The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp opened in the UK in June 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, and was made by The Archers — the production company Powell and Pressburger had founded earlier that year — with finance from J. Arthur Rank and Independent Producers. The film's relationship with Winston Churchill's wartime government was infamously hostile: Churchill personally tried to suppress the production, and a Ministry of Information memorandum from Brendan Bracken (then Minister of Information) survives in the National Archives recording the attempt to block its release.

The cast pairs Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrook (the Austrian actor who had fled Vienna in 1936) and Deborah Kerr, with Kerr playing three separate roles across the film's forty-year span — her first major role of the kind. Livesey's commitment to the central role across decades of aging makeup is one of the most discussed performances of British cinema of the 1940s. Cinematography is by Georges Périnal, the French cinematographer who had shot Powell's earlier An Age of Kings work, in three-strip Technicolor.

The original 163-minute UK release was cut to 90 minutes for U.S. distribution; the original cut was effectively unavailable for decades and was restored only after Martin Scorsese personally championed the project through the Film Foundation in the 1980s. The full restoration was finally premiered at the BFI in 2012 and has since been reissued multiple times in successive 4K versions. Sight & Sound's 2022 critics' poll placed the film on its Greatest Films of All Time list.