Powell and Pressburger

With poise alternating with rebelliousness, Kerr plays three different women in Colonel Blimp (while turning twenty-one on the set in 1942), each one essential to a storyline that extends from London and Berlin in 1902, during the Boer War, to World War II. News of the film being shot in the middle of the blitz, and daring to portray a German officer in a sympathetic light by contrasting his noble nature with the Nazis, reached Winston Churchill. Calling it a threat to military morale, Churchill sought to derail it. However, powerful impresario J. Arthur Rank remained behind The Archers — the Powell/Pressburger name for their unique writer/director/producer collaboration as well as for their independent production company — and the film was released to wide acclaim for its performances. But anxiety about its content lingered with British critics, under the spell of the war. The exportation of The Archers’ first Technicolor film was blocked for two years, then released only to be butchered — in various incarnations by twenty minutes to over an hour — in America. Kerr’s three disparate yet spiritually kindred characters fuel unconscious, Oedipal themes underlying the unique frisson and unlikely friendship of a buttoned-up, British officer Clive Candy (Roger Livesey) and his sensitive German counterpart Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook). Through a fateful letter, Kerr’s intuitive, bilingual governess Edith Hunter triangulates the characters, who evolve over forty years. Edith speaks her mind on matters of diplomacy and the human costs of war, which Kerr understood only too well: Her father, a WWI veteran, was exposed to nerve gas and had a leg amputated after a severe bullet wound. He suffered ill health for years, and died at forty-three. The characters in Blimp are a paradigm for Great Britain, from its nefarious colonial reputation that began the twentieth century to its apotheosis as a noble underdog fighting against Nazi imperialism in WWII. Clive and Theo age, while Kerr morphs herself and Edith into Barbara Wynne — a Red Cross nurse, whom Clive meets during WWI and marries — and Angela (“call me Johnny”) Cannon — a tomboy and former model turned home-guard military driver during WWII. Director Michael Powell praised Kerr’s special contribution to this unsung — until its 1983 restoration — masterpiece. He described Blimp as Pressburger’s favorite film and the best romantic script he ever wrote. Before the Archers’ second Technicolor project, hinging on the twenty-six-year-old Deborah Kerr channeling a thirty-six-year-old Sister Clodagh in Black Narcissus, the busy actress returned to the stage in Shaw’s Heartbreak House. She also entertained the troops in Gaslight, had her contract (with producer Gabriel Pascal) sold to MGM, and married RAF pilot Anthony Bartley, ending her romance with Powell, who was sixteen years her senior. Kerr’s Sister Clodagh struggles with duty and piety as she clashes with sensuality and lost love, reawakened in the intoxicating atmosphere of the Himalayas. She is joined in the quixotic mission of turning a palace brothel into a convent — complete with school and hospital — by Flora Robson (Sister Philippa) and taken off course by David Farrar, Jean Simmons, Sabu, and Kathleen Byron. Although, the nuns are an Anglican, working order, the Catholic Legion of Decency threatened to cut the crucial flashbacks of Clodagh as a young Irish girl. Kerr sparkles with adolescent innocence in those scenes, reflected in her intense love for an impossibly handsome young man. It’s difficult to determine which version audiences saw, especially during the first U.S. exhibition. Without the seminal, flashback sequences so beautifully photographed by Jack Cardiff, Kerr’s artistry may not have been fully appreciated until the 1983 restoration. In a sequence in which Clodagh fishes in Cardiff’s shimmering stream, Kerr radiates in equal measure through dialogue and gesture the cinematographer’s magical lighting. Then, in an extreme close-up of the girl’s face dissolving into Sister Clodagh’s, the actress suggests how feeling love-struck can no longer be repressed. Kerr’s powerful performance inspired the sometimes brutal taskmaster Powell to describe her as “the ideal … the flesh-and-blood woman whom I had been searching for ever since I had discovered that I had been born to be a teller of tales and a creator of dreams.”