Sunday, for the first time, I saw the ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’, by Powell and Pressburger starring Roger Livesey and Deborah Kerr. It was made in 1943, at the height of the war and Winston Churchill tried to have it banned because of the sympathetic presentation of an anti-Nazi German officer who is more down-to-earth and realistic than the central British character.
I did some looking up afterwards, not knowing much about Blimp. For me he's just been a symbol of reactionary old buffers everywhere - as he was meant to be in fact. That made the film rather a surprise. I hadn't expectd to be touched with sympathy for the old horror.
David Low, the cartoonist who created Colonel Blimp, described his character as "a symbol of stupidity", but added that "stupid people are quite nice".
“With the sympathy of genius", wrote The Times in 1939, "Low made his Colonel Blimp not only a figure of fun, the epitome of pudding-headed diehardness, but also a decent old boy."
Ralph Steadman, met Low in 1957 and recalled later that he "was my bete noir": "Something turned me off him as the voice of authority...He was the insider playing the maverick, hand-in-glove with Lord Beaverbrook."
Low regarded himself as 'a nuisance dedicated to sanity'.
I wonder how he would have felt to discover that Colonel Blimp is now thought of in some circles as a gay icon?
2 comments:
Maybe he is a gay icon [news to me] because more Gay Gents look like Blimp than like........ John Bannerman
If I were male I'd go gay for Bannerman!!
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