I first featured the late Deborah Kerr a year ago, in a scene from Michael Powell’s Black Narcissus. Prior to that, at age 21, Kerr appeared in Powell’s The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp. This is a movie you may not have even heard of, let alone ever seen.
Following a Michael Powell movie demands a lot of concentration; not because the stories aren’t told well, but because they’re so intelligently made, deliberately paced, and densely packed. I say this because I’m providing 15 minutes of scenes from Colonel Blimp, and I daresay you may consider them to be tough going, perhaps even boring. But if for no other reason than seeing a young and luminous Deborah Kerr, I think this is worth watching.
Kerr plays three different women of the same age, appearing at various points in time over a period of decades, while “Colonel Blimp” ages. I added transitions at the beginning and end of a scene, at 4:50 and 11:30, that may look like they’re in the original film, but they’re not. I let this scene play out because I want you to see Anton Walbrook’s impassioned speech against Nazism. Keep in mind this movie was made in England during World War 2, long before the outcome was certain, and Walbrook himself had escaped persecution in Nazi Germany for being homosexual.
[flv:/Video/OCT07/ColonelBlimp.flv 400 300]
The Flash encoding runs at 1 megabit/second, so dialup users don’t bother! A very rough bit of math comes out as 1,000,000 bits per second, divided by 8 bits per byte, equals 125,000 bytes per second, times 60 seconds per minute, equals 7,500,000 bytes per minute, times 12 minutes equals 90,000,000.
So this particular video is roughly 100 megabytes, so I’m not surprised it’s taking a while to download. But you don’t have to wait for it to finish downloading before watching. One of the benefits of the Flash video format.
There seems to be some sluggishness on Saturdays, coming from the server in Phoenix. Don’t know why that is. There were a lot of problems with connection resets a month back, but they’re gone for now.
Your clips are taking forever to download on my computer. Gotta run a virus check. Meanwhile, even at 21, she looked so mature!