War Starts at Midnight: The Tragic, Immovable British Character of Colonel Blimp

He was a comic strip character.

Created by cartoonist David Low, Colonel Blimp appeared in the London Evening Standard from 1934 as a satire of elite foppish military brass -the "donkey leading the lions" concept that had taken root with the First World War. An antiquated, pigheaded military commander offering little in terms of sound military strategy or intelligence, and only arrogant jingoistic nonsense. A ludicrous relic of an empire in decline and perhaps a perfect symbol of Britishness as it was stereotyped around the world.

And as happens with every popular intellectual property, in 1943 he got his own movie. Though The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp didn't begin as an adaptation of the character, its themes just happened to line up perfectly with what Colonel Blimp represented -though not as a caricature ...as a man. Inspired by the idea of an elderly soldier failing to relate to a young one, the great British filmmakers of that era Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger turned a silly cartoon mockery of the British military class into a human figure of intense beliefs and principles -stubborn and buffoonish to be sure, but in a poignant, even tragic sense. In so doing they made Colonel Blimp, in the form of a man gradually left behind by the pace of time, an even greater symbol of a Britain at a crossroads between the old world and the new.

We see the span of forty years illustrated in the movie, from the post-Victorian pinnacle of the imperial era to the chaos of the Second World War. Over that time everything changes, except for Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey), raised and conditioned in the stringent national attitude of the late nineteenth century: Britain as the hegemonic model for a world that runs on a universally adhered to order of honour and discipline. It is not merely his belief, but the crux of his very existence. Britain’s geopolitical power is fixed. Decorum trumps all. Adversaries in battle must “follow the rules”. And War Starts at Midnight.

This is his outraged rebuttal when he is ambushed in a Turkish Bath by the young contingent of Home Front soldiers subverting his war exercise by attacking the officers hours early. They are not following the agreed upon rules! But as the brash young leader explains, the Nazis won’t follow the rules so why should they; and that as soldiers fighting this unpredictable war they must be prepared for anything. It is a logic that doesn’t make sense to Clive and that frustrates him as he begins to belittle the young punk with his history of service. “In 1983, I will be able to say that forty years ago I was a fellow of enterprise”, the young man scoffs before a fight ensues.

But forty years ago, Clive was indeed himself a fellow of enterprise -at least as far as acting on his convictions was concerned. Though these convictions were that of an acolyte -stemming from his good indoctrinated mindset. While on leave from the Boer War, upon learning of anti-British propaganda being circulated in Berlin he recklessly goes to Germany against the orders of his superiors to fight the spreader of these "malicious lies" (of course, much more truthful assertions of British military conduct than the British would like to admit). He was a jingoist at a young age and an ignorant one too -as demonstrated by his incorrect reference to Livingstone (a key figure in that era's colonialist mythmaking) while trying to charm the lady whose letter brought him to Germany.

It would not be the last mistake he’d make, nor the last that he would merely shrug off and avoid accountability for. Immediately after in fact, he caused a minor diplomatic incident -insulting the German army and thus forcing himself for his country’s political reputation into a duel with a German adversary. He can take it in stride though -it is in the “honourable” way of the world that he is so used to. This era in his life, and in the movie, feels like a totally different world. It may be only a few decades removed from modernity as Powell and Pressburger knew it -but they do everything they can to emphasize how sharply different things were. Those colourful soldiering uniforms, essentially unchanged since the eighteenth century, the formality of conflict with the rigidly rule-based fencing that onlookers observe with class, the reference to Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories as contemporary (though in reality, both he and that character arrived much later than we like to imagine). And of course it is a possibility that, though geopolitical rivals, a respect and even friendship can be struck between an Englishman and a German.

Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, played by the exquisite Anton Walbrook, is initially a man of that same breed as Clive -and it is what allows them to become fast friends. But as a German he is not beholden to such a rigid view of the world -his state had barely existed in its independent form for his lifetime, perhaps it accounts for his better acceptance of shifting tides as he ages in a world that grows ever more chaotic. But there is a romance to his relationship with Clive, apart from the homosexual reading one can infer into their bond. We meet them each as young men of shared values and experiences, regardless of their separation by nationality. And their friendship is a true and wholesome one. Even a woman can’t get between them -Edith, the first of several women in Clive’s life with the beautiful face of Deborah Kerr- and the very woman who had summoned Clive to Germany, marries Theo; and in spite of his late-understood love for her, Clive bears Theo no ill will. But Clive mistakenly believes the rock of that friendship can circumvent anything.

Both he and Theo enter the First World War as essentially the same people who met in a duel. And they are both tested by the war, but only one of them is forced to change. There is a moment we clearly see when it could have been for Clive. He maintains his rigorous discipline as a commander where we first see him out of step with a succeeding generation as he hears about how the Germans came by some vital British information. “Are you suggesting our fellows talked?” he asks his subordinate inexplicably. “The Germans know how to make them talk”, the batman responds. Clive is slipping in relevance, doesn’t know the new code words, and his own service privately is disrespected. Compared to what they’re fighting now, young soldiers liken the wars in Somalia and South Africa to “summer maneovuers”. And Clive remains steadfast in his belief in just, honourable fighting, is gullible towards Hindenburg’s intentions, and states confidently that nobody fights foul unless they are desperate -and desperation for either the British or the Germans won’t do.

But then the Allies win, and we see how close Clive came to his worldview shifting. As he stands in No Man’s Land with Murdoch (John Laurie) -the Sancho Panza to his foppish Don Quixote- momentously declaring the end of the war (and getting the time wrong), he expounds on it’s conclusion as an affirmation of his ideals that the British won:  “It means that right is might after all -the Germans have shelled hospitals, bombed open towns, sunk neutral ships, used poisoned gas, and WE won! Clean fighting, honest soldiering have won.” But Murdoch knows as well as we do that the clean, honest soldiering was a fiction of Clive’s imagination and sheltered idealism. The First World War was the most brutal to that time, and no side was really innocent. But Clive ends that war remaining the greatest student of British propaganda.

Theo on the losing side, is not so gun-ho. For him, the Great War is a wake-up call to the realities of changing geopolitical tensions, especially in the knowledge of what chaos his country is on the precipice of. But Clive is blind to it, and shows that blindness upon meeting Theo, now a prisoner of war. It’s astonishing how he fails to read the situation, approaching his old friend like nothing has changed, with a smile and a charming welcome -and Theo rightly rebuffs him. This relationship can be seen (and was likely consciously intended by Powell) as a metaphor for Britain and Germany themselves; perhaps some of the British politicians and figures of power in 1943 identified this -hence the efforts to censure it. Because Britain does not come out looking great. Once Theo is coaxed into dinner with Clive and other British generals, given special treatment as a friend that his compatriots do not receive, they show themselves as deeply out of touch as Clive, unable to comprehend the situation for Germany and its people, and what misery it is primed to go through. “We’ll soon have Germany on her feet again” says Clive the delusional, romantically pining for a restoration of that old world diplomacy, incapable of envisioning a darker future for it. He is incapable of envisioning the future at all. But Theo can see it, even as he too longs for a world that cannot return, the behaviour of these men seems to emphasize that for him.

And it is telling that it is Theo who is next checked in on after another time-jump -a couple incidents in Clive’s life passing by in mere newspaper headlines. Anton Walbrook is the movie’s best actor, and it is in this section of the film that he gives his most exquisite performance. He is a man humbled and damaged by the rise of fascism, imploring the British authorities for grace as he mourns his homeland, his late wife, and his children -alive but in his words, "good Nazis, as far as any Nazis can be called good." He bears little similarity to the man from forty years ago. Clive however is still that man -in spite of his retirement and his own wife's passing- and is again Theo's stringent ally, loyally vouching for him to the scepticism of his peers. But Theo, much as he bears affection for Clive, cannot return that favour.

As a distinguished veteran soon restored to active duty, Clive is arranged to speak following Dunkirk on the BBC about the state of the war, but he is in effect "cancelled" by the content of his speech in which he planned to express his stern opinions on how the war is being fought; going so far as to say he would sooner accept defeat than victory if it could only come from what he considered "uncivilized" ways to fight a war. For Theo, reading the speech, it ignites a fire that has long been simmering, a need to confront his friend directly. Summoning up his first-hand knowledge of the power of the Nazi regime, he counters, "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.” Clive believes he knows better, as he invokes the First World War as he interpreted it: vindicated by that victory. Theo responds in kind with a monologue addressing Britain herself as much as Clive.

“We lost it, but you lost something too. You forgot to learn the moral. Because victory was yours you failed to learn your lesson twenty years ago and now you have to pay the school fees again. Some of you will learn quicker than others, some of you will never learn it because you’ve been educated to be a gentleman and a sportsman in peace and in war. But Clive, dear old Clive, this is not a gentleman’s war. This time you’re fighting for your very existence against the most devilish idea ever created by the human brain: Nazism. And if you lose, there won’t be a return match next year, perhaps not even for a hundred years.”

Emeric Pressburger, who cited this film as his favourite of the Archers' catalogue and who wrote this speech, fled to the U.K. like Theo to escape the Nazis. Walbrook, a fellow Austrian and a Jewish homosexual, came for similar reasons. They understood the threat of the Nazis in a way their British friends did not, and it all comes out in the scripting and performance of this scene. And indeed it is a far better work of righteous British propaganda as a result, if someone like Churchill could only get past the ire of such a statement being directed at a British man.

Yet Powell and Pressburger do not despise Clive Wynne-Candy, nor is the audience meant to. Because unlike his cartoon counterpart, he is not mere jingoist caricature, but a human being. The extravagant elements are there, but so is the inference to where they come from. There is a sadness, mostly bottled up, that follows Clive through his life. From the loss of one love to his friend to the loss of another to premature death. Both Edith and his eventual wife Barbara are played by Kerr, stunningly just twenty-one years old -his resilience to change even manifesting in his romances. He loved Edith, but she was an intelligent noblewoman and early feminist; her doppelgänger Barbara, a nurse he meets at the end of the First World War, shares most of his virtues as well as his obtuseness over the changing character of the Germans. Even after her death the face returns in Clive's life in Johnny, a spunky young woman who is his driver. Whether their identical looks is entirely real, or just the fantasy projection of an old romantic, each of the three stands in for their respective generations, and each in their way relates to Clive with some sympathy for him being a man of his.

Johnny is the audience surrogate for finding understanding and humanity in Clive, when so much of his attitude and worldview are out of date. Though she hasn’t seen the decades of his life, she can comprehend where he comes from. To the young soldiers who take the polar opposite and equally wrong approach that “in war, anything goes”, Clive is the bumbling antiquated symbol of the old guard. To Johnny he is a weary old man. A man who the world has passed by, and who perhaps knows this. And in his resistance to confronting that has ensconced himself in the ways of the world that he knows: turn-of-the-century English tradition and military ideals -itself a fiction of his state’s concoction.

Seeing the scope of his history, through all the stubbornness and ignorance, we too can see Clive as a man of pathos -not admirable but still. Here is a man whose indoctrination was so severe and who is so dependent on it, that it has defined his life -refusing to let him grow and forcing him to take only stock in nostalgia and his own image of how the world ought to be. It is an image that includes his love -either Edith or Barbara- and his dearest friend Theo, and is set on a principle of right, regardless of what all has to be ignored to uphold it. I think that’s something everyone can identify with. Though perhaps not to the extreme ends of Clive Wynne-Candy, we all are left behind by time eventually, as new generations, new orders replace us. There will come a time gradually for all of us when war does not start at midnight anymore.

Clive eventually comes to know this. He doesn’t press charges on the lad who led the raid -in fond remembrance of his younger impetuous self. He sees off the new crop of soldiers  going to war and salutes them, now at peace with the changed world. And yet he is not at peace yet with his place in it. Years earlier he had promised his late wife he would stay just as he is till the floods come to their home and it is a lake. “Now here is the lake,” he observes. “And I still haven’t changed.” He is proud.

And thus it is a sadness rather than a humour that Colonel Blimp is proud not to have changed; that he’s found a way to admire his regress. At the same time, the Archers invite you to consider the sadness of his being lost to time more profoundly. They illustrate how difficult growing old and contending with a changing world is, what it means. Maybe it’s right that he doesn’t change, standing alone as a symbol for that old world idealism. Yet alternatively maybe he should just cast it aside. Both Stephen Fry and Anthony Lane of the New Yorker have seen the film as a direct comment on Britain and British tradition, with the latter characterizing it as an examination on “the incurable condition of being English.” Powell and Pressburger certainly had critiques for their country -and expressed them here in what ways were possible during the propagandic war years. But I think they loved their country too, and saw something virtuous, maybe even noble, in a figure like Clive -or hell, the cartoon that was Colonel Blimp. Some thought the character, who does share a similar military history, was a stand-in for Churchill himself -portraying him thus as an archaic buffoon. And that’s certainly valid, but then it does show sympathy towards him whilst still confronting his ideology. The filmmakers take the position of Theo towards Clive as stand-in for Churchill or Britain itself, and want the audience to as well. It’s okay to love him, and it’s because of that love he needs to know the necessity of adapting, the doom of only clinging on to the past.

“It is a different knowledge they need Clive; the enemy’s different so you have to be different too.” The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp remains searingly relevant for Britain, even as a film made during the war with only what foresight they could have then. The country is in a bad state now as it was in 1943, and holding onto traditions, old values and the old ways of doing things won’t cut it anymore. The politicians of both major parties are learning that dramatically. It is important that there remain Theos to speak sense to the Clives, both of the individual and national ideological variety, whether they’re poised to listen to it or not. Because ultimately what the film presents is a man alone in his principles and habits and unwavering faith in a long-dead order. He will be left behind. War starts well before or well after midnight; it suits no one to be the old fool thinking otherwise.

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