All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

All Quiet on the Western Front. Screenplay by Erich Maria Remarque, Maxwell Anderson, and George Abbott. Dir. Lewis Milestone. Perf. Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, John Wray, and Slim Summerville. 1930. Asheville Film Society.

Show Boat (1936)

Showboat. Screenplay by Edna Ferber and Oscar Hammerstein II. Dir. James Whale. Perf. Irene Dunne, Allan Jones, Charles Winninger, Paul Robeson, Helen Morgan, and Helen Westley. 1936. Asheville Film Society.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Screenplay by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Perf. Roger Livesay, Deborah Kerr, and Anton Walbrook. 1943. Asheville Film Society.

From Ken Hanke, Asheville Film Society. "July Calendar of Films." Message to the author. 6 July 2015. E-mail.

The original Colonel Blimp was the central figure in a series of British comics—a blowhard caricature of the English "fire-eater" military man. The character presented in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp only starts as that caricature, and is transformed into a living, breathing, loving, dreaming human being over the course of the central flashback that makes up the bulk of this long, sprawling film. They've taken the caricature from the comic—presented him to us in fact—and shown how he got that way. More, they show us that [he] really isn't "that way" at all. In a way, it's a magnificent deconstruction of a (then) pop culture figure. [...] At bottom, it's the slightly sad portrait of a romantic—from the Boer War to World War I and right up to World War II. And despite the fact that the film can rightly be called an epic, it's really an intimate film about love and friendship and loss. A wholly beautiful creation.