Well Begun: Colonel Blimp and the fountain of youth

For my First Post column about establishing sequences, here’s a look at a brilliant scene from Powell-Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp – and why it feels so personal at a time when I have been trying to write chronicles centred on the movie-watching summer of 1991
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“How do you know what sort of a fellow I was when I was as old as you are now?”

When we first meet Clive Wynne-Candy, the protagonist of the classic British film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, he is an old major-general, rotund and walrus-like in appearance, sweating heavily in a Turkish bath. He is also about to be ambushed by a group of young soldiers – his own countrymen – who are conducting a wartime training exercise.

The scene is set during WWII (which is when the film was made in 1943), but Candy, being a veteran of much earlier conflicts including the Boer War, clings to old notions of valour and fair play. Now he is caught, literally and otherwise, with his pants down because he thought the training exercise would begin a few hours later, as had been agreed. But the youngsters retort that the current enemy, the Nazis, can’t be trusted to honour such pacts – the age of niceties and gentlemen’s agreements is long gone. They see Candy as a relic and mock him, while the walrus sputters indignantly at this impudence and lack of respect.

The Candy character is loosely modelled on David Low’s famous “Colonel Blimp” comic strip, which was meant to expose the pretensions of a stuffy and jingoistic old soldier. But as it happens, this film aims at a more fleshed out, multi-dimensional view of this man. It will take us into the past to show us the personal history of Candy over a period of four decades, spanning many forms of fighting and romance and friendship. And it will commence this movement with a beautiful, audacious scene.

During that Turkish bath confrontation, the enraged Candy runs after his chief tormenter, pushes the young man into the water, and plunges in after him. As they wrestle, he harrumphs:

“Puppy! Gangster! I was fighting for this country while your father was still in bum-freezers.
[…] How do you know what sort of a fellow I was when I was as old as you are now… Forty Years Ago.”

The sound of those last three words comes to us as a bubbling echo, as if from a deep underwater cavern. The two men slip out of sight, an elegant camera glide leads us along the length of the pool… and culminates in the younger version of Clive Candy emerging from the other end.

A transition to four decades earlier has been made in a single unbroken take – no cuts or dissolves or fade outs or any of the other techniques that were traditionally used to mark the passage of cinematic time.

Weirdly, the other instance of something like this that comes to my mind is from a scene in the 1973 Hindi film Yaadon ki Baaraat. It’s one of those familiar scenes where a child is about to transform into the adult star, except that there’s nothing familiar about the way it’s done here. A boy on the run has just stopped to catch his breath atop a small bridge; the camera pans down to his legs and feet, then moves slowly through 360 degrees with nary a blink (as it does this, we see a train passing below; the only real movement within the frame). When it returns to its starting point, the same space is occupied by the adult version of the character, played by Dharmendra. Again, no cuts or dissolves, just the brilliant conceit that a simple camera movement lasting a few seconds can carry us across many years of narrative time.

Unusual as that moment in the Hindi film was, the Colonel Blimp scene predates it by three decades. Which should come as no surprise if you’re familiar with the splendidly inventive 1940s oeuvre of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who made this film as well as other classics: among them Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death, A Canterbury Tale, The Red Shoes, and I Know Where I’m Going.

Re-watching those films last year in preparation for an online course I taught about Powell-Pressburger, I delighted again in the rich mingling of fantasy and reality, the inner life and the external one. One thing I emphasised in the course was the use of transitions in these films, including the shifts from the present to the past and back again. The “Forty years ago” pool scene is a notable one, but there are so many others. In one of my favourite films, A Canterbury Tale, a cut from a hawk soaring across the sky to a modern fighter plane in the same space takes us swiftly from the 14th century – the time of Chaucer’s Pilgrims – to the present day. And in Black Narcissus, a nun posted at a convent in the Himalayas experiences little memory triggers – visual and aural ones – to her earlier, much more carefree life in Ireland. When Sister Clodagh (played by Deborah Kerr) hears the sound of a barking feral dog in the distance, we get an instant flashback to a horseback adventure with her boyfriend, hunting dogs scampering beside them; an overheard reference to a grandmother’s foot-stool similarly takes her back to a warm family gathering (and the frame shifts from a relatively subdued palette to something brighter, more saturated).

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Scenes like these, as well as countless others, can’t be described in mere words; you really have to experience the magical world of Powell-Pressburger for yourself (in good prints and preferably on a largish screen). However, there is another reason why the Turkish bath scene in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp – and the old man’s grunted “Forty Years Ago” – strike a chord for me. This is why: in recent months I have been on many nostalgia dives of my own, some of them involving immersions into my old diaries from the early 1990s (Thirty Years Ago!), which was a pivotal time for me as a movie buff developing new tastes and entering uncharted worlds.

As I negotiate the turbulent waters of those diaries, I feel a bit like Candy entering the bath and coming out at the other end. I encounter a different version of myself, and the world has of course changed too. It is the world of 1991, with economic liberalisation around the corner and satellite TV about to change our viewing habits forever. I have recently become obsessed with old American and British cinema, and in the process become even more solitary than before, cut off from my friends who don’t share such interests. The internet is still many years away, and one has to work hard not just to get prints of such films but also to acquire any details about them from embassy libraries or from movie guides in second-hand bookstores. CD-ROMs containing useful information are in the near future, but it is beyond imagining that a day might come when one can interact in real time, through a computer, with other movie buffs based around the world.

In the decades since then, I have been fortunate enough to have had many online and offline conversations about cinema with a variety of people – including some young students who are genuinely curious about old films. But there are also times when I feel like an old fogey, waxing on about things that seem to have little relevance to today’s viewers. With countless new films and web series being released each week across a host of OTT platforms, when there is so much competing for a movie nerd’s attention (and when even someone who has the luxury of 12 hours’ viewing time per day might feel overwhelmed by watch-lists), how does one meaningfully curate thousands of films across genres and categories that are 60, or 80, or 100 years old? And how does one argue with a “woke” viewer who firmly believes that old films were regressive products of a backward age, that they might have some value as artefacts but can’t really “teach” us anything today?

The pragmatic answer for me is: keep trying. Write about such films in columns, host online discussions about them once in a while, hope that I might get a few people as engaged with these things as I was thirty years ago. Wrestle in the pool of argument and opinion, dunk the head of a “young un” under water if you need to, hope to infect others with your passion. But in doing all this, try not to be a boastful old blimp.

[Earlier First Post columns are here. And here is an old piece about A Canterbury Tale]

Talking movies (and other things) on Amit Varma's podcast

Did a long, free-flowing chat – mainly about movie love – with Amit Varma for his excellent podcast The Seen and the Unseen; the link is here.

 

Amit is a super curator, and the conversation was very stimulating as it happened (we recorded between roughly 9 pm and 1 AM a few days ago), but as is usually the case with any such talk I wasn’t too happy with myself – felt like I ended up articulating only a fraction of what I would have liked to say. Later I looked through the rough notes I had made on a word-file and wanted to smack myself on the head with a blunt instrument for all the stuff I had left out and the things I had just blanked out on. Given that Amit had encouraged me to make this as personal as possible, there was much else I might have said about the early years of my journey as a film buff (things that I am currently also trying to write about in my personal essays about the late 80s and early 90s, a couple of which have been published on this blog in the past 2-3 months).

Still, we’ll do a follow-up conversation at some point. And there should be some things of interest in this one too, for those of you who have the time/patience to listen to a long chat between two people who first met during the heady, pre-social-media days when blogs were the most exciting things on the internet.

 

P.S. the recording itself was done as a video chat so that we would have visual cues, allowing the conversation to proceed smoothly. Early on, as Amit and I were filling our coffee cups, we realised the cups had a weirdly similar colour scheme - so Amit took this screenshot for posterity.

(On the other hand, our tastes in cinema sometimes differ drastically, as you can tell from parts of the conversation. Poor Amit must be traumatised by how many of his recent guests have turned out to be Sanjay Leela Bhansali defenders!) 

In memory of a sports-loving dog

These aren't flattering photos, but never mind. This is one of our colony dogs, Noorie, who was taken to the Animals First clinic (in Chhatarpur) a few days ago with a serious kidney condition. She passed away early yesterday. She was old, the blood reports had been very bad, and she had been vomiting constantly, not retaining food over the past few days. A few of us, including the woman who used to feed her, had decided — in consultation with a vet — that it was time to put her out of her suffering, but she went on her own. We cremated her at Sai Ashram in the afternoon.

 

I didn’t know Noorie well — in fact I didn’t even know she was called Noorie by those who interacted with her regularly. I thought of her as "Kaajal" because that was the name given to her by someone I knew — it was a natural fit because she had very distinctive black eyes in her prime, with the colour appearing to spill over like thickly applied kohl.

 

She was a solitary creature, seemingly not fond of other dogs, making sure no one encroached on the small park where she lived, outside our local BSES office. But I did briefly see a more social side when she took a liking to my Lara a few years ago. If she saw us from a distance, she would hesitantly trot across to our park to say a very quick hello, lick Lara a couple of times, and then scoot back just as nervously — as if sheepish about having over-stayed her welcome.

 

She seemed to be quite tolerant of humans though. I have taken many photos of colony dogs doing amusing things, expressing various shades of personality, but there are just as many memorable images that I never managed to capture. Among these: Noorie/Kaajal sitting right in the middle of the BSES park while youngsters noisily played cricket or football around her. When it was a cricket match, I used to think of her as the umpire, because that’s always where she seemed to be sitting, near the end of the bowler’s run-up. It was a remarkable sight, and she always looked very poised and content in this role. (I never actually saw her get hit by a ball, but I'm told that when this happened once in a while, her response was never more than a short and stoical yelp; she didn’t get up or run away. Unfailingly professional, a Dickie Bird of her species.)

 

[Related post: Sona, in remembrance]

The 1991 case-files: two real-life murders (and a few movies)

[Continuing the nostalgia/memory project that I referred to in this recent post about Ajooba]

Another despatch from the summer of 1991. As I have written earlier, that summer was a pivotal one for my film education – this being when I first developed an obsession with old American and British cinema that also led me to serious film literature for the first time. (Since I am still very much a young film student in my own head, it’s strange to think that a full 30 years have passed since the months when I lugged my heavy Leonard Maltin movie guide around with me to neighbourhood video shops, or to Palika Bazaar once in a while, and looked at movie entries in the book before deciding what to rent or buy.)

Some memories of the April to July period in particular are very vivid, and are supplemented by – or in some cases, contradicted by – my diary entries of the time. These include two other signposts: two killings that took place a little over three weeks apart. The first of them – the Rajiv Gandhi assassination on May 21 – everyone knows about. The second was much less public but created lasting shockwaves for my mother’s family: the murder of my great-grandmother – my nani’s mother who, for whatever reason, was known to all of us as “bhabhiji” – in her Nizamuddin house on June 14.

Looking back, both these incidents are inseparable in my mind from the ferocious movie-watching I was doing at the time – and the many ways in which I was processing or making sense of real life through films (while also being aware of the differences between the two things).

On the night of May 21, my nani was staying with us in Saket. (She divided her time between Saket and Green Park, where she had lived for years with an old friend, a reserved, silver-haired gentleman whom I knew as Badhwar uncle – and in whose house my mother and I had also lived for a year in 1986-87 when we moved out of my father’s place – but more on that another time.) Though my summer holidays had begun, we must have all gone to bed by 10-10.30 pm; this would be the last year of the Doordarshan era, and we weren’t in the habit of watching TV till late. And so, it was only at around 5.30 the next morning that we were woken by a call from Badhwar uncle, telling us about the assassination.

As my nani told it, his voice was shaking on the phone, and this wasn’t just because of the magnitude of what had happened. Badhwar uncle, who practised astrology (very seriously but non-professionally, only counselling acquaintances who came to him for advice), had once predicted that not only would Rajiv Gandhi not live to see 1992, but that his death would be so terrible that his face wouldn’t be left intact enough for identification.

I grew up to be an astrology-sceptic myself (and didn’t find it too interesting even as a child, having eye-rolled my way through parts of a Linda Goodman book my mother had lying around), but I had heard uncle make that prediction years earlier – possibly during the time when my mother and I lived in his Green Park house. And when I met him for the first time after the Rajiv Gandhi killing, he looked strained by the way in which it had come to pass; there was no gloating, no “didn't I tell you”, just tiredness.

This was my most first and most immediate association with the death of the young, pleasant-looking prime minister, but others came soon. Starting with the photographs in India Today and Frontline (it is still hard to believe today that they were printed in such widely read magazines that must have been lying around lakhs of houses for anyone, including children, to pick up). Those images of blood and gore and dismemberment and numbed survivors wading through slush (followed a week or two later by a particularly macabre picture of the reconstructed limbs of the suicide bomber) were my first direct acquaintance with what a bomb could do to a human body; this was the real thing, so removed from the glamorous explosions and sanitised aftermaths one got to see in action sequences in films. As someone who turned often to cinematic reference points even back then, I remember looking at these gruesome pictures and reflecting that the little girl in Mr India who was blown up by a stuffed toy – after she picked the thing up – would definitely not have been left in a state that allowed Anil Kapoor to lift her whole and rush her to a hospital in desperate hope of saving her.

Later there was the televised funeral, with the glimpses of Amitabh Bachchan in white kurta-pyjama standing near the pyre – it was strange to see AB on screen in this context, so different from the last two times I had seen him, in Hum and Ajooba earlier in the year. At a time when I was slowly moving away from the grand idiom of the Hindi cinema I had loved for years, this moment was another reminder that a superstar may be an all-avenging Tiger or a swashbuckling Arabian prince on screen (or a Supremo in a comic strip) but a bowed and helpless mourner, looking much smaller than life, at the funeral of a friend who couldn’t be saved even though he was the most powerful man in the country.

Though this messy real-life killing, and the way it played out on our TV screens and in the pages of news magazines, dominated our thoughts for several days, a more personal tragedy soon followed.

On the afternoon of June 14, while my nani played cards with a couple of her friends at our dining table, I was in the video room watching the 1974 film of Murder on the Orient Express. The film held no surprises for me as a mystery, since I had read the Agatha Christie book much earlier, but I was very interested in it for its large ensemble cast. This was in the first couple of months of my obsession with old Hollywood stars, which included leafing for hours each day through the Maltin guide and making my own filmography lists – and “multi-starrers” (to use the Hindi-movie term) held a special attraction since they allowed me to deepen my acquaintance with many different actors at the same time. Ensemble films or epics like Judgement at Nuremberg, Spartacus, The Longest Day and How the West Was Won had served this function over the previous few weeks. Though Murder on the Orient Express wasn’t an “old” film by my standards, it was useful for bringing together such disparate giants as Ingrid Bergman and John Gielgud and Wendy Hiller and Lauren Bacall and Richard Widmark (as well as the “younger” stars like Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave and one of my biggest crushes, Anthony “Norman Bates” Perkins).

Shortly after I began watching the film, I became vaguely aware that my nani was feeling uneasy in the room outside, and her friends were asking her if everything was okay and asking my mother to bring her a glass of water; but things settled down and I figured it was a bit of drame-baazi as distraction because she was losing her card game.

Less than an hour later, the phone call came. My mother answered it, spoke monosyllabically for a few seconds (with my nani yelling “Kaun hai? Kaun hai?” from a distance as she tended to). Then mum put down the phone and said, in a deadpan voice, getting straight to the point, no softening of the blow: “Bhabhiji ka murder ho gaya hai.”

On my TV screen, Hercule Poirot was interrogating the Russian princess. I registered what my mother had said, along with the wheezing gasps and groans that had started to come from nani (the contrast between the tone of the announcement and the tone of the response was like the difference between a studiously understated Nordic noir and a Sivaji Ganesan mythological), and realised I’d have to stop the film and go to play my own part in this real-world theatre.

Over the days that followed – going for the funeral, visiting the Nizamuddin house a couple of times, hearing much grisly speculation about what had happened – I found myself playing the part of Albert Finney’s Poirot in my head. I can’t provide too many details here, but suspicion danced around a couple of members of the deceased woman’s enormous family (which was made up of a dozen children, of whom my nani was the oldest, and many more grandchildren). As little details about fingerprints and unusual sightings and unidentified strangers and contradictory claims and property issues emerged, I imagined my Poirot self in a large room, interrogating members of my big fat Punjabi extended family (in what would have been a very incongruous Belgian accent given the circumstances) – with several “a-ha!” moments as I noted an incongruous statement here, an overlooked clue there, and generally had a roomful of grand-uncles and grand-aunts gaping at my intellectual brilliance.

But of course, in real life, there were to be no epiphanies or denouements of that sort. The case petered out after a while, things were brushed under the carpet or rationalised away, life moved on. There was much bad blood among some members of the family for a while – some resentments and suspicions lasted in one form or the other for decades – but nothing like a full-fledged severing of ties or a full-fledged reconciliation. Those sorts of resolutions I continued to find in the thrillers I read and the suspense films I watched. (In the weeks between the two murders, I had watched a few Hitchcock films for the first time – among them Notorious, The Trouble With Harry, and The Birds. There was also a short and uncharacteristic dalliance with a few of the Roger Moore James Bond films.)

The uncertainty of those times – at the personal and political level – is reflected in two “by the way” postscripts in one of my diary entries near the end of June:

“By the way: **** uncle dropped by in the afternoon, dropped some more dark hints about **** uncle, and then left. It didn’t seem to matter to anyone though, and soon we were talking about other things.”

“By the way 2: Narsimha Rao is the prime minister now. Wonder who it will be tomorrow evening.”

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P.S. the last time I met my great-grandmother – or “bhabhiji” – was a couple of weeks after RG’s death, and 10 days before her own, when she came to our Saket flat with one of nani’s sisters who was visiting Delhi. My diary tells me the date was June 4, but there aren’t any other details given; what I do clearly remember is my nani showing her mother those grisly assassination-scene photos in Frontline and India Today, discussing them using not-very-refined Punjabi phrases (and with a very Punjabi relish).

[Earlier posts about 1991: awaiting Ajooba; and my Leonard Maltin movie guide. And on Facebook, here is a public post about my learning of Satyajit Ray’s adolescent journal-writing, which I could identify with]