The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) — watch online on iFILM this British epic by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The film follows British officer Clive Candy across forty years, from a dashing young hero of the Boer War to the 1943 general his junior officers privately consider a dinosaur — well-meaning, principled, and completely out of step with a war that has no rules.

Roger Livesey plays Candy with genuine warmth, never as a buffoon. Across both World Wars he maintains an unlikely friendship with a German officer, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, played by Anton Walbrook in what might be the film's finest performance. Deborah Kerr appears in three different roles — three women from three chapters of Candy's life — and each time something slips just out of his reach. Powell and Pressburger treat their hero's old-fashioned honour not as a flaw to mock but as something genuinely worth mourning.

Churchill tried to block its release, worrying it softened the enemy. He was wrong in every sense. Stream The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) online on iFILM.