A nasty film as phoney as its electric cigars

I’D LIKE to see an intelligent, critical film about Winston Churchill. Great men are seldom perfect and enough time has passed for us to stand back a bit from the great cigar-smoker. Beyond doubt he was the saviour of his country in 1940. But he got many other things badly wrong, especially Singapore and Greece.

He was also on the losing, bad side in the abdication crisis, though that stupid, over-rated movie The King’s Speech pretended otherwise. And he should have retired long before he did.

But the new film about him, starring Brian Cox is absolutely, shockingly bad and wrong. It invents stuff. It is as phoney as the electric cigars it uses instead of the real thing in the many ‘scenes of smoking’ which viewers are warned of at the start.

Some of it is small, such as a fictional event in which his long-suffering wife Clemmie slaps him across the face. But the central suggestion, that he pestered Dwight Eisenhower to call off the D-Day landings in the last few hours before they were launched, is surely tripe of the first order.

It is true that he never wanted a frontal assault on Hitler’s West Wall. It could have gone terribly wrong. But in the end, he gave in to pressure from Stalin and the Americans.

This invention allows the film-makers to portray him as a foolish, drinksoaked, humiliated old fool, despised by his generals and lost in the past. But in the final few scenes when he is redeemed (by showing empathy to his bullied secretary), they turn up the violins and resort to sentimental worship again. Nasty and gutless, both at once. And often quite dull as well.