War Pictures

Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939-1945

Kent Puckett

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780823276509, 9780823275748
• eBook ISBN: 9780823276516
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

In this original and engaging work, author Kent Puckett looks at how British filmmakers imagined, saw, and sought to represent its war during wartime through film. The Second World War posed unique representational challenges to Britain's filmmakers. Because of its logistical enormity, the unprecedented scope of its destruction, its conceptual status as total, and the way it affected everyday life through aerial bombing, blackouts, rationing, and the demands of total mobilization, World War II created new, critical opportunities for cinematic representation.Beginning with a close and critical analysis of Britain's cultural scene, War Pictures examines where the historiography of war, the philosophy of violence, and aesthetics come together. Focusing on three films made in Britain during the second half of the Second World War—Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Lawrence Olivier's Henry V (1944), and David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945)—Puckett treats these movies as objects of considerable historical interest but also as works that exploit the full resources of cinematic technique to engage with the idea, experience, and political complexity of war. By examining how cinema functioned as propaganda, criticism, and a form of self-analysis, War Pictures reveals how British filmmakers, writers, critics, and politicians understood the nature and consequence of total war as it related to ideas about freedom and security, national character, and the daunting persistence of human violence. While Powell and Pressburger, Olivier, and Lean developed deeply self-conscious wartime films, their specific and strategic use of cinematic eccentricity was an aesthetic response to broader contradictions that characterized the homefront in Britain between 1939 and 1945. This stylistic eccentricity shaped British thinking about war, violence, and commitment as well as both an answer to and an expression of a more general violence.Although War Pictures focuses on a particularly intense moment in time, Puckett uses that particularity to make a larger argument about the pressure that war puts on aesthetic representation, past and present. Through cinema, Britain grappled with the paradoxical notion that, in order to preserve its character, it had not only to fight and to win but also to abandon exactly those old decencies, those "sporting-club rules, " that it sought also to protect.

1

“But what is it about?”

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

The cheat or the spoil-sport shatters civilization itself.

—Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1938)

He did not cease to complain . . . that the war was being carried on contrary to all the rules—as if there were any rules for killing people.

—Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869)

When The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp appeared in 1943, it looked to many like a good movie that made for bad propaganda; if it was beautiful, moving, often funny, it seemed also too willful, too complicated, too weird, too eccentric to help its audiences know what to think and feel about the war. The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that its “message may be obscure, but its emotional appeal is high.”1 The Tribune claimed that, although the film was “excellent entertainment . . . no-one decided exactly what they wanted to say with it.”2 The Manchester Guardian said that it “contradicts itself, mixes its motives, and never seems quite to settle down.”3 The Daily Mail wrote that “to depict British officers as stupid, complacent, self-satisfied, and ridiculous may be legitimate comedy, but it is disastrously bad propaganda in the time of war.”4 These mostly mixed responses to the film’s apparently mixed motives are more or less representative. Molly Haskell writes: “When it opened, audiences were enthusiastic about the performances but disconcerted by the ambivalence toward war.”5 To be fair, the film did ask a lot from its first, war-weary viewers: instead of offering comfort or selling the war, it embraced formal complexity almost for its own sake. Its protagonist, a benighted but lovable English gentleman, stands both as a manifestly good man and as an implicit rebuke to Britain’s backward-looking military establishment; the film takes care not only to feature a “good German” but also to make that German its most eloquent and, indeed, its most recognizably “English” spokesman; and the film overlays its very modern story of Britain’s twentieth-century wars with a quasi-mystical tale of romantic eternal recurrence: disappointed in love, Clive Candy—the “Blimp” of the film’s title—is haunted across decades by the appearance and reappearance of his feminine ideal, a figure played in each case by the same actor, Deborah Kerr. As opposed to sending a clear message about war, the film embraced, says Ian Christie, an “often skittish, playfully allegorical” tone that seemed self-consciously to distance it from other, more obviously instrumental war movies, films that were “championed for their realistic qualities, which, in the terms of the dominant critical discourse of the time, meant sober, unsensational narratives with believable characterizations and a prevailing sense of stoicism and emotional restraint.”6 Oddly romantic, gently surreal, often sweetly funny, the film appears to distance itself from the expected and perhaps necessary pragmatism of wartime propaganda. In a line I have already quoted, C. A. Lejeune, film critic for The Observer, summed up the film’s attractive and playful incoherence in a word: “It is a handsome piece. It is frequently a moving piece. But what is it about?”7

Aesthetic complexity is one thing; aesthetic complexity in a time of war is quite another, a fact that became apparent as several members of government weighed in against the idea, the production, and at last the international distribution of Colonel Blimp. In a 1942 memo to Churchill, Sir James Grigg, secretary of state for war, wrote, “I think it of the utmost importance to get [Colonel Blimp] stopped.”8 A Ministry of Information report on an early draft of the film’s script anticipated the critics’ confusion, arguing that its complexity was not only ineffective propaganda but also a possibly active hindrance to the war effort: “The over-complication of ideas is . . . dangerous.”9 Churchill himself became involved and wrote to Minister of Information Brendan Bracken, asking him: “[P]ropose to me the measures necessary to stop this foolish production before it gets any further. I am not prepared to allow propaganda detrimental to the morale of the Army.”10 Although rightly unwilling to suppress the film (to do so “would have been a politically insensitive move in a democracy at war”), Bracken and the Ministry of Information did turn down Powell and Pressburger’s request that Laurence Olivier be given leave from the Navy’s Fleet Air Arm to play Candy; did deny them access to locations, vehicles, uniforms, and so on; and, in time, did interfere with the film’s international distribution. Colonel Blimp did not play in the United States until later and, even then, it appeared in bowdlerized versions: by the 1950s it was circulating as The Loves and Adventures of Colonel Blimp; its all-important flashback structure had been stripped away; it had been cut from 163 to some 90 minutes; and it was being marketed not as a war film but rather as a kind of “mad, mad, mad, mad” madcap romp: “The lusty lifetime of a gentleman who was sometimes quite a rogue! Dueling—hunting big game—pretty girls—life’s a grand adventure with Colonel Blimp!”11

If the sense that the film was not good propaganda feels right enough (the film, we might want to agree, is too good to be good propaganda), Powell and Pressburger nonetheless responded to government reservations with alacrity, making a surprising case for the film’s value as propaganda. Not at all complicated, they said, Colonel Blimp was an explicit argument not only in support of the war but also about the peculiar nature and necessary demands of total war: “Englishmen are by nature conservative, insular, unsuspicious, believers in good sportsmanship and anxious to believe the best of other people. These attractive virtues, which are, we hope, unchanging, can become absolute vices unless allied to a realistic acceptance of things as they are, in modern Europe and in Total War.”12 Their argument is at once clear and oddly involved: Englishmen must change to stay the same; because the war is a war for national survival, Britain needs to suspend exactly the aspects of its national character that it wants most to preserve; it has to embrace the “all-in” tactics of total war in order to protect values that would consider those tactics as repugnant. This paradox—that one needs to undo Englishness in order to save Englishness—is central to the film’s form and content and is, as we shall see, a concentrated expression of a contradiction immanent to the British experience of World War II, one I have already tried to capture with the phrase, “it takes a fascist to fight a fascist.” In the build-up to the film’s release, the industry periodical Kinematograph Weekly restated Powell and Pressburger’s case even more directly: “The film’s vital theme that we must forget chivalry and sportsmanship to fight the enemy successfully and its dedication to the new aggressive spirit of the Allied Armies is a challenge to those among the democratic peoples who are only just awakening to the meaning of total war.”13 Years later, Powell reiterated this position, remembering the film as an argument about the suspension of the English past in the service of the present crisis, an argument against “British procrastination and British regard for tradition and all the things which we knew and which were losing the war.”14

One can of course see why Grigg, Bracken, and Churchill were unconvinced despite Powell and Pressburger’s several assurances. Colonel Blimp lacks battle scenes; it is ambivalent, to say the least, about the means and ends of each of the three wars it represents (the Boer War, World War I, and World War II); it is often remembered more for its hoary sentiment than for its bellicosity; it both recommends and preemptively mourns the loss of tradition—“all the things which we knew”—as it asks us both to forget and to remember “chivalry and sportsmanship”; it is a profound and moving embodiment of nostalgia for the English past as well as a steely rejection of nostalgia as fundamentally inappropriate to the tactical presentism of total war. Read through the distinctly mixed terms of its first reception, the film emerges as an ideal case of what (after Gestalt psychology, Wittgenstein, and E. H. Gombrich) is sometimes referred to as “multistability,” a quality of some images that, according to W. T. J. Mitchell, “illustrate the co-existence of contrary or simply different readings in a single image.”15 Like the Necker cube, the “Double Cross,” and the “Duck-Rabbit,” The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp forces a viewer to confront the only apparently absurd possibility of a single object that coherently manages and contains ontologically opposed orders of significance: life and death, past and present, the love of tradition and the rejection of tradition. The film thus offers an ideal case for thinking about what makes a film more or less—more and less—about war.16

I want to see the this-and-that multistability of Colonel Blimp as an expression of another related and equally ambivalent wartime phenomenon, the official and unofficial desire to develop an effective, democratic, and layered alternative to Nazi propaganda. Faced with the bad but apparently effective example of Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda, the Ministry of Information struggled early on in the war to balance apparently incommensurate goals: the goal of maintaining a strong relation to democratic values of openness, thoughtfulness, and critique and the goal of producing a coherent and persuasive propaganda apparatus that could compete with the Nazis’ less scrupulous output.17 F. C. Bartlett, the Cambridge psychologist who had been commissioned by the Ministry of Information to address exactly this issue, sought to bring these maybe incompatible goals together in the form of what he called “democratic propaganda,” an open, self-conscious, and yet no less effective form of media persuasion that he opposed to the iron fist of “dictator propaganda”:

It does not go all out to short-circuit reason, as the dictator propaganda does. It recognizes that men act where their affections, sentiments, and emotions are concerned, but that these must and can be led by intelligence without losing their strength. It knows that the stability of a social order does not depend upon everybody’s saying the same things, holding the same opinions, feeling the same feelings, but upon a freely achieved unity which, with many sectional and individual differences, is nevertheless able to maintain an explaining and consistent pattern of life.18

On the one hand, the virtues of Bartlett’s idea are obvious enough; his proposed or rather hoped-for mix of argument, persuasion, and belief fit well with a broader set of cherished and, one might even say, Churchillian values: tolerance, directness, irony, and so on. On the other hand, Bartlett has a difficult time sustaining his good-faith effort both to imagine the wartime state as “a freely achieved unity” (a body both really free and highly organized) and to imagine such a condition as anything other than naive wish fulfillment; what, after all, is the practical difference between a freely achieved unity and unity imposed from beyond, between a spontaneously mobilized democracy and totalitarianism, between freedom as such and the freedom to obey?19 One is reminded here of what Kant identified long ago as a paradox fundamental to enlightenment: “Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, but obey!”20 Years after the war, Jacques Ellul, who had fought with French Resistance, wrote: “[T]here is . . . no ‘democratic’ propaganda. Propaganda made by democracies is ineffective, paralyzed, mediocre.”21

Bartlett’s hopeful and Ellul’s negative assessments of the democratic possibilities of propaganda need both to be seen in relation to the larger fate of state propaganda before, during, and after the war. Mark Wollaeger writes: “By the fort...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. “But what is it about?”
• 2. Pistol’s Two Bodies
• 3. Celia Johnson’s Face
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index