Trivia for
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) More at IMDbPro »

• Director Michael Powell originally wanted Wendy Hiller to play Blimp's "ideal woman", but she was unavailable, so the part was given to Deborah Kerr.
  
  
• Michael Powell's golden cocker spaniels Erik and Spangle make their second appearance on film as Clive and Barbara return from their honeymoon.
  
  
• The tapestry seen in the opening credits was made by the members of The Royal College of Needlework.
  
  
• Winston Churchill hated the film and wanted it banned.
  
  
• The filmmakers wanted Laurence Olivier to play Clive Candy, but he was prevented from being furloughed from the Navy by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who didn't want the film to be made. Churchill didn't want to bolster the production with an actor and star of Olivier's caliber, as he felt the movie was critical of a type of British patriot. Olivier was allowed to take a leave from the Navy to make a film about William Shakespeare's patriotic King Henry V in The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France (1944). Roger Livesey was cast instead. A generation later he played Olivier's father, Billy Rice, in The Entertainer (1960), though he was actually less than a year older than Olivier.
  
  
• Director Michael Powell was intrigued by how second-unit cameraman Jack Cardiff was filming the animal heads and gave Cardiff his first big break as the cinematographer on his next film, A Matter of Life and Death (1946).
  
  
• Three-quarters of the Germans in the crowd at the POW camp are "carefully painted and positioned" plaster models.
  
  
• Colonel Blimp was a British cartoon character in a then well-known strip. The producers decided to use the name for the movie.
  
  
• One of the earliest films to directly refer to The Wizard of Oz (1939) (one of the characters sings part of "We're Off To See the Wizard"), proving rather conclusively that "Oz" was more successful and popular on its first release than is sometimes claimed.
  
  
• According to the directors, the idea for the film did not come from the comic strip by David Low, but from a scene cut from their previous film, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), in which an elderly member of the crew tells a younger one, "You don't know what it's like to be old."
  
  
• At the end of the film, when the camera zooms in on the tapestry, the Latin phrase "Sic Transit Gloria Candy" is shown. This translates to, "Thus passes away the glory of Candy."
  
  
• Clive Candy goes to Germany to fight a duel over propaganda about the British treatment of people in South Africa in the Boer War. Many of the cited things he was dueling over were in fact true. "Concentration camp" was first used to describe British camps in South Africa in 1899-1902.
  
  

Related Links