1944 and all that

The star of this film is the music, composed by Lorne Balfe. I really liked it, which was just as well, because it plays for about half the 98 minutes, while a superannuated Churchill, played by Brian Cox, moons about on beaches, deeply penitent for his catastrophic authorisation of the Gallipoli disaster in which a quarter of a million Allied troops lost their lives on the beaches of Turkey. It is the summer of 1944, and an apparently almost pacifist Churchill is timidly begging Eisenhower and Montgomery not to go ahead with the Normandy landings. He dreads the loss of life, you see.

Not being a Churchill scholar, indeed being, I must admit, Churchill-allergic, I have no idea if this is true or false. It did not ring any more true to me than the depiction of a benevolent and politically astute Mountbatten in Viceroy’s House, woodenly rendered by Hugh Bonneville. After all, this Churchill is the man who, as well as being responsible for Gallipoli in his younger days, would gleefully offer the British people blood, toil, sweat and whatever. He would round off his war career by bombing the civilians of Dresden and then casually handing over eastern Europe to Stalin, the worst mass murderer in modern times. By 1944, the death toll, for which he was directly responsible, must have been in the tens of millions; 1944 seems a bit late to be turning him into an agonised Hamlet. In one scene, Churchill, whose agnosticism is well documented, kneels down and prays.

This film concentrates on Churchill the self-doubter, Churchill the sufferer from black dog, and Churchill the foully bad-tempered bawler-out of secretaries. Here, no doubt, we’re on surer ground, for it is a matter of record that, especially when drunk, this is what he was like.