And Churchill was understating his case. 8>)
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 ...
The Darkest Hour is just before the first Scotch of the morning
England only had to deal with their “darkest hour” for 5 years...we had 8! And they were actually able to shoot back and fight whereas we had to just sit down and suck it up.
Churchill: "And you, madam, are ugly. But in the morning, I shall be sober."
Winston Churchill
Just saw this yesterday morning.
I thought it was well done. In many, many ways it made me think of what President Trump faces on a daily basis.
Best scene was when Churchill jumped out of his car and road the underground for one stop. If that scene is true, those people were heroic and epic in their own time.
Is the movie Pro Churchill?
“Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
Poster hangs in my law office.
I’ve always enjoyed Gary Oldman’s craft. I am not a regular movie-goer at all (it’s been over 20 years since I darkened the door of any movie theatre), but this one is on my “must see” list, both for the acting and the partial story of one of the 20th century’s greatest leaders.
I saw this over the weekend. Much better in my opinion than Dunkirk. Dunkirk was all action, Churchill was the central figure of the story of Dunkirk yet was barely mentioned. This movie was all about Churchill. There was no action at all really. But it told the real story in my opinion.
The scene toward the end with Winnie on the tube was brilliant !
Absolutely, sans the Olympian halos that are wont to surround him .. because even portrayed as a regular human like most of us, it still manages to convey that a number of said halos are well-deserved.
Their latter day foibles notwithstanding, that statement nails it precisely.
And Churchill was understating his case. 8>)
Well he did get some help. He didn’t have the resources to do it alone in fact.
Chartwell books in NYC has an interesting website all about Churchill.
True enough, but with few exceptions, the spineless appeasers surrounding WC would have rolled over without even asking for said help, or having the will to use it if it was proferred.
The “tube” scene was an invention of the filmmakers.
But essential to the story as told.
That’s the scene that Steyn says never happened.
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