MovieChat Forums > The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1944) Discussion > War Crimes Denial Movie?

War Crimes Denial Movie?

posted 18 years ago by j-b-imdb
39 replies | jump to latest

First of all, a big hello to imdb and to film fans, especially Powell & Pressburger fans. I've recently bought a 9 DVD box set having seen 'A matter of life and death' which is a great film, and tonight watched this one.

Depicting politics in film can be a very touchy and controversial area, so I feel a little wary about opening this topic up, and yes the film has to be into historical context. Namely its 1943, Britain is in the middle of the second world war, this is a propaganda flick. However there are some major pieces of historical revisionism going on in this picture which need to be counter-balanced to give a fair account. Revisionism which could well be classed as a denial of British war crimes.

So, what's my beef here:

The major focus of the film is the protagonist's struggle to come to terms with the concept of fighting dirty. As stated in the imdb intro 'Clive Candy V.C. has fought in the Boer War and the first world war. He still believes he can win any fight with honour and maintaining "gentlemanly conduct".'

He serves in the Boer war and the first world war and at the end of film is part of the preparations for the second world war. A constant theme of the film is the Colonel's insistence that the British fight fair, a belief that even sends him to Germany to defend the Britain's reputation following the Boer war.

Sorry Colonel, but things just don't add up:

The film sends us back to 1903, a year after the end of the 2nd Boer war. Blimp says 'nothing dirty going on in Africa' - so you didn't know about Britain's concentration camps?

See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War#The_concentration_camps

Later we join Blimp in the first world war, he doesn't know about the torture going on (fair enough). But he does rant on about the Germans using chemical weapons and says that the Brits didn't, a statement made in 1918.

Wrong again:

See this information from J Paxman and T Harris, 2002, A higher form of killing – the secret history of chemical and biological warfare, London, Arrow Books

June 1916
Allies use phosgene at the Somme

9 April 1917
Livens projector first used by the British at the Battle of Arras. The projector allowed a 30lb drum of gas to be exploded in lethal concentrations over the enemy, allowing for greater precision.

Ok so it can be argued 'Hey Blimpy didn't know anything about all this bad stuff, even if he was a general.' But my feeling is, the government aren't going to want any dirty washing about past war crimes to be aired in the middle of the most important war since the Napoleonic conflict, and maybe this is the source of Blimp's ignorance.

Aside from trying to correct this historical imbalance, I must say that I enjoyed the film and that it had some real classy touches in it. It can be read that actually Powell and Pressburger have produced a film which on the surface portrays Blimp as lovable but in actuality is cruelly mocking. What fighting does he actually do? The Boer war was a cake walk for the British and in the first world war he doesn't fight, he just drives around looking for some food and a train. He's the classic 'tin soldier man' - a general who never really did anything. Oh I forgot, he hid inside a fort for 7 months and got a VC before we join him in 1903.

Anyhow I hope this pushes a little more information out into the world, and helps to correct another example of censorship in the cinema.

Regards

Another great link for dirty tricks by the Brits:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1640957,00.html

'Marquess of Queensbury rules old chap'

- Oh I am English, and having studied History at GCSE (for 14-16 year olds) level can assure you, that this didn't come up in the curriculum back in 1993. In fact no British war crimes did.

Postscript
Oh here's another quote for American readers from 'A higher form of killing', I'm sure you may well know about it but its so wild, I thought I'd repeat it:

1950
Between 20 and 26 September a spray contaminated with two supposedly harmless bacteria was released in the port of San Francisco by two US Navy minesweepers to test the effectiveness of a chemical attack in the harbour. From the six mock attacks an estimated 117 square miles of the area was contaminated, in other words, every one of the 800,000 inhabitants. These tests were conducted in total secrecy.

Go check the book out if you want to verify this, its really good. Err I'm not a salesperson by the way, and I'm not getting any commission on sales.

[–] ethereal_tb 15 years ago

I think that it is Candy's view that they fought fare in the Boer War. It's one of the things that Candy is blind to. He's a sweet man, but definitely only sees what he wants to see (another major theme of the film.) I've always thought it was one of the attempts at irony by P&P that were going after.

"You may very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment."

[–] sky-115 15 years ago

The major propaganda thrust in this film seemed to me to be that the British must change their principles of fair play, fighting with honour, etc, and fight dirty, like their opponents. It seemed to be preparing the way for the terrible fire-bombing of civilians in German cities (sure, the Germans did it first, but nothing on the scale of Air Chief Marshall Bomber Harris).

I was watching a TV doco on Japan the other evening, which revealed that about 70 Japanese cities had been devasted by U.S. fire-bombing, to the extent of losing at least 80% of all their buildings. Many hundreds of thousands of civilians bore the brunt of this bombing.

[–] Steve Crook 15 years ago

As Theo says, sometime you have to be prepared to fight dirty.

Clive: I heard all that in the last war! They fought foul then - and who won it?
Theo: I don't think you won it. 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 the 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!
[tenderly]
Theo: 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 a human brain - Nazism. And if you lose, there won't be a return match next year... perhaps not even for a hundred years.

Steve

[–] Hancock_the_Superb 14 years ago

I think you're missing the point. The movie seems to know about Allied atrocities, but Mr. Candy, with his out-of-touch view of British morality and chivalrous warfare, refuses to acknowledge them. The scene where he orders the German POWs not to be mistreated, only to have the South African officer threaten them as soon as the General leaves, seems an obvious indicator of this. This is the very sort of thing that pissed off Winston Churchill so much: it's playing Candy's dubious claims of British moral superiority for laughs.

"Earth first! Make Mars our bitch!"

[–] Marmadukebagelhole 14 years ago

I think you've missed the whole point, of this movie.

You are correct that this is a propaganda film and as such it is unlikely that it would lay bare the realities of Britains conduct during wars, historically.

The film does strongly suggest , i feel, that Blimp (and by implication, Britain) is very naive about his own values of honour and right-mindedness are upheld universally by his country and fellow countrymen.

The message of this film was that there should be no illusions about where Britain found itself at that stage in history and that it must be prepared to drop any attempt to adopt the moral high ground regarding it's methods of victory in the battle against facism and be prepared to do so unashamadely.

It would be fair to say thought that in recent times. Looking back on itself some people in britain have found it difficult to see it that way.

Len Petersen - "It could be dirt. Something in the lens"
Chief Brody - "Lens my ass!"

[–] DD-931 14 years ago

Claiming the Rape of Nanking is comparable to the dropping of the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki shows an astonishing ignorance of the Pacific War and Imperial Japan's prosecution of it. I'd love to hear you make such a claim to a group of Chinese. Boy, would you get straightened out in a hurry!

Do you even know what the Bushido Code is? Or how many Chinese were murdered by the Japanese from 1931 to 1945 (very probably far more than the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust)? Do you even know what kamikazes were? Or how surrender was considered by the Imperial Japanese as beneath contempt, meaning Allied POWs were to be treated like animals, and also meaning any JAPANESE who surrendered had dishonored themselves so thoroughly that suicide was considered the only reasonable response?

Japan had lost the war by late 1944. Yet they continued to fight the war in places like the Phillipines, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and Burma with insane and fanatical ferocity. The popular slogan of the time, according to Japanese Ensign Mitsuru Yoshida, was "one hundred million deaths rather than surrender". It was clear the Japanese would NOT surrender unless presented with overwhelming evidence that such resistance was pointless. That evidence was the A-bomb. But even AFTER Hiroshima and Nagasaki some in the Japanese military wanted to continue to fight. There was an attempted coup by Japanese officers trying to keep the Emperor from announcing the surrender. On August 13, 1945 Admiral Onishi, creator of the kamikaze units, burst into a meeting of Japan's war rulers to deliriously cry "If we are prepared to sacrifice 20,000,000 Japanese lives in a special attack effort, victory will be ours!" Admiral Ugaki led a kamikaze attack on American units AFTER the Emperor's speech to the nation announcing Japan's surrender.*

Anyone who thinks the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "war crimes" is an immature child.

* "Sea of Thunder" by Evan Thomas and "Flyboys" by James Bradley are just two sources among many for these facts. And before you make some idiotic claim about these books being American "white-washing" of history, you might want to actually read the books.

[–] 14 years ago

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[–] marktayloruk 11 years ago

That he wasn't shown fighting doesn't mean that he didn't.VCs are not issued with the rations. He stood for a world whose end might have been inevitable but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

[–] Trax-3 10 years ago

Candy goes after Kaunitz not because of the concentration camp stories (implying that these are true) but because of the ridiculous claim that: "the British shot 250 women and children to avoid feeding them".

As for the gas, the Germans were the first willing to use it, that the Allies answered in kind can hardly be blamed on them.

[–] liscarkat (16759) a year ago

The film is such a disappointment. If only the OP had been there to help Powell and Pressburger "to correct the historical imbalance". The people of the past could have used correction by more awakened 21st century educators.