re: YouTube Pick Of The Day

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One rainy day in the early 1950s, a very young Martin Scorsese was watching a butchered version of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp on his black-and-white TV. Colonel Blimp, which deals with a lifelong friendship between Clive Candy, a British soldier sporting an upper lip of almost unbelievable stiffness, and his top-hole German counterpart, Theodore Kretschmar-Schuldorff, first saw the light of day in 1943. This was not the best time to be releasing a film with a sympathetic German character.

The film Scorsese saw was not the film Michael Powell had shot, nor the film his collaborator Emeric Pressburger had written. (For years, the pair worked under the name "The Archers", a partnership that produced such immortal films as The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus.) Blimp originally ran at 163 minutes; the version Scorsese saw had been hacked down to 90. With scenes presented out of order, huge chunks of plot missing, and no possibility of marvelling at its radiant Technicolor cinematography, Scorsese was nonetheless beguiled. Eleven or 12 at the time, he could not have known that in 1943 a lot of Brits would have found the film unusual, if not downright strange, and Candy a bit priggish, blustery, annoying. He could not have known that Winston Churchill despised the film and ensured its failure at the box office. None of this mattered.

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"The story transcends the culture which produced it," the director explains in an amused tone, pointing out that British films were part of every American's childhood back in the 50s. "It is very elegantly made. It would be great if audiences could experience the film the way it was made, the way the camera moves, the way it was supposed to be seen. But for me the most important thing is the humanity of the film, the relationship between the characters. The whole story has an eloquent sadness to it."

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