"Outrageously original--and a heartfelt statement against wartime stress on realism and obedience" David Thomson, Boston Phoenix. Called "defeatist" by its critics, pronounced "disgraceful" by Winston Churchill (who tried to terminate production, attended the film's premiere, and then issued multiple memoranda attempting to halt its export), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp provides a sardonic course in British military history. Its dubious hero, Clive Candy (played by Roger Livesey) is based on a jingoist cartoon character, Colonel Blimp. In a brilliant color trip through one man's fantasy of history, Candy describes in flashback how the years have mellowed him from the hothead he likes to think he was at the time of the Boer Wars to the lukewarm, harmless bumbler he in fact is in 1942. Deborah Kerr plays the love interest of three separate periods in Clive's life, and Anton Walbrook is excellent as the Prussian officer who becomes a refugee from Nazi Germany-- an interesting creation of co-writer and director Emeric Pressburger, himself an "enemy alien" in England.