Where to begin with this strange and remarkable antiwar film, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp? For one, it's a movie that Winston Churchill deeply hated. Why? For two reasons: One is obvious, the other less so. The obvious: The film was made in the middle of Britain's war with Germany (1943) and yet it had a sympathetic German character, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (played by the dashing Anton Walbrook). Winston Churchill wanted films that made his countrymen hate the Germans, and the only real way you can get one group of humans, say the A race, to hate another group of humans, say the B race, is to convince them, the A race, that the other group, the B race, are less than human, are actually animals, are barbaric, are rapists, are the radical other. Without this hate, wars would be much less frequent or not exist at all. The second and less obvious reason Churchill hated the film is because it is about the end of the British Empire.

The story is this: In 1902, Major General Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey), a man of the 19th century, a professional soldier who believes in "honest soldiering," an aristocrat who loves horses and hunting wild animals, a man who does not question for one moment Britain's rightness/greatness and sees imperial power as the march of progress, falls in love with a beautiful English woman, Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr), who lives and works in Berlin. But the beautiful English woman falls in love with a German officer, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff. However, Major General Clive Wynne-Candy is a good sport, takes his loss like a man, and congratulates the German officer on his success with Edith Hunter. Wynne-Candy then spends the rest of his life hunting animals in British colonies, getting involved with women who look exactly like Hunter, and saying noble things about the good old British Empire. Eventually, he becomes a political dinosaur, and his society ultimately rejects him. The film is packed with memorable scenes, sequences, and lines. Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Thurs 7 pm.