Colonel Blimp

Colonel Blimp is a film of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger left in 1943. Casting including/understanding for the first roles Roger Livesey (Colonel Wynne-Candy), Anton Waldbroock (Théo Kreitschmar-Schuldorff) and Deborah Kerr then at the beginning of its career (three different feminine roles).

Synopsis

August 1st

Prolog

The film starts in 1942. Colonel Wynne-Candy, the organizer of the " home guard" , a stimulation exercise of the defense of London sets up. The war is judicious to start at midnight, but the English soldiers charged to play German decide to open the hostilities earlier, fascinating pretext owing to the fact that the war does not have a rule - or that at least German does not respect them. In spite of an attempt of the driver of the colonel, Angela, it to warn, Wynne-Candy is made prisoner with the Turkish baths. It lets burst its fury on the English soldiers and proposes that such an insubordination would not have been tolerated one minute forty years before. It is on these " forty years ago" that the prolog is completed while the camera makes a close-up on the principal basin of the Turkish bath…

Act I

… basin from where one sees arising a forty years younger Wynne-Candy. We are in 1902 and Wynne is a young English officer who received the " Victoria cross" for its important facts and gestures at the time of the war of Boers. Wynne is shown then quite as impertinent as the English soldiers of the beginning towards its superiors. It then receives, via a friend, the letter of a called Edith Hunter, allemande installed in Berlin, alarmed by the anti-English propaganda which prevails in Germany concerning the war of Boers. Propaganda which is then orchestrated by one of the prisoners that Wynne had made at the time of the war of Boers: Kaunitz. Against the opinion of its superiors, Wynne leaves for Berlin, and meets Miss Hunter in a coffee which Kaunitz attends. To draw the attention of this last towards him, Wynne asks for the orchestra coffee of play an extract of the opera of Ambroise Thomas, " Mignon". Extract whose Kaunitz became allergic after having heard it in loop during its imprisonment in South Africa.

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