Major General Clive Candy (Roger Livesay) is in charge of the Home Guard during World War 2, and prepping for an exercise where the Guard must defend London against British regular army soldiers, pretending to be an invading force. The war is supposed to start at midnight, so he's caught entirely off-guard when the guy in charge of the "invaders" (who is dating Candy's driver), barges into the Turkish baths six hours earlier and takes him prisoner. There's a scuffle, and the movie dives into flashback through Candy's entire career.
In the early part of his life, he was the one ignoring orders and traveling to Germany to meet an English governess (Deborah Kerr) who wrote to him, concerned about the propaganda being spread about the British's actions in the Boer War. He confronts the one spreading the stories, insults the entire German Army for considering the man one of them, and fights a duel over it with a German officer (Anton Walbrook).
And after that, Candy as a person was basically set in stone. His ideas of how how war should be fought were locked in, and he couldn't adjust to a world where the enemies didn't follow notions like duels, or waiting for a prescribed time to begin fighting. Nor is he aware that the younger generations in his own country don't think as he does. Not only that, he figures out too late he's fallen for Edith (Kerr), after she and Theo (Walbrook) have fallen for each other. So he spends the rest of his personal life looking for a woman that can recreate the one he let slip away.
Kerr's character is only referred to after that point in their lives, so you can chart the course of years in the changes in Walbrook and Livesay. Walbrook turns grey, needs a cane, loses some of his boisterous good cheer and becomes more soft-spoken. The interwar years weren't kind to him, as he fled Germany after Edith died and their kids wouldn't attend the funeral because she was English.
Livesay, however, grows louder with age, even as he gets fatter and balder. Where as a young man he was able to project a quiet confidence, or at least be quiet occasionally, now he's got to loudly assert his knowledge and authority. Theo can express concerns about how the British will treat the Germans after the Great War, and Candy will get everyone at the table to assure him England wants a healthy Germany for trade and whatnot. Nothing to worry about, you see. Walbrook gives Theo a sort of weary indulgence, a man who knows his friend means well, but also that his friend has no idea what the heck he's talking about.
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