Look Again

To spare any suspense, I ought to point out that this is the finest film ever made. Really. Also, there are spoilers in the following, so beware.

This film was written, directed and produced by British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, in 1943. That is to say, squarely in the middle of the Second World War. And this is a propaganda film – but the type of propaganda film that only the British could produce: the Brit is portrayed as a bit of a fool. The most intelligent character, who plays his conscience and best friend, is a German. No one is actually called Blimp.

Winston Churchill himself asked officials to ensure the film was stopped ‘as a matter of the highest importance.’ It will come as no surprise to British people that he found defeating the Nazis easier than curbing the British sense of fair play, and the film was made.

This film attempts to do something few films do, let alone propaganda films: it challenges your preconceptions.

A little background: the most popular cartoonist in Britain at the time was a man called Low. One of the characters he created was a bloated, walrus-mustached colonel – called ‘Blimp’ – who would appear in a sauna (called Turkish Baths back then), wearing only a towel, and spouting off about how things had gone to rack and ruin since his day, how modern youth had no backbone. I seem to remember that Low was inspired to create him after reading a letter from a retired colonel insisting that former cavalry divisions – who now drove tanks – should still be made to wear spurs.

What this film does early on is present us with a retired colonel – who resembles the cartoon Blimp a great deal – and has a young man of enterprise confront him with a few home truths. We are then transported back in time, to when the colonel was himself a young man of enterprise – 1902. We see the same streets – now empty of cars but full of horses. We hear people speculating on what might happen in the next Sherlock Holmes installment. Our hero goes to see a play called Ulysses – not the ‘scandalous’ book by James Joyce, but a conventional stage play featuring Olympian gods.

He fights a duel with a German officer; the torturous protocols and outdated procedures boggle the mind.

Over the rest of the film we see how the world radically changes over 40 years, and how ‘Blimp’ does not. But now, his unchanging nature is shown in a more positive light: instead, he is seen to be utterly faithful, unbreakably loyal, a man who unquestioningly stands surety for a friend with everything he owns. Someone who falls in love once, and, come what may, can never fall in love with another woman. His wife begs him to never change, ‘not till the floods come’, and he never does.

But of course, he had to change. Britain in 1943 was fighting for its very existence. The Blimps had to go. The triumph of the film is how it turns that truth into a heartbreaking tragedy: there was no more room in the world for certainties, honour, decency or trust.

The makers of this film, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger went on to create many truly brilliant films; and that’s not just my view, Martin Scorsese agrees. David Mamet calls this it his favourite film, and considers the duel scene ‘perfection’. It is emotional, romantic, thought provoking, and has a career defining performance from Roger Livesey at its heart. I have watched it many times, and keep finding new things to love.