A truly extraordinary film to have been made whilst Britain was engaged in the second world war, Powell and Pressburger's masterpiece is the very definition of a velvet glove socked squarely in the jaw of the British upper classes' image of themselves. Ostensibly the life story of a military gentlemen whose rules of engagement and code of honour has become outmoded, the film is actually a portrait (or rather tapestry, as the credits set forth) on the life of a man who had never been able to bear too much reality, and whose idealism never actually sees what is going on in the world about him.
The film is told largely in flashback, with the ageing protagonist getting a rude awakening as he lays in a Turkish bath, looking for all the world like a corpse on a mortuary slab, as the "opposing" side in a home guard war game decides to play dirty and strike before "war" is supposed to officially begin. This traumatic awakening, with insults, pushes the protagonist into a long flashback to salient episodes in his own life. First we see him in Berlin during the Boer War, then on battlefields during the Great War, then finally facing pensioning off into the home guard in WWII. The binding theme of all these episodes is that the man, named Clive "Sugar" Candy, fails at all times to see what is actually happening around him. He sticks to a notion of defending a set of gentlemanly rules which neither his country nor his fellow human beings conform to.
Take the Boer War: he goes to Berlin to expose a "spy" who has been spreading "black propaganda" about British concentration camps and the starvation of prisoners in South Africa, even though anyone who knows history will know that the so-called "propaganda" is true. In the Great War, Candy makes a big fuss over not using methods of torture to extract information from prisoners (unlike the Germans), although as soon as his back is turned his South African subordinate turns on the prisoners with threats which we know will be carried out. After the war, Candy and his gentlemen friends reassure their German guest that Germany won't be humiliated post defeat, without any reference being made to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Once Britain is at war with the Nazis, this pretence can no longer be suffered, and Candy is summarily dismissed from active duty; blind idealism in the face of what the world actually is cannot be held any more.
Candy's love-life shows a similar idealistic tendency. He meets a governess in Berlin who marries the German both have befriended; he was too blind to see that he loved her whilst he was with her, and then lives the rest of his life with her on a pedestal, trying to meet other women who fit the ideal (even marrying a lookalike); but as the German friend later points out, Candy didn't live with the governess and see her grow old. His life is a tissue of ideals and illusions, none of which have any bearing on reality. By 1943, reality was no longer willing to hide it's face. Finally, Candy is left looking at the hollow which was the house he had lived in - an empty bomb site, with an autumn leaf floating in the lake of filthy water which fills the cellar.
Powell and Pressburger's life of Candy is a glorious journey into colour, with sweeping camera moves and striking narrative solutions to the problem of telling so long a tale. The bridges between Candy's periods are particularly imaginatively done, especially when the wall in his den fills up with the stuffed heads of the exotic wildlife he has slaughtered, an off-screen bloodbath which shows that repression and reality must come to the surface in a man's life, one way or another. It is no mistake that the ultimate animal he kills is an elephant, the white hunter's deadliest sin.
Candy's illusory plod through life is contrasted with the clear thinking of his German friend, who gets the girl, has children, experiences bitter defeat but turns his back on the Nazi answer to that defeat. It is he who gives Candy a reality check near the film's end. It must have galled the British establishment to see a German character gently scolding an English gent during the war! Despite being an ultimately devastating portrait of a life lost in illusion, and wielding the velvet covered fist that Britain was never that morally different from the Germans in the first place (it was, after all, the Brits who invented the concentration camp!), the film has a lot of affection for its protagonist; he's blind rather than malicious, and must be retired rather than condemned. The film is helped immeasurably by the remarkable performances of all the cast, with Livesey in particular giving a tour-de-force in the central role, with one of the best make-up ageing jobs of all time as he lies fat, bald and ruddy in the Turkish bath.
An important moment in history, when the upper classes of England woke as if from a spell and discovered the lies they had told themselves and the rest of the country, distilled in reels of film and drenched in irony.
The film is told largely in flashback, with the ageing protagonist getting a rude awakening as he lays in a Turkish bath, looking for all the world like a corpse on a mortuary slab, as the "opposing" side in a home guard war game decides to play dirty and strike before "war" is supposed to officially begin. This traumatic awakening, with insults, pushes the protagonist into a long flashback to salient episodes in his own life. First we see him in Berlin during the Boer War, then on battlefields during the Great War, then finally facing pensioning off into the home guard in WWII. The binding theme of all these episodes is that the man, named Clive "Sugar" Candy, fails at all times to see what is actually happening around him. He sticks to a notion of defending a set of gentlemanly rules which neither his country nor his fellow human beings conform to.
Take the Boer War: he goes to Berlin to expose a "spy" who has been spreading "black propaganda" about British concentration camps and the starvation of prisoners in South Africa, even though anyone who knows history will know that the so-called "propaganda" is true. In the Great War, Candy makes a big fuss over not using methods of torture to extract information from prisoners (unlike the Germans), although as soon as his back is turned his South African subordinate turns on the prisoners with threats which we know will be carried out. After the war, Candy and his gentlemen friends reassure their German guest that Germany won't be humiliated post defeat, without any reference being made to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Once Britain is at war with the Nazis, this pretence can no longer be suffered, and Candy is summarily dismissed from active duty; blind idealism in the face of what the world actually is cannot be held any more.
Candy's love-life shows a similar idealistic tendency. He meets a governess in Berlin who marries the German both have befriended; he was too blind to see that he loved her whilst he was with her, and then lives the rest of his life with her on a pedestal, trying to meet other women who fit the ideal (even marrying a lookalike); but as the German friend later points out, Candy didn't live with the governess and see her grow old. His life is a tissue of ideals and illusions, none of which have any bearing on reality. By 1943, reality was no longer willing to hide it's face. Finally, Candy is left looking at the hollow which was the house he had lived in - an empty bomb site, with an autumn leaf floating in the lake of filthy water which fills the cellar.
Powell and Pressburger's life of Candy is a glorious journey into colour, with sweeping camera moves and striking narrative solutions to the problem of telling so long a tale. The bridges between Candy's periods are particularly imaginatively done, especially when the wall in his den fills up with the stuffed heads of the exotic wildlife he has slaughtered, an off-screen bloodbath which shows that repression and reality must come to the surface in a man's life, one way or another. It is no mistake that the ultimate animal he kills is an elephant, the white hunter's deadliest sin.
Candy's illusory plod through life is contrasted with the clear thinking of his German friend, who gets the girl, has children, experiences bitter defeat but turns his back on the Nazi answer to that defeat. It is he who gives Candy a reality check near the film's end. It must have galled the British establishment to see a German character gently scolding an English gent during the war! Despite being an ultimately devastating portrait of a life lost in illusion, and wielding the velvet covered fist that Britain was never that morally different from the Germans in the first place (it was, after all, the Brits who invented the concentration camp!), the film has a lot of affection for its protagonist; he's blind rather than malicious, and must be retired rather than condemned. The film is helped immeasurably by the remarkable performances of all the cast, with Livesey in particular giving a tour-de-force in the central role, with one of the best make-up ageing jobs of all time as he lies fat, bald and ruddy in the Turkish bath.
An important moment in history, when the upper classes of England woke as if from a spell and discovered the lies they had told themselves and the rest of the country, distilled in reels of film and drenched in irony.