Winston
Churchill hated The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and tried
to have it banned when it was released in 1943. But Martin Scorsese, a
champion of directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, considers
it a masterpiece.
It's
a film about desires repressed in favour of worthless and unsatisfying
ideals. And it's a film about how England dreamt of itself as a nation
and how this dream disguised inadequacy and brutality in the clothes
of
honour.
A L Kennedy, writing as a Scot, is fascinated by the nationalism which
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp explores. She finds human worth
in the film and the pathos of stifled emotions and unfulfilled lives.
'If he is unaware of his passions,' she writes of Clive Dandy, the film's
central figure, 'this is because his pains have become habitual, a part
of personality, and because he was never taught a language that could
speak of emotions like pain.'
A L Kennedy was named one of the best young British novelists in 1993.
Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains won the
Saltire Award and John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Looking
for the Possible Dance the Somerset Maugham Prize; an So
I Am Glad the Encore Prize. Her first screenplay has been filmed as
Stella Does Tricks.
