The Gathering Storm

The Gathering Storm-360P

The Gathering Storm-360P

The Gathering Storm-720P

The Gathering Storm-480P

The Gathering Storm-720P

The Gathering Storm-480P

source: The Gathering Storm

A peak at the life of the Winston Churchill I did not know about; for me he has ceased to be the rather one-dimensional leader of England during WWII and has been revealed as the many faceted, egotistic, tirant that he was. Albert Finney was wonderful; I thought he WAS Winston Churchill a few times as I was immersed in the story. There was across the board good acting by all the leading characters. Another quality winner for HBO!

Unexpectedly defeated in the election of 1945, Churchill used his latest period in the wilderness to write his highly tendentious and self-justifying war memoirs. The first volume's title is borrowed for this muddled picture of Winston in the 1930s, which ranks with HBO's "Conspiracy" for tendentiousness if not for melodrama. The theme is that Churchill alone steadfastly foresaw Hitler as a menace to European peace and was right to urge a programme of pre-emptive rearmament by Britain to forestall the Fuhrer. This is dramatised through having Ralph Wigram, a middle-ranking Foreign Office civil servant, purloin classified documents showing Germany's military build-up. The trouble is that in reality Wigram had been permitted by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, to "leak" papers to Churchill. Neither is there any reason to think that Wigram's death was suicide; he was a sick man. Moreover, we now know that Churchill's estimates of German air and armoured power (derived from disgruntled junior RAF officers as much as from Wigram) were grossly exaggerated; under the supposedly complacent Baldwin and his successor, Neville Chamberlain, Britain's defence spending, unlike its diplomacy, was more vigorous and demanding of national resources than Hitler's. The real fault in Churchill's eyes was that it was indeed defence spending. Traditional British isolationism from European quarrels would not do for Churchill, who saw himself as a reincarnation of Marlborough, the ancestor whose biography he was writing. Churchill's political exile in the film was his fate for being mistrusted as a war-loving belligerent who might drag Britain into a foreign quarrel. Although Churchill performed splendidly as a war leader between 1940 and 1944, he had no influence over British rearmament before the war and was the beneficiary of Baldwin's and Chamberlain's wise preference for protective strategies. Britain resisted Hitler in 1940 because our fighters were faster, our early-warning radar network the world's best and the Royal Navy too formidable for the German landlubbers to dare an invasion without command of the skies. If Churchill had been heeded, we would have spent our money on tanks and bombers for continental land campaigns while leaving the Home Front vulnerable. These arguments are never properly ventilated in the film. Instead we have human interest in dollops, a fine prosthetics-less turn from Finney, tactful support from Redgrave and gaping omissions: no Abdication, no Munich (!), no Chamberlain and no Anthony Eden either. In 95 minutes the preference of producers Ridley and Tony Scott for pretty pictures of Chartwell over chewy plot-substance becomes all too plain. Twenty years ago the TV serial "Winston Churchill: the Wilderness Years" ran for 400 minutes. It supplied a continually engrossing and far more balanced retrospect of the great defence debate of the Depression decade. High time we stopped letting Americans sentimentalise WSC as an infallible seer.

This is Albert Finney's defining film role. I have never seen Churchill portrayed in a movie so I cannot compare what I have seen here to anyone else's attempts. However, Churchill is now, in my mind, as portrayed in this excellent made-for-TV-film. HBO have hit the nail on the head with this one and the historical accuracy shows how incredible the events leading up to WW2 actually were. We enter the personal life of arguably the most famous Briton ever. By the end, we find out why the country loved this man so much. He is brash, he was clever, and he was right. Annoying to give in to such a arrogant man but he fully deserved it. Albert Finney brings a performance to the screen as equally compelling as De Niro's la Motta, or Pacino's Scarface. Finney is masterful in his performance and I can find no flaws. Clemmie, Vanessa Redgrave, provides a brilliant portrayal of a equally engrossing suffering wife and pleasant cameos by Ronnie Barker, Jim Broadbent and Derek Jacobi add superb pedigree to an already perfect film. There I said it, this film is flawless, magnificent and a joy to watch over and over.