The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Carr didn't necessarily have as many credits as some of the famous actors we've discussed on this podcast, but the ones she had were absolutely choice.

She was in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, King Solomon's Mines, The Prisoner of Zenda, and Julius Caesar, From Here to Eternity, An Affair to Remember, Tea and Sympathy, and most famously in The King and I as Anna.

Even so, she considered her role as Miss Gibbons in this movie as possibly her finest performance.

As she got older, she began to get disenchanted with the quality of roles offered to women in their 60s, and she abandoned film and television in favor of stage acting.

that had a system of communication outside my dimension, which could gather a score or a thousand of them to down me if I showed fight.

On my side, a regular Colonel Blimp of a retired officer, a Boer War veteran, a skeptical middle-aged physician, a blind man, another chap with no left arm, and a girl.

and i will chester thirty-three years old five feet ten moderately strong normally intelligent having all my teeth save two a thick crop of black hair brown eyes a complexion more ruddy than otherwise and a face that if it would not halt a charging bull in its tracks still would not win a beauty competition either seven years of army behind me, an income of eight hundred pounds a year from a legacy, and nothing much in view as a future, until this morning, when I had suddenly been elected the saviour of mankind.

I walked across to the tremendous blackened fireplace, empty now of everything but a lonely-looking single bronze fire-dog.

Yeah, no, exactly.

I mean, if you've ever seen that brilliant Powell and Pressburger film, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Roger Livesey is the titular Colonel Blimp, who is this basically lifelong soldier who's been in everything from Sudan through to the First World War.

And by the time of the Second World War, he's an old man.

He's an old pot-bellied man.

Genuinely.

I was thinking why hadn't they dented my mind before? And I do think, in my defense, it was impossible to watch Colonel Blimp.

basically before about 2000 it'd been until scorsese gets the blu-ray you know yeah and it we do have to thank scorsese for this essentially sort of gets it gets it remastered and re-released you know in a form where you can sit and watch it and go oh yeah that's what this is you know yeah and you can see it as it as it must have looked on the screen and i think I think the lushness of what they do was sort of killed by television.

I mean, going to your daughter's complaints about watching 80s TV, I think if you watched, say, The Red Shoes on a small colour TV in 1984, I'm not sure that you saw what Powell and Pressburger intended you to see.

But, yeah, so you've got Lemontov, played by Anton Warbrook.

um who i recently read his um biography of him it's really interesting actually um so i can highly recommend reading that um but yeah i mean these these the cast is quite well stacked but a lot of power and press work irregulars so like under walbrook obviously appeared in life and death of colonel blimp and that as well popped up murray scoring was a regular player um who else have we got here um esmond knight for example i think worked with power and press for like 11 times um well it's a film that pal made at the very end of his career peeping tom is when that appears and that is um it's basically like a film within a film and he plays a director which is he's also quite obsessive about his art but it's quite interesting because essentially he was um he was blind um so he might kind of um he was in the royal navy during the war and um was on the oh, I think Prince of Wales, I want to say.

Okay.

Um, and during the battle where they tried to sink the Bismarck and basically essentially lost, lost, lost an eye pretty much.

Although if you want to do the Moria Shira triple, as it were, so you can do this film, Tales of Hoffman and Pippin Tom, for example.

Okay.

But yeah, or Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is also very good.

Or if you want another ballet movie, Rosalinda, which is basically a remake, adaptation of Die Fledermaus, I think.

Have you ever seen anything by the Archers? Like Powell and Pressburger? I don't know if I have, no.

Is it Life and Death of Colonel Blimp? Or...

Is it Black Narcissus? Yeah, there's a lot of movies.

And they're great movies, but they...