Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 01/12/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, January 12, 2020

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1943)

Anton Walbrook, Roger Livesey, and Deborah Kerr in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Cast: Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrook, Deborah Kerr, James McKechnie, Roland Culver, Ursula Jeans, Valentine Dyall. Screenplay: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger. Cinematography: Georges Périnal. Production design: Alfred Junge. Film editing: John Seabourne Sr. Music: Allan Gray.

This time around, I had to ask myself: Why does Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943) feel timeless when The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a film from the same year, seems so dated? Is this just the American in me, forced to dredge up knowledge of British history that might be more ingrained in a Brit? (Though I really doubt that most Brits today are familiar with David Low's political cartoons from the 1930s and '40s that featured Colonel Blimp, a corpulent old walrus of a Tory, who satirized British complacency and jingoism.) Or is it that the Powell-Pressburger film is more detailed and searching, more engaged with what it means for a country to go to war, than the Warner Bros. romance, which is "still the same old story," cast in a wartime mode, so that we respond more immediately and viscerally to it? This is a handsome movie, with beautiful Technicolor and some engaging performances, but it takes work to appreciate its story, whereas you can just let Casablanca wash over you.