Posted on 01/07/2018 7:01:09 AM PST by Rummyfan
Churchill is an abidingly popular role with big-time actors once the receding hairline and expanding girth of middle-age set in. Sometimes the player is too evidently suited to the part - one thinks of Robert Hardy on telly in the Eighties - and the jowly gravitas gets clanked around as if Winnie wandered Chartwell and Westminster in never-was-so-much-owed mode 24/7. On the literal face of it, the man who brought both Sid Vicious and Commissioner Gordon to the silver screen is one of the least obvious cinematic Winstons ever, and he wears his lavish prosthetics with a very light touch. Gary Oldman's is stylistically both a nimbler and more shambolic Churchill - boozy and blustery and blubbery, immensely secure and oddly disconnected. It is a dazzling performance of the indispensable man of the century, intelligent and insightful, yet one that caused me, by the end, a grave unease.
Churchill tends to the Churchillian, which is to say the epic. Darkest Hour, by contrast, is very finely focused. Joe Wright, director, and Edward McCarten, writer, confine their two dark hours of screen time to a couple of critical weeks in May 1940, when Hitler's invasion of Norway precipitated Neville Chamberlain's retreat from Downing Street. Aside from some rather elaborately choreographed overhead shots and a lush grandiose score, Darkest Hour is filmed claustrophobically - in poky sitting rooms, Downing Street basements, attics, Westminster ante-rooms, and chilly lavatories; the lighting is crepuscular. The fate of the world is being determined, but we never glimpse the far horizons, only the dingy backrooms.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
In the companion book the author makes fairly clear that in his research he could see how totally opposite Churchill and Halifax were in their approach to policy. That being said. Halifax was convinced that there was, and had to be, a true possibility for peace, while Churchill was temperamentally convinced that Hitler would not allow it. VDH, in his new book, gives us the quote that Hitler would be happy with ten years of war to get the conquests he felt his people deserved.
Halifax did not want Britain to surrender its independence in any peace negotiation and Churchill was convinced that once started, peach negotiations with a rampaging and successful Hitler would have no other outcome.
Then the director failed.
Fun, though!
The film had its flaws, but even so was head and shoulders above most other films of the past five or even ten years. Because of the subject matter: arguably the greatest man of the past century.
And he was eager to please his muslim overlords.
The idea of PM Churchill riding the subway is absurd.
We loved the film, though. Gary Oldman was invisible and all I saw was Churchill in his performance. My wife did not know much about the Great Man going in, and she found it fascinating.
Just watched it. A+++
It also showed what a stupid dick FDR was.
Neville Chamberlain was just like Obama..
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