!

Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff: Clive! If you let yourself be defeated by them, just because you are too fair to hit back the same way they hit at you, there won't be any methods *but* Nazi methods! If you preach the Rules of the Game while they use every foul and filthy trick against you, they will laugh at you! They'll think you're weak, decadent! I thought so myself in 1919!

When people express the desire for Christian leaders to “know what time it is,” I think this is what they’re getting at. We’re not talking about disagreements over indecent rap lyrics or public school dress codes, we’re talking about people who celebrate cutting children’s breasts off.

Yet before you roll your eyes too hard at the pastor giving the identical sermon his father gave forty years ago, even as the congregation has hollowed out and more than half its children have fallen prey to gender confusion, race consciousness, the sexual revolution, and valium-soaked secularism, do give this unforgettable movie a watch, and remind yourself of the very good reasons why people carry on in their set ways, and the very real sense of loss each of us will one day have to face when we too are asked to get with the times. Don’t be flippant about the old guard, don’t turn them into a caricature: we can treasure the past, acknowledge its passing as a real tragedy, while still understanding the need to adapt to the new battlefields ahead of us.

Don’t just take my word for it on this movie. David Mamet, who is no slouch, says this: “My idea of perfection is Roger Livesey (my favorite actor) in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (my favorite film) about to fight Anton Walbrook (my other favorite actor)." And he didn’t even mention Deborah Kerr!

So, next time your kids ask you to put on a comic book adaptation for movie night, don’t even hesitate, give them a huge smile, and tell them it’s time to meet the Colonel!