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. It was made by The Archers, the production company the two had founded earlier that year, with finance from J. Arthur Rank and Independent Producers. Winston Churchill's wartime government was notoriously hostile to it: Churchill personally tried to suppress the production, and a Ministry of Information memorandum from Brendan Bracken (then Minister of Information), recording the attempt to block its release, survives in the National Archives.

Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrook (the Austrian actor who had fled Vienna in 1936) and Deborah Kerr lead the cast, Kerr in three separate roles across the film's forty-year span, her first major part of that kind. Livesey carries the central role through decades of ageing make-up, and his performance is among the most discussed in British cinema of the 1940s. Georges Périnal, the French cinematographer who had shot Powell's earlier An Age of Kings work, photographed it in three-strip Technicolor.

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