Stanley Kubrick - help! (dialogue, mostly)

[filmstar-en]

@GreenWyvern

It’s the Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, not Life and Times - although he is not a colonel and doesn’t in fact die.

And no, that’s not at all what it’s about. It’s about youth and old age, it’s about the young becoming old, and how the young and old judge one another. It’s about changing times and culture. It’s about an unshakably good, decent, generous and kind man living through it all. It’s about how mistaken first impressions can be.

The great achievement of this movie is that it takes a character who appears at first sight to be a pompous old fool (a ‘Colonel Blimp’), and over the course of the movie completely transforms him into a real person the viewer deeply likes and cares about.

Well yes, it is about that as well, but there was a serious political point being made in the film. It was that warfare conducted by gentlemen who have values shaped by honour and chivalry is a thing of the past in the face of new, completely ruthless enemy. Blimp is a gentleman and a romantic, a thoroughly likeable English character but the story suggests that it is men who are much more pragmatic and determined and who may break rules that are needed to wage a modern war.

This resonated with the military establishment or it would never have gotten past the censors at the height of WW2.

[GreenWyvern]

@filmstar-en

Well yes, it is about that as well, but there was a serious political point being made in the film. It was that warfare conducted by gentlemen who have values shaped by honour and chivalry is a thing of the past in the face of new, completely ruthless enemy. Blimp is a gentleman and a romantic, a thoroughly likeable English character but the story suggests that it is men who are much more pragmatic and determined and who may break rules that are needed to wage a modern war.

This resonated with the military establishment or it would never have gotten past the censors at the height of WW2.

I have to disagree.

Clive Candy is shown trying to fight a ‘gentleman’s war’ even in WW1 - which was most emphatically NOT a gentleman’s war. His values were out of tune with the times even then. The point is not about what kind of war to fight, it’s only about Candy’s personal character.

The reason the Ministry of Information didn’t like Colonel Blimp was that it has a highly sympathetic German character with a large part, and it shows a deep and genuine friendship between an Englishman and a German. But note that they still didn’t prevent the film being made or advertised or shown, they just didn’t promote it.

If you want to watch one of the greatest speeches ever made in any movie - given by a German refugee in WW2 - watch this clip from Colonel Blimp:

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) - "The Truth" Monologue

[filmstar-en]

I think I will watch this film again. Time for a Powell and Pressburger season I think.

[Voyager]

@Lucas_Jackson

I don’t mean this as a thread shit, but I don’t get the reverence for Kubes. I like The Shining enough but I absolutely don’t get (or like) 2001. I’ve watched it a couple of times but it just doesn’t make sense to me. Molasses.

Might be a generational thing. 2001 moves slowly like real spacecraft - Star Wars moves quickly like scifi spacecraft.

If it doesn’t make sense, try Clarke’s novel. It made perfect sense to me when it first came out, but I had read all of Clarke’s work up to then. You might still not like it, but you will more or less understand it.

[Mavic_Chen]

I still don’t get why he did the sloooow and repetitive dialogue though. Take 2001, normal dialogue albeit it very banal, I get it - man is superfluous. Up to The Shining he used normal dialogue then why the slow stilting repetitive way? It can’t be to make the viewer look “beyond” the dialogue because (a) he adopted it only in his later years and (b) other directors do it better with focus pulls or the like. It only serves to bore casual audiences and frankly make “fans” a little embarrassed about it all.