Eisenhower ( John Slattery), Britain’s General Montgomery ( Julian Wadham) and King George VI ( James Purefoy). One doesn’t have to be a Churchill worshipper (I’m not) to recognize that this is sheer nonsense.Īfter Churchill’s visit to the bloody beach, he’s roused from a drunken sleep by an aide and taken to a meeting with Allied Forces Commander Dwight D. But “Churchill” wants us to believe that he was mentally trapped in the events of the past and thus virtually incapacitated as Britain’s leader. When he walks away from the waves, the image turns monochrome and the beach is littered with the bodies of World War I soldiers.Ĭhurchill was indeed concerned about the amount of casualties an invasion of France might incur and had a vivid memory of the wholesale slaughter that the First World War visited on Europe. Very subtle, no? The prime minister is of course gazing across to France and recalling the horrors of 30 years before. The movie opens with Churchill ( Brian Cox) walking on a beach and looking out at the waves, which begin to turn blood red as they roll in. That telescoping not only makes much of the story of “Churchill” ridiculous and unbelievable, it also renders Churchill himself a pathetic, doddering and deluded old fool. In her press notes for the film, von Tunzelmann says she “telescoped” the events of Churchill’s opposition, bringing them from months earlier to the days just before the invasion. But by the time of D-Day in June of 1944, he was one of the plan’s chief architects and proponents. Was Churchill opposed to an Allied invasion of northwestern France? He was, for various reasons-in 19.
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