BFI Film Classics, the British Film Institute’s series of short monographs on individual films, is a great idea. The quality varies – reading A. L. Kennedy on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is like watching the movie with a woman in a large floral hat plonked in the seat in front of you – but with a scene by scene study of the film, plenty of stills and a discussion of its sources and wider significance, Mark Sinker’s study of if.... provides all you could ask.
When the film came out in 1968 it was thought daringly avant-garde. Today it looks more like the last flowering of the Auden, Isherwood and Spender tradition from the 1930s. To them, as to the film’s director Lindsay Anderson, a British public school was at once a totalitarian state in miniature and a symbol of the nation.
Alan Bennett’s play Forty Years On was first seen in 1968 too. Bennett also used a school to symbolise Britain, but he saw that the traditional public school was passing and wanted to explore its attractive side as well as its many absurdities. Today his play’s humour and elegiac tone seem a saner reaction to that world than Anderson’s self-conscious cinematic and political radicalism.