Reception
The film was heavily attacked on release mainly because of its sympathetic presentation of a German officer, albeit an anti-Nazi one, who is more down-to-earth and realistic than the central British character. Sympathetic German characters had previously appeared in the films of Powell and Pressburger, for example The Spy in Black and 49th Parallel, which were also made during the war.
Although the film is strongly pro-British, it is a satire on the British Army, especially its leadership. It suggests that Britain needs to "fight dirty" in the face of such an evil enemy as Nazi Germany. There is also a certain similarity between Candy and Churchill and some historians have suggested that Churchill may have wanted the production stopped because he had mistaken the film for a parody of himself (he had himself served in the Boer War and the First World War). Churchill's exact reasons remain unclear, but he was acting only on a description of the planned film from his staff, not on a viewing of the film.
Other critics comment:
What is it really about? —C. A. Lejeune, The Observer, 1943 Colonel Blimp is as unmistakably a British product as Yorkshire pudding and, like the latter, it has a delectable savor all its own. —New York Times, March 30, 1945 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp...may be the greatest English film ever made, not least because it looks so closely at the incurable condition of being English. —Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, March 20, 1995 It addresses something I've always been profoundly interested in – what it means to be English ... it is about bigger things than the war. It takes a longer view of history which was an extraordinarily brave thing for someone to do in 1943, at a time when history seemed to have disintegrated into its most helpless, impossible and unforgivable state. —Stephen Fry, interviewed by the Daily Telegraph, 2003The film provoked an extremist pamphlet, The Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp, by "right-wing sociologists E. W. and M. M. Robson", members of the obscure Sidneyan Society:
highly elaborate, flashy, flabby and costly film, the most disgraceful production that has ever emanated from a British film studio.In recent years, particularly after the highly successful re-release of the film in the 1980s, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp has been re-evaluated critically and is today regarded as a masterpiece of British cinema. The film is praised for its dazzling Technicolor cinematography (which, with later films such as The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, would become The Archers' greatest legacy), the performances by the lead actors as well as for transforming, in Roger Ebert's words; "a blustering, pigheaded caricature into one of the most loved of all movie characters".
The film currently has a rating of 91% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Read more about this topic: The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp
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