Posted on 06/28/2026 7:37:57 AM PDT by Twotone
The collaboration between director Michael Powell and writer/producer Emeric Pressburger began on the eve of World War Two and built up a considerable head of steam making films for and about that war. Some were obvious propaganda (Contraband, 49th Parallel, One of Our Aircraft is Missing) while a couple were far too idiosyncratic to match any workable definition of propaganda (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale). Blimp was so at odds with the British government's idea of what aided the war effort that Churchill himself ordered the military not to assist the filmmakers during its production.
The pair continued to make films about the war when it was over, starting with A Matter of Life and Death (1946), which marked the beginning of their visually lush, highly stylized creative peak that continued with Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). Their last film together (before a rather disappointing late reunion for They're a Weird Mob and The Boy Who Turned Yellow) was another war picture about British special agents and resistance fighters during the German invasion of Crete, Ill Met By Moonlight (1947), which marked the end of Powell and Pressburger's production company, The Archers.
But the oddest film in The Archers' catalogue of war pictures has to be their most conventional entry in the genre, a relatively accurate, visually straightforward picture that seems at great pains not to distinguish itself from other postwar British war films – like The Cruel Sea, The Dam Busters, Dunkirk, Reach for the Sky, Above Us the Waves, Raiders in the Sky, The Colditz Story or Sink the Bismarck!.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
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Pursuit of the Graf Spee(1953)
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is a good movie and well worth watching, imo.
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