The hat. The jowls. The spotted bow tie. The spectacles, descending the bridge of the nose. The fat cigar, brandished like a broadsword. The waistcoat, the watch chain, and the whiskey. And the voice—hark to the boom of it, rumbling up from caverns measureless to man. Put all these elements together, and who do you get? Albert Finney, that’s who. Or Richard Burton. No, wait—Michael Gambon. Maybe Robert Hardy. How about Brendan Gleeson or Brian Cox? Or John Lithgow? Timothy Spall? Oh, and there’s Viktor Stanitsyn, four times over. You can’t forget him.
If you are an actor of some eminence, naturally blessed with a mien like a full moon, it seems inevitable that, once you have attained the requisite age and girth, you will be asked to play Winston Churchill. Your obligation to do so lies somewhere between a contractual clause and a rite of passage, not unlike marrying Elizabeth Taylor in the nineteen-fifties. You could refuse the role, but that would be ungracious and perverse; you might as well turn down a medal. As with every privilege, this one comes bedecked with responsibilities. You are expected not merely to stand and declaim in the House of Commons, or in a passable facsimile of it, but also to sit and growl into a microphone. Cigars must be smoked, although Lithgow has revealed that, now that tobacco is taboo, his cigars, as deployed in “The Crown,” are made from some more innocuous, and therefore disgusting, vegetable substitute. (Brave is the doctor who would have dared to propose such a ruse to Churchill himself.) And, yes, you will be compelled to don the standard Winstonian outfit, which is now as recognizable as the Batsuit.
Consider, for instance, “The Gathering Storm.” In fact, consider it twice. There was a TV movie by that name in 1974, and another in 2002. (The title is borrowed from the first volume of Churchill’s history of the Second World War.) Each is a dramatization of the testing period, in the second half of the nineteen-thirties, during which Churchill, out of both power and favor, struggled to convince others of the threat that was posed by German rearmament. In the first film, he is played by Richard Burton; in the second, by Albert Finney, who won an Emmy for his endeavors. As both men take up the Churchillian props, it’s tempting to scroll back through their respective filmographies and to recall the impact they made, at the dawn of their careers, in fierce blue-collar roles—Burton as the resentful Jimmy Porter in “Look Back in Anger” (1959), and Finney as the pleasure-hunting factory worker in “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (1960). In postwar Britain, it seems, even actors had to climb the rope ladder of the class system; start by looking back in anger and, God willing, you could end up as a portly blueblood on the steps of 10 Downing Street, looking forward in gutsiness and hope.
The latest actor to make that journey, and to try his luck at the noble sport of Churchill-playing, is Gary Oldman, in Joe Wright’s “Darkest Hour.” Oldman grew up in a rough patch of southeast London, and the resulting movie, “Nil by Mouth” (1997), which he directed, is one of the best and the most oath-stuffed portraits of working-class British life ever created. Now he stars as Churchill, who was born in Blenheim Palace in 1874, and whose grandfather was the Duke of Marlborough. “Darkest Hour,” set in the late spring of 1940, covers the resignation of the besieged Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) and his replacement, after much ill-tempered wrangling, by Winston Churchill.
On the face of it, Oldman is an unlikely candidate—the face, indeed, being the main impediment. The young Oldman was a stranger to genial rotundity. He looked and moved like a human flick-knife, sharp and thin and stropped for mischief. He played Sid Vicious, of the Sex Pistols, in “Sid and Nancy” (1986), and the rascally playwright Joe Orton, in “Prick Up Your Ears” (1987), neither of whom is an obvious precursor to Churchill. Then came “The Firm” (1989), in which Oldman, armed with a lethal mustache, led a gang of soccer hooligans, and advocated to two rival gangs that they all club together and take on the Continental thugs. “In two weeks’ time, there’s going to be ’alf of Europe waiting in Germany for us,” he says. “If we don’t stick together, they’re going to trample all over us.” His plea is rousingly plain: “Look, I’m recruitin’ for a national firm. Do you want in, or what?” The sentiment is Churchillian enough, but the cause at stake is not the survival of Christian civilization, as Churchill phrased it, so much as the right to apply an iron bar to a Dutchman’s groin.
And now look. Here, in “Darkest Hour,” is Oldman as the old man, padded and wadded, the cheeks plump, the hair yellow-white and sparse. You could forgive this Churchill for being freighted with cares, for Germany is rampant and Britain is on the rack. Something sprightly is afoot, however, and it’s Oldman’s feet, among other things, that make the difference. His tread is not heavy and forlorn but purposeful and deft. (Though leonine, Churchill had surprisingly small paws—size 6. Fred Astaire took an 8½. When a sculptor depicted Sir Winston with large feet, he was reportedly displeased. “How was I to know?” the sculptor asked, adding, “I visualized him as a Colossus bestriding the world!”) We get the impression of someone in a hurry, whose life hitherto has led to this point, with an enemy clearly in his sights, and who is energized afresh by a crisis that might deflate a more wavering soul.
Oldman’s vocal range, likewise, is more tenor than bass, yet he makes the lightness work for him. Of all those who have tackled Churchill onscreen, the majority tend to weight their words as though even badinage were an oration, but this new Churchill, sotto voce, dithers and huffs. All of which is not just dramatically plausible but historically accurate, based on the testimony of John Colville, who served two terms as Churchill’s private secretary during the war and kept a diary, assessing, from the closest quarters, every wrinkle in his master’s temperament:
What does this remind you of, if not of an old-school actor-manager, rehearsing his lines for a grand production that he himself must oversee? Is it any wonder that real actors have swarmed toward such a man?
The most potent of Churchill’s rehearsals occurred on the morning of May 13, 1940, three days after he had been appointed Prime Minister. Malcolm MacDonald, a Member of Parliament who hoped for a place in the wartime Cabinet, was summoned to his presence. MacDonald was taken aback when Churchill said, “I’ve nothing to offer you except”—pause—“blood and toil, tears and sweat.” It later transpired that a colleague of MacDonald’s had been offered the same things. (Both men were, in fact, given ministries to run.) What Churchill was doing, as was confirmed that afternoon, in Parliament, was limbering up for this: “I would say to the House, as I would say to those who have joined this Government: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’ ”
The screenwriter of “Darkest Hour,” Anthony McCarten, has written a new book of the same name, in which he cites the scene with MacDonald. I wish that he had found room for it in the movie; what could be more beautifully suited to Oldman’s depiction of Churchill than these backroom mumbles and self-goadings? Instead, we get the greatest hits, out loud. We get the blood and the sweat, barked to the House of Commons, and, needless to say, we get the most celebrated speech of all, unleashed on June 4th, when the Prime Minister informed the world that Britain would fight the Germans on the beaches, in the streets, and wherever else they chose to intrude.
These arias of formal rhetoric deserve their fame, but, as with Hamlet’s soliloquies, that very ubiquity makes it almost impossible for us to give them a fresh hearing. (Burton was once playing Hamlet, and was disconcerted to find that Churchill, seated in the front row of the stalls, was uttering the lines at the same time, like someone at a concert singing along to his favorite song.) Worse still, “Darkest Hour” deems it necessary to beef up Churchill’s climactic address with the addition of a muscular musical soundtrack, just in case we aren’t sufficiently stirred.
That beefing is common practice. We hear it at the end of “The Gathering Storm,” where Burton—who sounds an awful lot like Richard Burton and nothing like Winston Churchill—gets a musical accompaniment, whether he likes it or not. So does Brendan Gleeson, reassuring the nation that “we shall never surrender,” in a 2009 TV movie about Churchill’s vicissitudes of wartime fortune, titled “Into the Storm.” (As far as Churchill movies are concerned, the climate is one of perpetual tempest.) Even the director Christopher Nolan, who ends this year’s “Dunkirk” with a young man reading the June 4th speech aloud from a newspaper, cannot resist the lure of a grand score, ladling souped-up Elgar onto the richness of the words. Can they not be trusted to stand by themselves?
If you are a seasoned Churchill-watcher, it can be a relief to slip away from the Second World War and to inspect less vaunted passages of his life. Make your way forward, for example, to the first half of the nineteen-fifties, when Churchill was Prime Minister once more, though beset by the drastic waning both of British global influence and of his own health. (One morning, in 1953, he held a Cabinet meeting after suffering a stroke the night before. Nobody noticed the difference.) On television, in 2016, both Michael Gambon, in “Churchill’s Secret,” and John Lithgow, in “The Crown,” incarnated a Churchill with whom age has finally caught up. In the latter, he stands before his youthful Queen (Claire Foy) in some perplexity, as she raises the “delicate matter” of “your position.” It turns out that she is referring to his placement at a forthcoming dinner, but for a moment she has grazed a sore spot, and it’s salutary to see Churchill, of all people, caught off guard. Lithgow is far too tall for the role, but he skillfully turns that loftiness to his advantage—bending to a near-stoop, as if bowing not only to his sovereign, whom he reveres, but to the gravitational summons of time.
Equally, you can start at the beginning and work back up to 1939. Exhibit A would be “Young Winston,” Richard Attenborough’s protracted but upbeat film of 1972. This rewinds to Churchill’s school days (which were far from illustrious) and traces his multifarious career as a cavalry officer, a war reporter, and an avid participant in the Battle of Omdurman, in Sudan, in 1898. You feel a bit deflated when he is elected as a mere Member of Parliament, in 1900, without any sign of swordplay. The tale that “Young Winston” tells is not as tall as it appears: Simon Ward, in the title role, bears a closer resemblance to Churchill, with the eyes set wide apart on that eager face, than any actor before or since, and we are reminded that the more outrageous elements of the Churchillian fable did actually happen. During the Second Boer War, for example, he was captured by the Boers and escaped, hiding first in a rat-infested coal mine for three days and then under a tarpaulin, on a train that crossed the frontier to freedom—a feat ardently covered in the British press, and replayed in the movie. By the age of twenty-five, he was stuck like a mote in the public eye, never to be dislodged.
The principal source for Attenborough’s film is “My Early Life,” Churchill’s sublimely impetuous memoir. It is not just the best of his many books but one of the most eventful—and least squeamish—works ever written by a politician. Try this, from his headlong recitation of close combat in the Mohmand Valley, on what is now the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The year is 1897, and a Pashtun warrior has just wounded a British officer:
The thing to bear in mind, amid such carnage, is that Churchill was at the time not strictly a combatant at all but a journalist, permitted to cover the conflict on the orders of—wait for it—Major-General Sir Bindon Blood. The writing of history, in this manner, is indistinguishable from yarn-spinning or from the narrative liberties taken by motion pictures, and, for young Winston, the limelight was the only place to be:
Think of the more sober inhabitants of Parliament, reading this theatrical bombast in 1930, when “My Early Life” was published, and quietly rejoicing that Churchill was no longer in their midst. Only a year before, he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer; now he was out of a job. This epoch is well covered in “The Wilderness Years,” which aired on British television in 1981, with Robert Hardy as Churchill. Sprawling across eight episodes, it ends with a freeze-frame of his triumphant grin, in 1939, as he is admitted to the wartime Cabinet. As with all Churchill dramas, it suffers from our retrospective wisdom: because we know that this man will weather one storm after the next, and that his doubters will be proved wrong, it’s difficult to imagine an era when doubting—indeed, loathing—was the norm.
Yet for much of his career Churchill was indeed seen as changeable to the point of treachery, having switched from the Conservative Party to the Liberals in 1904, over the issue of free trade, and back again in 1924. (“Anyone can rat, but it takes talent to re-rat,” he said.) Resentment at his attitudes toward India, Irish Home Rule, and domestic industrial strikes ran fathoms deep. Many people could or would not forget his record as First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War; in 1915, he was demoted, after a naval campaign in the Dardanelles which he had championed turned into a disaster, entailing severe losses for Britain and its allies. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he returned to the Admiralty and devised a mine-laying operation off the Norwegian coast. Applied too late, it faltered, and the German invasion of Norway went ahead: further proof, to the anti-Churchill brigade, of his rash mettle. The country could not be defended by so loose a cannon. Roy Jenkins, in his 2001 biography, sums up the view that prevailed for the bulk of Churchill’s career:
Hence the near-disbelief that gripped the House of Commons, in 1939, when he came once more to the fore. A consuming new book by Nicholas Shakespeare, “Six Minutes in May: How Churchill Unexpectedly Became Prime Minister,” takes an accurate reading of the moral atmosphere, but the historian’s poise, on the page, is neither matched nor sought onscreen. Movies like “Darkest Hour” are impatient to press onward, and the momentum is all with Churchill. Film after film mounts the same inspiring thesis: as he gained control of the war effort, a lifetime’s recklessness was transfigured into the one virtue—a refusal to yield—that suddenly seemed indispensable. The gallop led a nation to victory; the spot of grease became a badge of honor. Even the enduring British joke, acknowledged in “Darkest Hour,” that all babies look like Churchill was no handicap, for people were well disposed toward such stubborn benevolence. How young Winston grew into old Winston, and what was left unchanged in the process, is the tale that no film has told. There may be too much for the telling.
If anything links the bio-pics of Churchill, whatever their span, it is this: they’re not very good. All make some contribution to the teeming treasure house of the Churchill myth, and, were you to catch them in reruns on TV, you might well stick with them for comfort’s sake, and in the mild hope of learning something new. But, while the central role has lured performers of the highest rank, no director of equal stature has tackled so redoubtable a theme, and the strange fact remains that the most distinguished film, by far, with which Churchill was involved was one that he despised. Had he had his way, it might not have been made at all.
“The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp”—“written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger,” as the opening credits state—came out in 1943, and was, despite being even longer than “Young Winston,” favorably received by British audiences. Colonel Blimp was a familiar figure, established in a long-running newspaper cartoon of the nineteen-thirties by the left-leaning artist David Low, who intended to satirize the outmoded jingoism that encrusted the higher ranks of British society. The Blimp in the film is one Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy, an elderly buffoon with a set of soggy opinions and a mustache that makes him look like a walrus. But the film is significantly gentler than the cartoon, humanizing Wynne-Candy in a series of flashbacks that usher us through his life and illustrate how he became what he is. (He is played, with warmth and gusto, by Roger Livesey; Powell’s first choice had been Laurence Olivier, who might have lent a chill to the proceedings.) As we witness the exploits of the General in his salad days, so well intentioned toward his fellow-man—his dearest friend is a German officer with whom he fights a duel in 1902—we feel half drawn to the chivalrous blusterer that he swells into in his dotage. Clinging to the notion that war can be conducted according to a gentlemanly code, he is rudely interrupted and shamed, at the height of the Second World War, by a unit of up-to-date fighting men.
Grumbles of official discontent plagued the film from the start, when it was still no more than a script. Powell, in his autobiography (which, being vastly entertaining, is not always to be trusted), recounts that he went to see Brendan Bracken, the Minister of Information, and asked if the film could go ahead as planned. Bracken said:
The more the Old Man learned of the project, the crosser he got. In a memo to Bracken, dated September 10, 1942, he launched a broadside: “Pray propose to me the measures necessary to stop this foolish production before it gets any further. I am not prepared to allow propaganda detrimental to the morale of the Army, and I am sure the Cabinet will take all necessary action. Who are the people behind it?” That note of menace is uncharacteristic, and Bracken was uneasy with the form of censorship at which Churchill appeared to be hinting. In the end, “Colonel Blimp” was finished and released, but Bracken was right: Powell never did become Sir Michael. What was it about the film, now hailed as a masterpiece, that riled the Prime Minister so?
Certainly, “Colonel Blimp” presents no detriment to morale. Indeed, the gist of the plot is that the future and the defeat of Hitler lie squarely in the hands of modern soldiery. Did Churchill fear that viewers might see in this fuchsia-faced, harrumphing old grump a trace of their determined leader, his jaw jutting out like the prow of a dreadnought? Did he maybe see that trace himself? “War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid,” he declared in “My Early Life,” in an outburst of pure Blimpery. He added, “In fact it has been completely spoilt. It is all the fault of Democracy and Science.” He and Wynne-Candy even attended the same boarding school, Harrow. In other words, Powell and Pressburger had conjured a fictional life that veered perilously close to Churchill’s, as dense with derring-do, divisiveness, emotional extremes, and lurching reversals of fortune as his had been. By showing the ages of Blimp, they made the Churchill film that never was. And what they omitted, perhaps to his dismay, was his extraordinary late bloom. That would be more than enough to hurt the Prime Minister’s pride.
We know something of Churchill’s cinematic tastes, because he made a habit of sitting down, toward the end of a crammed wartime day, to watch a film after dinner. (Afterward, he would return to work, often expecting others to do the same.) Colville’s diary lists many of the screenings: Bette Davis in “Dark Victory” (1939) on one evening, say, followed by Edward G. Robinson in “The Woman in the Window” (1944) the next. In December, 1940, after following the travails of the characters in “Gone with the Wind,” Churchill announced himself “pulverised by the strength of their feelings”—a loaded verb, in the Blitz, when parts of London were being reduced to rubble and dust. Now and then, the films’ proximity to nonfictional dramas of the time can verge on the surreal:
The next day, Colville writes, the choice is “Western Union (with Red Indians and all the Wild West trappings) and the P. M.’s favourite March of Time.” This erodes the lingering rumor that Churchill rated “That Hamilton Woman” (1941), with Laurence Olivier as Lord Nelson and Vivien Leigh as Emma Hamilton, above all other movies, but then “The March of Time” is a special case—not a movie at all, but a regular series of short productions, watched at their peak by twenty-five million Americans every month. The films were pasted together from documentary footage and pumped up into semi-dramas, with excitable voice-overs. You will know the style, because it is parodied, without mercy, in the mock newsreel that prefaces “Citizen Kane.” No surprise, perhaps, that Welles’s movie, when shown for Churchill, failed to strike a chord. Colville writes:
Churchill’s coolness may have been exacerbated by memories of his trip to Hollywood, in 1928, during which he was invited to Hearst Castle, the mansion in San Simeon that was the model for Xanadu in “Citizen Kane.” It was in Hearst’s company that Churchill first encountered Charlie Chaplin. The two men got on famously, as only the famous can; the former pronounced the latter to be “bolshy in politics & delightful in conversation,” and there even arose the question of a professional partnership. Churchill advanced the idea for a film about the young Napoleon, saying that Chaplin should direct and play the lead, and that he, Churchill, would write the script. Two world-straddling egotists discussing the life of a third: what a spectacle it must have made, though not as startling as the lunch at Chartwell, Churchill’s country house, two years later, when the host inquired of Chaplin what part he would play next. “Jesus Christ,” Chaplin replied. There was a pause, then Churchill said, “Have you cleared the rights?”
There is an important affinity here, and it touches upon the alarming desire, rare in regular mortals but common among the great and the mad, to envisage one’s stint on earth as a performance. David Copperfield, like most of us, was unsure as to whether he would be the hero of his own life; Churchill and Chaplin had no such qualms, and every gesture, be it a cavalry charge or a pratfall, was proffered as part of the act. Here, as described by Colville, is the lone leader of the fight against Nazism, in 1940, flat on his ass:
It remains a close call as to which of the two men, the statesman or the comedian, is the most recognizable Englishman of the twentieth century. Both can be identified from their silhouettes alone, and the Tramp’s costume, right down to the hat and the cane, is like a pauper’s response, roughed up and slimmed down, to the well-fed Churchillian look. Both men, moreover, had a self-proclaimed gift for reaching over the heads of the bien-pensants and answering to popular prejudice and popular taste. When Churchill, on the morning of V-E Day, took time to insure that there was no shortage of beer in London for the imminent celebrations, he was obeying a principle—humane and humbug-hating—that Chaplin, and indeed Dickens, would instantly have grasped.
By that robust standard, most of the Churchill films that we possess, though dutiful, come across as doughy and sedate. Had he watched “Darkest Hour,” he might have been flattered to see himself take the national helm; abashed to hear himself grousing at a secretary (Lithgow does the same, as does Brian Cox in this year’s “Churchill”); and amused to hear a parliamentary foe scorn him as “an actor, in love with the sound of his own voice.” In truth, however, Churchill continues to slip the clutches of modern movies, and I sense that the full force and the flavor of his life would have been most happily caught by the early silent cinema, which burgeoned under Chaplin’s spell, and thrived on the implausible and the breakneck. Oldman, Hardy, Finney, and the rest of the team are stalwart and assiduous in their care for detail, and what they arrive at, in every instance, is far more than a mere impersonation. And yet they fall short, as they are doomed to do. The best person at playing Churchill, in the end, was Winston Churchill himself. ♦
