Albert Finney as Churchill (Jim Broadbent as Desmond Morton, The Gathering Storm)
Michael Gambon as Churchill (Churchill’s Secret)
Friends,
Another rather shorter blog where I depart from our usual fare, this time in content. Since this summer, without intending this (in a “fit of absence of mind”), I’ve been watching and reading about a sub-genre of movie I hadn’t realized existed: films centering on Winston Churchill as a piquantly fascinating and admirable older hero. In one he seems hardly to figure, Dunkirk; in another, he is sideshow for a season, The Crown (superb performance by John Lithgow — I hope to blog soon on this extraordinarily well-done serial drama); in a third, he is sort of warped Trump twin, The Darkest Hour (very worrying film). Then after reading Geoffrey Wheatcoft’s superb essay in the NYRB, “A Star is Born” (January 18, 2018), the most touching and insightful of biographical sketches, Rosemary Dinnage’s “Holding the Baby: Clementine Churchill” (under “Partners and Muses” in Alone! Alone! Lives of Some Outsider Women), and Joan Hardwick’s Clementine Churchill: The Private Life of a Public Figure, I consciously set out to watch two against type: 2001 The Gathering Storm, and 2016 Churchill’s Secret.
A statue on the Chartwell grounds
This is a departure because I avoid books and movies about supposedly great men, often, as Thomas More had it, the pests of humanity. I dislike and find such films dangerous most of the time (exceptions include anti-war films Danger USB, Piece of Cake, Kilo Two Bravo). I slipped into this for the reason I want to talk about two against type: we find ourselves in a culture and unacknowledged coup lurching towards war. The cult has been and continues to be heavily American, a profoundly militarist state where violence is close to the surface, and macho male norms prevail. What can attract them? What’s worth noticing is the Churchill films (until The Darkest Hour) have been anti-fascist because Churchill’s intelligence, words, behaviors help undermine the hero fantasy, and he is not himself an action-adventure icon. The list of actors playing the various parts in these films show something worth while glimpsed in the legend: Richard Burton, Robert Hardy, Robert Shaw; even the self-deprecating ever self-conscious Bob Hoskins (in World War Two: When Lions Roared, in split screens, with Michael Caine as Stalin, John Lithgow as Churchill, with much war documentary footage).
Gathering Storm and Churchill’s Secret place Clementine equally at the center
Vanessa Redgrave as Clementine who Churchill calls Mrs Pussycat and she Churchill Mr Pug (Gathering Storm)
Lindsay Duncan as Clementine, with Romola Garadi as Nurse Millie (the myth has come to include a young woman working for Churchill whose life he changes)
These two against type also feature Clementine as central, a role when written with insight offers remarkable moments for a great actress: in The Crown, when Harriet Walter as Clementine burns Graham Sutherland’s portrait of her husband because Sutherland captured his aging and dense characteristics and she cares about how she remembers him, it’s one of the finest intense sequences of the first season.
After reading Sir Almroth Wright’s able and weighty exposition of women as he knows them the question seems no longer to be ‘Should women have the vote?’ but ‘Ought women not to be abolished altogether?’… We learn from him that in their youth they are unbalanced, that from time to time they suffer from unreasonableness and hypersensitivity … and … later on in life they are subject to grave and long-continued mental disorders, and if not quite insane, many of them have to be shut up … May we not look to Sir Almroth Wright to crown his many achievements by delivering mankind from the parasitic, demented and immortal species which has infested the world for so long … Clementine Churchill, a letter to The Times, published 1912)
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Chartwell in both films played an important role.
In both we are being let into the life of the house and watch the characters wander about the grounds. In Gathering Storm, Churchill is fixing his pond, draining it, saving ducks; in Churchill’s Secret, it is a ambiguous haven for all.
I was much moved by The Gathering Storm. I felt as a widow what I’ve lost was enacted by Redgrave and Finney’s relationship: deep companionship and support. It gave over some 2/3s perhaps to private daily life whose values are not militaristic, not aggressive (anything but), nurturing, home-making. The movie has Churchill show Clementine on behalf of what he is acting: what preserving — good quiet lives lived in liberty. The center was the same as Spielberg’s The Post: a defense of whistle-blowers.
The film’s other hero, Linus Roache as Ralph Wigam is a Deep Throat, a Daniel Ellsberg, is supplying documents and evidence to Winston so he can have ballast in his speeches that they must prepare for and fight the insanely tyrannical socio-pathic Hitler. Wigam and his wife love dearly their disabled child, a Downs Syndrome son, caring for him tenderly. The emphasis was also on how Wigam was not supported by his colleagues (as is Ellsberg in The Post). In a Laura Poitras film the hero is a victim, and in The Gathering Storm Wigam’s colleagues, e.g., Hugh Bonneville as Pettifer. threaten Wigam by saying they will place him where he and his wife cannot attend properly to their child’s needs. Wigam cracks under the pressure of doing what he has been trained not to do.
Ronnie Barker returns as an the argumentative faithful comic Butler. Vulnerability is to the fore, mutual tolerance, comradeship.
The original title for Churchill’s Secret was KBO (said to be Churchill’s motto: Keep Buggering On). Here we have a man who with the help of a working class nurse who would never have voted for him, brings himself back from near death; the courage to be is at the film’s center. He’s weak, sick, and yet aware of others. No pious family, bickering bitter snarky adult children (especially good are Tara Fitzgerald and the inimitable Matthew Macfayden as egregious snob Randolph and desperate Diana. Rachel Stirling as the daughter deprived of a man because her father despised him), yet everyone gathers together to watch a film and walk in the garden.
In Churchill’s Secret, there was a disturbing intrusion of our contemporary insanities: the way Garai was introduced. A hard-working nurse, she is commanded by silent men to “come” with no explanation, then threatened if she spills some vital secret she will regret it forever. This is appalling — it seems to be presented as part of life. Garai is about to go to Australia to live a life as a man’s wife when she really would prefer to stay in London because her job is more satisfying. She does not long to spend her life as this man’s wife. And watching Clementine crying and the family’s lack of identity outside this man gives her courage to say no. She seems to lose her labor identification and allow her father’s earnest reading to be made fun of (just a bit, as Churchill reads the same poet).
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A photograph of Winston and Clemmie walking together when young
What is valued in these two films are relationships between people, reasonableness, strength as staying true to an inner self, kindness and real equity. No misogyny, no ritual humiliation for anyone. Touching individualizations. In Dunkirk it’s a sheer will to survive that governs the evacuation whose hero is Mark Rylance.
When you come to the quiet end of these two films, you might think as I did: how unfathomable and crazy can we be in the US to have large numbers of people supporting a manic malevolent man who promotes violence, anti-social behavior at every turn, says carelessly he’ll kill 12 million, and no one acts seriously consistently to remove him.
This is Churchill’s portrait of himself from 1920
Izzy tells me she has read Churchill’s war correspondence and it is very worth reading. The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor by Jonathan Rose is valuable. That last word is significant: he made himself into a theatrical figure in public, a possible clue to the cult. Like Martin Luther King he was a master rhetorician, but since he was not philosophically deep, we have to look elsewhere to understand. A recent book by Barry Gough extends our sense of Churchill as head of the Navy together with John Arbuthnot Fisher in World War I.
In Joan Hardwick we see the aristocratic culture of the later 19th and early 20th century: Clementine was the child by a man who was not her mother’s legal husband; the same man fathered her older sister. Her twin brothers had a different father. She was sent away to and pulled out of schools on whims, for lack of money. Maybe she clung to Winston because he was rock-like, a kind of Tolstoy’s Levin & Karenin with cigar and liquor.
As Sir Winston and Lady Churchill much older; Harriet Walter as Clementine burning the false portrait
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Mike Powe sent this about another more recent enactment:
http://www.identitytheory.com/dvd-review-into-the-storm/
Ives Smith on the rash of Churchill films, and especially Darkest Hour against a context of Brexit:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/01/darkest-hour-rash-winston-churchill-portrayals-tell-us-brexit-britain.html
What disturbed me is this Churchill (Gary Oldman) is openly a jeering bully, a liar, utterly irrational, half-mad in his approach to other people. The film forgets that Chamberlain’s (and before him Baldwin) were motivated by memories of a hideous war; that their policies were what the British people wanted. Atlee too is egregiously attacked — after the war he brought in nationalizing, the national health, and was popular and a decent man, not a fool at all. A negotiator. The British people did not want a bulwark against communism and did not understand quite why Hitler was tolerated.. One of the recent Republicans seeing it pronounced the hero type a Trump.
An excellent review of Barry Gough’s 600 page (!) Churchill and Fisher: Titans at the Admiralty by Jan Morris in the Times Literary Supplement for January 24, 2018, p 28. I repeat the URL as it’s worth reading for its sense of a possibly homoerotic relationship between the two men. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/clash-and-clatter/
This is exactly my yardstick. I did a presentation on the topic at a conference last year. I hope the idea will spread: “What is valued in these two films are relationships between people, reasonableness, strength as staying true to an inner self, kindness and real equity. No misogyny, no ritual humiliation for anyone.”
Do tell us the name of your paper and where you presented it! If you can, put it online. 🙂 I’d like to read it and put the URL here.
Catherine Janofsky:
Churchill is a hero of mine. We never go to movies so wait until it comes out on CD. A remarkable book is Harold Nicholson by Norman Rose. I think I might have recommended it, forgive me if I’m repeating. Insight into his marriage, his relationship with Mosley and Churchill. No idol-worship, just facts and insight into my favorite era of British history, the first 45 years of the 20th century.
Note: Harold Nicolson was a great biographer. You might read Joan Hardwick on Clementine Churchill too.
Me: Do you think the Americans who are drawn to Winston Churchill are mostly women? each time someone has talked of how she loves these films, it’s been a woman. When I see someone carrying a Winston Churchill book, it’s been a woman?
Catherine: I don’t know. The only time I saw my dad cry was when watching his funeral. Mitford people, whom I guess are mostly women might be fans or they might be fascinated with Jenny.
By “Jenny” you mean Lady Randolph Churchill? I see Winston’s mother who was American born. Ah. I know nothing of her. Was she made into a character in a PBS on-going serial decades ago? I have yet to meet a man rushing out to see a Churchill film or talk about it the women do.
My father thought FDR’s death without having Henry Wallace in place as his Vice President a fateful continuing loss. He said people did cry in the streets when Roosevelt died.
Jennie Churchill was portrayed by Anne Bancroft in the film Young Winston (1972) and by Lee Remick in the British television series Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill (1974). Also, see this link for biographies and details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Randolph_Churchill
A pet peeve: I cannot understand why people who have never met these individuals refer to them by their first names — it implies a relationship that does not exist. I would not have known who Jenny is until I guess that Winston Churchill’s mother was referred to, looked up Winston Churchill on Wikipedia and then click on Lady Randolph Churchill and discovered her first or familiar name was Jenny.
I agree, much too much familiarity in our current culture. It makes me cringe to hear the Duchess of Cambridge referred to as “Kate Middleton”. As if she was a neighbor down the street!
What bothers is a delusion is spread 1) that these people are living lives like ours, which they are not; 2) they care about or are linked to us somehow with an imagined connection, even obligation of some sort (so people protest when an actor leaves a show. This leads to foolish voting patterns among other things. The British Royal Family encourages this with photos of Prince William and his princess outside the hospital with her with her baby in her arms, and both dressed very plainly as if they were about to call a cab. Around the block is their fully-equipped limousine; at home is her nanny and a house filled with expensive clothes and servants at the ready; an accountant to work at their money is available at any time. As they drive through the streets, other cars are often obliged to give way. I know sometimes the farce is gone through of him driving up and driving her somewhere in an expensive car on some occasions — it’s for the camera.
And it extends to writers of books, of film series, all sorts of places. And is encouraged by the people themselves when they come online.
I’m now following yet another course at OLLI at Mason: World War I: its realities, its legacies — only the last 4 weeks of 8 this term and 8 last. As luck would have it, the teacher sent a non-western view of British rule in India where Churchill emerges as a ruthless mass murderer repeatedly. It fits well with a present reading of Paul Scott’s Jewel in the Crown as well as the serial film drama by Ken Taylor on TrollopeandHisContemporaries@groups.io
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/03/10/in-winston-churchill-hollywood-rewards-a-mass-murderer/?utm_term=.f53a267f74ec
Ellen,
Thanks for the link to the Churchill piece. I knew about starving the Bengals, but not the rest. Not in any way to excuse Churchill, but he follows a long tradition. Jane Austen’s uncle in law mentions the famine in the 1760s that killed 10 million in Bengalis, making a noticeable dent in the world population at the time, caused by the British East India Company insisting that the Indians grow indigo rather than food for themselves, and the Bulwyer Lyton who, while viceroy of India in the nineteenth century, oversaw another mass Indian starvation while giving purportedly the longest banquet in history for his own people. And of course there were the ruthless Britsh machine guns slaughters in Africa. No wonder Hitler was surprised when the British turned against him: I think he felt sure they (at least the upper classes) understood him. He was nothing if not derivative, trying to get for Germany what he believed the rightful “share” of colonial loot (only turning on other European nations) that the British already had gotten. Both he and Churchill had both feet firmly planted in a 19th century worldview.
Diane
5/10: this week I saw a 1999 PBS film, misnamed All The Kings Men (the title is a common one and tells nothing of the film’s contents) it tells the larger story of the catastrophic slaughter of thousands and thousands of men at Gallipolli
It uses an incident where all the men from a single country house — the king’s Sandringham — went as a battalion to Gallipolli and only one returned. No one has ever offered an official explanation, much less any kind of apology. Basically they were thrown away: these young men went with foolish naive ideas about glory and honor, seeming almost not to consider they are invading a country, sent there to kill, and so of course the people there will try to kill you. No provision made for them of any long term supplies, no study of the terrain, they were told to take a hill (rather like Kubrick’s Paths of Glory) only there were no trenches to hide in. it’s too sentimental about the country house and much compromise of nostalgia for this “earlier innocent world” (I thought of Gosford Park) but the effect was as strong as Paths of Glory and it by telling this incident in such detail taught me what happened at Gallipolli. I heard one watcher say as if this is adequate: Churchill stubbed his toe. Another woman moaned about the bad Turks but most people could see what was put before us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_King%27s_Men_(1999_film)
E.M.