Hitchens broadside: The King's Speech is good movie, bad history

[mgc1961]

The King's Speech is an extremely well-made film with a seductive human interest plot, very prettily calculated to appeal to the smarter filmgoer and the latent Anglophile. But it perpetrates a gross falsification of history. One of the very few miscast actors—Timothy Spall as a woefully thin pastiche of Winston Churchill—is the exemplar of this bizarre rewriting. He is shown as a consistent friend of the stuttering prince and his loyal princess and as a man generally in favor of a statesmanlike solution to the crisis of the abdication.

In point of fact, Churchill was—for as long as he dared—a consistent friend of conceited, spoiled, Hitler-sympathizing Edward VIII. And he allowed his romantic attachment to this gargoyle to do great damage to the very dearly bought coalition of forces that was evolving to oppose Nazism and appeasement. Churchill probably has no more hagiographic chronicler than William Manchester, but if you look up the relevant pages of The Last Lion, you will find that the historian virtually gives up on his hero for an entire chapter.

Read on at http://www.slate.com/id/2282194

[Smarmie Doofus]

1. K and R. n/t

[enlightenment]

2. I love it when Hitchens' gets annoyed.

But he should know by now the futility of expecting historical accuracy from Hollywood.

[Bluenorthwest]

5. This is not a Hollywood film. It is British.

Made in Britain, by British people.

[enlightenment]

7. Okay.

Stretching that point until it screams, aren't you?

I'm aware it was made in the UK, with a British cast and crew - the 'Hollywood' was a shorthand for 'popular films designed to make a lot of money'. The Brits do that, too . . .

[nxylas]

3. There's historical truth, and there's dramatic truth

I haven't seen the film, so I can't comment, but I know that it doesn't bill itself as a documentary, or even a docudrama. To take an example of a film I have seen, it doesn't matter to me that Salieri was a highly respected composer and not the mediocrity that Amadeus made him out to be. The point of the film, and the play it was based on, was to dramatize the hatred of mediocrity for genius, not to provide a course on Mozart for Dummies. Authors can be inspired by history, but they should not be constrained by it.

[yellowcanine]

6. The Churchill character was a disappointment, I'll give him that.

But I am not sure that it was historically inaccurate. When did Hitchens become an historian?

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. It's been a common criticism of the film, not just by Hitchens

See eg:

This is British interwar history, as told by the makers of The King's Speech. And it's bunk. No one would know from this scene, or any of the others in which the two appear, that Churchill had supported, lobbied for Edward VIII's right to wed Mrs Simpson and stay on the throne, that for most of the Thirties he was regarded by the establishment as a crazy, washed-up has-been, and that George VI would go on to become a staunch supporter of Chamberlain's policy of appeasement.

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2011/01/king-speech-churchill-film

Winston Churchill is the crucial figure here. As you may have read you will get no hint from the movie that Churchill – the only British politician of the period whom most audiences remember – did himself immense political harm by backing Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson against Stanley Baldwin's government's insistence that they could not marry and retain the throne.

Baldwin was right, as he usually was in his tussles with Churchill in the 20s and 30s – think the General Strike of 1926, think the Indian independence question – but even on the one where he was wrong the facts are pointlessly distorted so that he is presented as conceding that "Churchill was right" as early as 1937 when he hands over to Neville Chamberlain.
...
Far from being a Churchillian, the king didn't like him. Why should he after the abdication fiasco? Even in 1940 he would have preferred Halifax as PM. Mistrust with the palace was mutual. They had all known each other for decades and, according to Andrew Roberts's book, Eminent Churchillians, Churchill thought George V pretty stupid too.

George VI backed Chamberlain to the point of breaking with protocol and allowing his prime minister to appear with him on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after Munich, having been persuaded not to go and meet him at Heston airport. In the film the scene of waving crowds in the Mall is transposed to September 1939 – hardly likely with German air raids already underway.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2011/jan/17/kings-speech-looking-back-time-didnt-exist

[Myrina]

4. Jeez, Chris ... the "Chuchill character" is in about 3 scenes ...

... not exactly a reason to excoriate the movie, unless one has nothing better to do with their time. :eyes:

[katty]

9. Hitch, are you really perturbed so by a film?! really..relax

no one is quizzing you on Brit history.