My favorite filmmakers are my favorite filmmakers because they usually offer something new every time I revisit their work. I find myself never able to choose a permanent favorite film. It might be
"Kagemusha" (1980) this month (I prefer the leaner American release version, I feel embarrassed to say), next month
"Seven Samurai" (1954).
"The Birds" (1963) this month, next month
"North By Northwest" (1959). Usually, I will say that
"Black Narcissus" (1947) or
"Stairway To Heaven" (1946) (aka "A Matter Of Life and Death") are my
Powell/
Pressburger films du mois. However, this
mois, the movie in the #1 Archers spot is certainly
"The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" (1943). "Blimp" is a film made with one foot in WWII-era British propaganda and the other wedged in between Cervantes' "Don Quixote" and Truffaut's
"Jules and Jim" (1962). It spans 40 years of a British soldiers life and covers everything from love to humiliation, honor to stupidity, idealism to self-delusion, Germany to England. And it features Deborah Kerr playing not just one mouth-watering female lead, but three.
The monologue below comes from our pompous hero's best friend, the realist Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, superbly played by Anton Walbrook in a performance which spans 40 years of a character's life.
In this scene, Theo, who has fled Nazi-controlled Germany, opens his tired, broken heart to an English Judge preparing to deny him asylum in England - homeland of his deceased wife, place of his incarceration in a WWI POW camp. The entire monologue takes place in a single shot on Walbrook, seated, leaning on his cane -
THEO
I have not told a lie. But I also
have not told the truth. A refugee
soon learns that there is a big
difference between the two.
He pauses. The JUDGE nods.
THEO
The truth about me is that I am a
tired old man who came to
this country because he is homesick.
(he smiles)
Oh please don't stare at me like that, sir, I am all
right in the head. You know
that, after the war, we had very
bad years in Germany. We got poorer
and poorer. Every day retired officers
and schoolteachers were caught
shoplifting. Money lost its value,
the price of everything rose. Except
of human beings. We read in the
papers, of course, that the after-war years
were bad everywhere, that crime was
increasing and that the honest citizens
were having a hard job to put the
gangsters in jail. Well, I needn't
tell you, sir, that in Germany,
the gangsters finally
succeeded in putting the honest
citizens in jail. My wife was English.
She would have loved to have
come back to England, but it seemed
to me that I would be letting
down my country in its greatest need,
and so she stayed at my side. When
in summer '33, we found that we had
lost both our children to the Nazi
Party, and I was willing to come,
she died. None of my sons came to
her funeral.
(eyes burning)
Heil Hitler ... And then in January
'35, I had to go to Berlin on a mission
for my firm. Driving
up in my car, I lost my way on
the outskirts of the city, and
suddenly the landscape seemed so
familiar to me. And slowly I
recognized the road, the
lake, and a nursing home, where I
spent some weeks recovering
almost forty years ago. I stopped
the car and sat still - remembering.
And ... you see, in this very nursing
home, sir, I met my wife for the first
time ... and I met an Englishman who
became my greatest friend.
And I remembered the people at the
station in '19, when we prisoners
were sent home, cheering us, treating
us like friends ... the faces
of a party of distinguished men
around a table who tried their
utmost to comfort me when the defeat
of my country seemed to me
unbearable. And - very foolishly - I
remembered the English
countryside, the gardens, the green lawns,
the weedy rivers and the trees ...
she loved so much. And a great desire
came over me to come back to my
wife's country. And this, sir, is the truth.
Silence in the schoolroom after THEO'S long speech. The JUDGE rises and walks round the table.
