Lord Moran

Brendan Gleeson as WSC. (Photo by Susan Allnutt for HBO.))

Brendan Gleeson as WSC. (Susan Allnutt for HBO)

“Into the Storm,” a television drama broadcast by the BBC and HBO, produced by Ridley Scott, directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, with Brendan Gleeson as Winston Churchill and Janet McTeer as Clementine Churchill. Screenplay by Hugh Whitemore.

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods…”
—“Horatius,” stanza XXVII in Lays of Ancient Rome, by Thomas Babbington Macaulay. Recited at the beginning and at the end of “Into the Storm.”

Here is a TV docudrama packing exceptional honesty. An old man, at an age when most men retire (or in his time die), is handed command of his nation, when no one else wants it, in the greatest crisis of her history. They fight alone, save for their kith and kin, “the old lion and her lion cubs,” as he put it, “against hunters who are armed with deadly weapons.” And they win—only to see the old man dismissed in the moment of victory.

The opening scene is Hendaye, France, July 1945, where Churchill, his wife and daughter Mary spend a week’s break between polling-day in the British General Election and the start of the Potsdam Conference. Anxious for election returns (delayed for a fortnight to count the service vote) Churchill relives the past five years in a series of flashbacks. This is the film’s one jarring element: the back-and-forth occurs without obvious transition, and you have to remind yourself whether you are in the past or present. It is the only fault worth noting. The story is massive, the action real, the history honest, the dialogue convincing, the scenes artful, the acting superb.

Brendan Gleeson, who in life speaks with a heavy Irish brogue, is the best Churchill since Robert Hardy. He falls into none of the usual traps. Most Churchill impersonators overdo the accent or the famous lisp, the V-sign or toilet scenes or siren suits, the caricatures painted by Lord Moran or Alanbrooke. Gleeson’s work was praised by WSC’s daughter Lady Soames, the sternest of critics.

Hugh Whitemore, the sensitive scriptwriter of Scott’s preceding film, “The Gathering Storm,” has again helped by not loading the dialogue with soaring rhetoric. “Papa spoke in private,” his daughter says, “much as he did in public.” And here is the private Churchill, with doubts about winning, fears of the future, and faults of his own—for he was as human as anyone, freely admitted it, and often apologized for it, especially to his wife.

Several quotes, though real enough, are taken out of time or context, but Whitemore blends them flawlessly into the story, and the student of Churchill’s words doesn’t mind. Several scenes—the famous “naked encounter” with Roosevelt is one—didn’t happen that way, but are so seamlessly integrated and well acted as to make them believable and acceptable. Churchill’s habits—like the mandatory siesta which enabled him to work into the wee hours—are deftly conveyed in a line of dialogue. There is no bending of history for the sake of drama. Only the advanced pedant can object to the film’s artistic license.

Yalta, 1954: Gleeson, Cariou, Patrenko (HBO).

Yalta, 1945: Gleeson, Cariou, Patrenko (HBO).

Janet McTeer is no Vanessa Redgrave, the archetypal Clementine in “The Gathering Storm.” She doesn’t even look like Clemmie, falling short of the character described by her daughter Mary’s biography. Though she gives WSC good advice, she seems more of a neurotic scold than a pillar of strength. It doesn’t matter because Gleeson, “throws himself into the character and completely owns him,” as Daniel Carlson writes, “from the nonstop cigars to the famous cadence of his speeches. Gleeson is believably tough but doesn’t make Churchill a warmonger or bully; if anything, he’s burdened by the thought of the boys he has sent to die.”

Carlson has his finger on the outstanding quality of this film: its sensitivity to Churchill’s true persona. Despite many opportunities for ignorant political posturing—the leveling of German cities, for example—Scott and Whitemore always have Churchill saying what he truly believed—culled in this case from My Early Life (1930): “War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid.”

”Into the Storm” packs less depth than “The Gathering Storm”—like the persecution of Ralph Wigram for sending WSC secret reports on German rearmament, and the bravery of his wife Ava during threats against their family. But too much is going on for sidebars. This is World War II, remember: the French debacle, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, Pearl Harbor, Singapore, the fraught meetings with Roosevelt (Len Cariou) and Stalin (Alexy Patrenko), the all-or-nothing assault on Normandy. Leadership is the plot, sub-plot and sidebar.

Some Churchillians have asked why Ridley Scott couldn’t have stopped at Pearl Harbor, and done a third film later; why there couldn’t be multiple parts; why it wasn’t a Churchill version of “Lord of the Rings.” Indeed, I criticized “The Gathering Storm” for skipping over Neville Chamberlain and Munich. But the best editor I ever worked for said: “A bore is someone who tells everything.” And we are not filmmakers. We have no idea what constraints the producers labored under. We do know that Ridley Scott had ninety minutes. And what he does to portray the real Winston Churchill is a work of genius.

My enduring impression of “Into the Storm” is of an old man, realizing after the most heroic chapter in his country’s history that history itself has passed him by, the Britain he loved vanished before his eyes. “The palmy days of Queen Victoria and a settled world order,” as Churchill put it in 1947, are gone forever. The war is won, the country lost in a Socialist dream. Hardly, alas, unfamiliar: a signal message in 2009.

A lot of us who grew up in Churchill’s time feel the way Churchill does at the end of this film, as he reads a sympathetic post-election note from his old friend Jack Seely: “I feel our world slipping away.” Churchill thinks back: “I met him in South Africa, riding across the veldt. He was Col. Seely then. I saw him at the head of a column of British cavalry, riding twenty yards in front, on a black horse. I thought of him as the very symbol of Imperial power.”

Watching this film, I had the odd sensation that it was well Britain chose World War II for what John Charmley called “The End of Glory.” British power and faith, focused one last time by a leader steeped in history and language, held the fort “till those who hitherto had been half blind were half ready.” Better to go out in a flash of light than face the long decline that seems now to attend another superpower. “The proud American will go down into his slavery without a fight,” Pravda (astonishingly) declared, “beating his chest and proclaiming to the world how free he really is.” That will take years. For Britain the End of Glory came in months.

“Yes, I’ve worked very hard and achieved a great deal,” Churchill reflected at the end of his long life, “only to achieve nothing in the end.” A life that rose to the heights of fame, the honors of the world showered upon him—for what? “I feel,” he said, “like an aeroplane at the end of its flight, in the dusk, with the petrol running out, in search of a safe landing.”

Not only he.

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No, Sir Winston has not interrupted his first million years in heaven to comment on the U.S. Government’s “Fiscal Stimulus Package.” And I’m not going to suggest what he would think of it—heaven forbid. I’ve just sifted through Churchill by Himself for applicable quotations, ranging them in strict chronological order. Draw your own conclusions:

“You may, by the arbitrary and sterile act of Government—for, remember, Governments create nothing and have nothing to give but what they have first taken away—you may put money in the pocket of one set of Englishmen, but it will be money taken from the pockets of another set of Englishmen, and the greater part will be spilled on the way.” —WSC, BIRMINGHAM TOWN HALL, 11 NOVEMBER 1903

“Where you find that State enterprise is likely to be ineffective, then utilise private enterprises, and do not grudge them their profits.” —WSC, ST. ANDREW’S HALL, GLASGOW, 11 OCTOBER 1906

“Every new administration, not excluding ourselves, arrives in power with bright and benevolent ideas of using public money to do good. The more frequent the changes of Government, the more numerous are the bright ideas; and the more frequent the elections, the more benevolent they become.” —WSC, HOUSE OF COMMONS, 11 APRIL 1927

“There are two ways in which a gigantic debt may be spread over new decades and future generations. There is the right and healthy way; and there is the wrong and morbid way. The wrong way is to fail to make the utmost provision for amortisation which prudence allows, to aggravate the burden of the debts by fresh borrowings, to live from hand to mouth and from year to year, and to exclaim with Louis XV: ‘After me, the deluge!’” —WSC, HOUSE OF COMMONS, 11 APRIL 1927

“Squandermania…is the policy which used to be stigmatised by the late Mr. Thomas Gibson Bowles as the policy of buying a biscuit early in the morning and walking about all day looking for a dog to give it to.” —WSC, House of Commons, 15 APRIL 1929

“Democratic governments drift along the line of least resistance, taking short views, paying their way with sops and doles, and smoothing their path with pleasant-sounding platitudes. Never was there less continuity or design in their affairs, and yet toward them are coming swiftly changes which will revolutionize for good or ill not only the whole economic structure of the world but the social habits and moral outlook of every family.” —WSC, “FIFTY YEARS HENCE,” STRAND MAGAZINE, DECEMBER 1931

“I do not think America is going to smash. On the contrary I believe that they will quite soon begin to recover. As a country descends the ladder of values many grievances arise, bankruptcies and so forth. But one must never forget that at the same time all sorts of correctives are being applied, and adjustments being made by millions of people and thousands of firms. If the whole world except the United States sank under the ocean that community could get its living. They carved it out of the prairie and the forests. They are going to have a strong national resurgence in the near future. Therefore I wish to buy sound low priced stocks. I cannot afford any others.” —WSC TO HIS STOCKBROKER, H.C. VICKERS. 21 JUNE 1932

“Change is agreeable to the human mind, and gives satisfaction, sometimes short-lived, to ardent and anxious public opinion.” —WSC, HOUSE OF COMMONS, 29 JULY 1941

“Nothing would be more dangerous than for people to feel cheated because they had been led to expect attractive schemes which turn out to be economically impossible.” —WSC TO FOREIGN SECRETARY, PAYMASTER GENERAL AND PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF TRADE, 17 DECEMBER 1942

I do not believe in looking about for some panacea or cure-all on which we should stake our credit and fortunes trying to sell it like a patent medicine to all and sundry. It is easy to win applause by talking in an airy way about great new departures in policy, especially if all detailed proposals are avoided.” —WSC, BLACKPOOL, 5 OCTOBER 1946

“The idea that a nation can tax itself into prosperity is one of the crudest delusions which has ever fuddled the human mind.” —WSC, ROYAL ALBERT HALL, 21 APRIL 1948

“Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.” —WSC, PERTH, SCOTLAND, 28 MAY 1948

“The choice is between two ways of life: between individual liberty and State domination; between concentration of ownership in the hands of the State and the extension of ownership over the widest number of individuals; between the dead hand of monopoly and the stimulus of competition; between a policy of increasing restraint and a policy of liberating energy and ingenuity; between a policy of levelling down and a policy of opportunity for all to rise upwards from a basic standard.” —WSC, WOLVERHAMPTON, 23 JULY 1949

“In America, when they elect a President they want more than a skilful politician. They are seeking a personality: something that will make the President a good substitute for a monarch.” —WSC TO LORD MORAN, 19 MAY 1955

Churchill quotations by kind permission of the copyright holders and Curtis Brown Ltd., from Churchill by Himself, Ebury Press and Public Affairs, 2008.

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