The New Pictures

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (General Cinema Finance--United Artists) is one of the most expensive and ambitious films ever made in England. It cost some $1,000,000 and it runs, even as cut for U.S. distribution, two hours and 26 minutes. Its very leisurely pace--almost that of a novel rather than a drama--may mystify the American cinemaddict, but the leisure is put to such good use that the chances are it will charm him instead. For The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is an uncommonly rich and pleasant study in character, both human and national. It brings to the screen the greatest English character since Pickwick: Cartoonist David Low's walrus-whiskered epitome of unenlightened self-interest.

In Low's famed cartoons, Blimp acts out in black & white, by one class and political reflex after another, the whole tragicomic history of a special kind of British stupidity. The screen's version of Blimp, in rosy Technicolor, is not a Low specimen of humanity at all, but one long apologia for the better side of the Low character. Watching on the screen how the old man got that way, you would never suspect that the Colonel and his kind had anything to do with bringing on the Second World War. Even insofar as Blimp is shown to be old-fashioned and shortsighted, this is simply because he is the soul of gentlemanly honor.

But if the movie is incomplete without the gently savage cartoons, by the same token the cartoons are incomplete without the affectionately explanatory movie. Many liberals and leftists are going to feel that Blimp has been whitewashed into a Dear Old Boy--as indeed he has; but David Low himself, who advised on the characterization and makeup, is well satisfied. Says he: "Blimp is a symbol of stupidity and stupid people are not necessarily hateful. In fact, some stupid people are quite nice."

Blimp first appears as a gallant and naive young officer named Clive Candy (Roger Livesey), back from the Boer War with a V.C., who takes it upon himself--very much without diplomatic portfolio--to go to Berlin in order to refute some popular German lies about British mistreatment of Boer prisoners. A cafe quarrel leads to a duel, thanks to which young Candy 1) gets the wound which causes him to raise his Blimpish mustache, 2) makes a lifelong friend of his unwilling opponent (Anton Walbrook), 3) loses, to this Prussian officer, a charming English girl (Deborah Kerr) whom he has shyly begun to love.

As a brigadier he serves quietly and creditably through the First World War--and catches sight of a nurse (Deborah Kerr again) who is the spit & image of the young woman whose loss in Berlin confirmed him in bachelorhood. After the war he marries her. Together, in a British prisoner-of-war camp, they seek out and are coldly rebuffed by Candy's old friend, the Prussian officer. Candy's young wife dies; and the walls of his home, through the years, grow ever more thickly studded with the big-game victims of his soldierly loneliness.

By the time his second great war is upon him, Blimp is the grand old lobster of the cartoon, angry, hurt and bewildered to find his age and his military experience in disesteem. The crowning blow comes when sharp young men of the new Army jump the gun in training maneuvers and capture him, boiling red and boiling mad, in a Turkish bath, hours before the sharo battle was supposed to begin. Reluctant and heartsick, he begins at last to understand the one thing the movie tries to teach Blimp, or to show him inadequate in: the idea that the code that has ruled his life is a suicidal anachronism in a world threatened by global gangsters.

The picture would be no great shakes as a story if at every point, through a dozen means other than those of plot, it did not make itself illuminating, touching, and delightful. The tortuous protocols of preparation for the duel, and the duel itself, between the brave but reluctant contestants, is as pretty a satire on diplomacy and war and national character as the movies have achieved. Candy's relationship with his beloved girls, reticent, boyishly idealistic and far more deeply felt than the eye can see, is a moving exposition of a kind of love the movies rarely pay attention to. The life history of the subtle German and the sanguine Englishman culminates in a beautiful study of two kinds of old age: one seasoned through suffering, the other invincibly innocent. Long as it is, Blimp seems short, for it is done with a constant feeling for lightness and for style, and it is wonderfully well acted.

God Is My Co-Pilot (Warner), an adaptation of Colonel Robert Lee Scott's best-seller (TIME, Aug. 9, 1943), tells the story of the 34-year-old Georgia flyer who, refusing to believe he was too old for combat, became an ace under General Chennault (Raymond Massey), was forced to land in enemy territory after helping to bomb Hong Kong, and survived to teach Army flyers what he had learned during the lean, heroic days of air warfare in China.

The picture might have been better if a priest known as Big Mike (Alan Hale) were not required to argue the validity of its title so often with the doubting colonel (Dennis Morgan), who has faith only in himself. Between these well-meant but not very convincing religious dialogues, however, there is a good deal of swift and explosive air combat, about as exciting as such material can hope to be, after it has been filmed so well and so often. A California-trained, English-speaking Japanese ace named Tokyo Joe (Richard Loo) adds a novel note of hatred by gritting "Yenkk" and other Homeric epithets into his cockpit radio, and meets his death in a long delirious streaking fall over fleabitten mountains, which is perhaps the best shot in the picture. Dennis Morgan, Dane Clark, John Ridgely and (barring some fancy eye-rolling) Raymond Massey are sincere and believable Flying Tigers, and Andrea King is a sincere, believable and charming Mrs. Scott, even when she has to tell her husband, in a singular greater-love-hath-no-woman outburst: "I love you so much that I'm unhappy when you're unhappy, even if deep down in my heart I don't agree with you."

The Affairs of Susan (Paramount) is Joan Fontaine's first fling at comic prettiness and vivacity in modern dress. Though it seems much longer, it lasts only an hour and 50 minutes.

The story: Walter Abel, a little bewildered by his fiancee Susan, assembles her former husband (George Brent) and a couple of other major influences on her career (Don de Fore and Dennis O'Keefe), in order to learn what is in store for him. In three long flashbacks they volubly oblige him, detailing her progress from innocent New England country girl to actress to burlesqued bluestocking to her present daftly sophisticated self.

In the course of the picture Miss Fontaine wears practically everything decency will permit, from pants to armor. Men who wander in by mistake may stay to enjoy the scenery (Miss Fontaine), but they are likely to feel that Paramount has been a trifle overgenerous with everything except what it takes to make an entertaining movie. The Affairs of Susan is one for the women.

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