Can ‘Darkest Hour’ Avoid the Pitfalls That Have Plagued so Many Churchill Films?

The same difficulty arises with nearly all film treatments of Winston Churchill, the greatest human being of the 20^th century. His largeness of soul, his capacious intellect, his legendary wit, his soaring oratory, and the length, breadth, and heated controversies of his long career—including many disasters, mistakes, and personal setbacks—are hard to render in the compressed format of feature films while retaining the profundity and substance of the man. Most films or TV shows about Churchill, or containing a significant Churchill role, are disappointing. There are a few exceptions, all of which owe their success to combining three related challenges in the right proportion.

The first and most obvious is casting. The role has humbled some of the greatest actors of modern times such as Richard Burton, whose 1974 turn in The Gathering Storm is entirely forgettable. The question is freshly acute with the arrival of Darkest Hour with Gary Oldman in the starring role, which has become controversial even before its general theatrical release this week, and coming on the heels of two other Churchill depictions, last summer’s Churchill featuring Brian Cox in the title role, and the prominent inclusion of Churchill’s character in the Netflix series The Crown. The less said about Churchill the better. This film took Churchill on the eve of the D-Day landing as its focus, and the result is a film that is not just ahistorical, but anti-historical. The summary judgment of Andrew Roberts, currently working on his own Churchill biography, is sufficient: “The only problem with the movie—written by the historian Alex von Tunzelmann—is that it gets absolutely everything wrong. Never in the course of movie-making have so many specious errors been made in so long a film by so few writers.” John Lithgow in The Crown plays a stooped-over Churchill who was borderline senile, a gross caricature of the reality of Churchill’s second premiership. Part of the problem is a defective script, but at 6-foot-4, Lithgow would seem a poor physical match for the 5-foot-6 inch Churchill, if nothing else.

The second challenge for every screenwriter and director is what story line, or period of Churchill’s life, should a film try to cover or employ as a character study? A person who was in office for more than 50 years, who switched parties twice, who was at the center of two world wars and the beginning of the Cold War, who saw combat as a young soldier on horseback (including the last full cavalry charge of the British army and a daring escape from a prisoner of war camp) and as middle-aged commander in the trenches, who was present in New York for the great crash of 1929 and later run over by a car on Fifth Avenue . . . you get the idea. And how can the many facets of Churchill’s character and talents be conveyed—the soldier, the politician, the painter, the author of 50 books, the connoisseur of fine food and wine, the raconteur, the sportsman—even a turn as a bricklayer? There’s good reason he was Time magazine’s “Man of the Half Century” in 1950. At that time the magazine said “no man’s history can sum up the dreadful, wonderful years, 1900-1950. Churchill’s story comes closest.”

The temptation is usually to cast Churchill at his peak, in his “finest hour” in World War II, but that is such a large story, involving other great figures such as FDR and Stalin, that Churchill usually ends up weakly defined. Most films attempting to portray Churchill against the wide canvas of the whole war, such as the 1994 made-for-TV movie World War II: When Lions Roared, are bland and forgettable, and capture the “roar” of Churchill at a very low decibel level and in monochromatic tones. When Lions Roared offers Bob Hoskins as Churchill, and is the weakest performance of the cast, which offers Michael Caine as Stalin and, ironically, John Lithgow turning in the best performance of the film as FDR. (Maybe someday Lithgow can be offered a Stalin film vehicle to complete the trifecta—he could do his own one-man Yalta show perhaps)

The more successful film renderings involve a shorter slice of Churchill’s life, such as one of the earliest Churchill films, 1972’s Young Winston, starring Simon Ward in a faithful adaptation of Churchill’s memoir My Early Life. This winsome and utterly ingenuous film, based on the veteran screenwriter Carl Foreman’s script (Foreman wrote the screenplays for High Noon, Bridge on the River Kwai, and The Guns of Navarone) and directed by Richard Attenborough, featured a stellar supporting cast including Robert Shaw and Anne Bancroft as Winston’s parents, Anthony Hopkins as David Lloyd-George, and Jane Seymour in one of her very first roles, as Winston’s early love interest Pamela Plowden. The film holds up extremely well, and is notable for resisting the temptation to use Churchill’s obvious ambition to make him into an ambiguous or grotesque anti-hero. The film ends just as My Early Life does—with a rendition of one of his controversial early speeches in the House of Commons in 1901 about the military budget, then meeting and marrying Clementine Hozier, with whom he “lived happily ever afterwards.”

Sharp-eyed viewers may perk up at the early scene involving the stern school headmaster who caned the unruly 8-year old Winston excessively during his brief time at St. George’s School. (The scene marvelously conveys Churchill’s impertinence in his questioning of the Latin first declension vocative case.) The headmaster, with the unlikely name of Rev. H.W. Sneyd-Kynnersley, was played by Robert Hardy, who went on a decade later to turn in arguably the best performance of Churchill in the eight-part BBC TV series from 1981, Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, covering the long recovery from the low point in Churchill’s career from 1929 to 1939. (Hardy also appears in the Richard Burton’s The Gathering Storm, as Joachim von Ribbentrop.) Like Young Winston, The Wilderness Years hews faithfully to the source material, in this case the fifth volume of Martin Gilbert’s magisterial official biography of Churchill covering that period, the longest of the Gilbert’s eight volumes at 1,167 pages. Hardy turns in a brilliant and wide-ranging performance, capturing Churchill’s intense energy and drive but also his emotional and romantic aspects with great effect, reaching a pitch-perfect climax in the eighth and final episode that contains a moving rendition of his speech attacking the disastrous 1938 Munich agreement. The very last scene, where a humbled Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain invites Churchill back into the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty after the outbreak of war on September 3, 1939, shows Hardy inhabiting the role of Churchill with a couple subtle mannerisms that are easily missed if you’re not watching closely.

A perfect case study in how Churchill films go wrong is seen in two HBO productions, The Gathering Storm in 2002, which also covers Churchill’s “Wilderness Years” ending in 1939, and its sequel Into the Storm in 2009, which attempts to cover the entire sweep of World War II. Both films were produced by Ridley Scott and featured screenplays written by Hugh Whitemore, a veteran writer of many superb historical dramas (including most notably a 1984 PBS docudrama on the Hiss-Chambers case that remains strangely unavailable). Despite the common production teams, the different casts and different approach to the story line make the The Gathering Storm a success and Into the Storm a failure. Albert Finney fills the Churchill role (with Vanessa Redgrave as Clementine) in a rich performance that conveys every bit as effectively as Hardy Churchill’s personal and political ups and downs during his Wilderness Years decade. Into the Storm, by contrast, cast Brendan Gleeson as Churchill, and though he looks and sounds the part decently enough, he puts in a flat and uninspiring rendition.

Part of the defects of Into the Storm can be attributed to the third challenge for all would-be Churchill filmmakers. Even when limiting the story arc to specific time period of Churchill’s life, screenwriters can’t resist the urge to work in or move around some of Churchill’s “greatest hits,” that is, some of his most famous witticisms, quips, or statements made at a different time or in a different context. Darkest Hour does this extensively, for example in a scene where Churchill barks at Lord Edward Halifax, “stop interrupting me when I’m interrupting you!” Most biographies attribute this illuminating comment showing Churchill’s domineering side as directed against his son Randolph at the dinner table at home at Chartwell years before, not to a fellow Cabinet minister. Into the Storm commits a related mistake endemic to so many films today of playing with the timeline, telling the story as a series of flashbacks while repeatedly jumping back to an anchoring scene meant to convey a subtle theme—in his case showing a worn down and defeated Churchill at the end of the war, without, however, capturing the poignancy of what Churchill himself called the “tragedy” of the end of the war in the last volume of his war memoirs. Poor Brendan Gleeson was defeated by both the script and the direction.

Which brings us to the controversy over Darkest Hour. Director Joe Wright and screenwriter Anthony McCarten stick closely to the timeline of the crucial first three weeks of Churchill’s premiership culminating in the intense battle inside the war cabinet between Churchill and foreign secretary Lord Halifax. This conflict, which was largely unknown to historians before the 1980s (largely because Churchill deliberately concealed and mistold it in his memoirs), reached its climax on May 28, with Churchill’s “choking in our own blood on the floor” speech to the entire cabinet. But Wright and McCarten take great liberties with some facts, move around some of Churchill’s statements, and invent some completely ahistorical scenes (especially Churchill taking a ride in the London underground), all in service of a revisionist narrative that on the whole gets more of the big things right than wrong. It is useful to compare Darkest Hour with Into the Storm. Both films offer a version of the Churchill-Halifax confrontation, but even with the objections that can be made about the inventions of Darkest Hour, its overall portrayal of this crucial moment is far superior.

Much more can be said, and undoubtedly will be, about Darkest Hour, and the controversy itself places it as a film apart from all the others, likely prompting fresh rounds of interest in Churchill. Maybe the semi-fictional inventions of Darkest Hour that in some ways understate Churchill’s greatness are a grudging concession to the fact that Churchill’s story, like The Great Gatsby, overwhelms the ability to render it on film straightforwardly, especially in our egalitarian age that resents this kind of magnificence. Nick Carraway’s last words to Gatsby come to mind: “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” Carraway’s coda to this comment could just as easily fit Winston: “[H]is face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we’d been in cahoots on that fact all the time.”

Steven F. Hayward is senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of Greatness: Churchill, Reagan, and the Making of Extraordinary Leaders.