I was one those who posted earlier and expressed my disappointment with "Into the Storm". Although I too count myself as a Churchill "snob" I do acknowledge that he did NOT win WWII all by himself. Even on the just the British side of the story he had some help! e.g. Brooke, Monty, Eden (?), etc. The movie over played Churchill compared to the first much more finely done effort, "The Gathering Storm" where those around Churchill, Desmond Morton, Baldwin and other characters were developed in a realistic and historically accurate way.
As suggested in another post, this "movie" would have been much better portrayed as a mini-series ala John Adams, it did not even have to be that long, maybe 4 or 5 hours devided into the Battle of Britain to Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor up to D-Day then D-Day to Winston's lost election at the end of the War. So that is 5 or 6 hours where Churchill would have been the central character but his role could have been told in context relative to the events and to the other major and some minor figures in the War. In my opinion what made the first movie so appealing was the telling of the story of the Wigrams. Few non snobs I am sure ever heard of them, but I know my wife (a non snob) felt their story and Winston's part in it, gave the movie and the Churchill's a real human dimension. That sort of story telling was left out of this second film because there was no TIME to tell those other stories when you have to sprint through so many years of the War and Winston had to be in virtually every scene. I do not know how the viewership of HBO movies are measured but I cannot believe that more than a handful of us Churchill snobs will ever bother to see this one versus the first one must have had a decent viewership of normal (non snobs) people. Again, the opportunity to tell the Churchill story within the context of WWII to a wider audience has been, I believe, wasted. Glenn Flickinger ----- Original Message ----- From: "Editor/Finest Hour" <[email protected]> To: "ChurchillChat" <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, June 03, 2009 3:59 PM Subject: [ChurchillChat] Re: Into the Storm broadcast I think we're all a bunch of Churchillosnobs. We are standing too close to our boy, and know too much about him, to appreciate that there's only so much a producer can do in 90 minutes. And, given today's level of education—when more English-speaking people know Madonna than their Congressman or MP, 90 minutes is a generous allotment. The best editor I ever worked for always said, "A bore is somebody who tells everything." As some have pointed out, "Into the Storm" is about CHURCHILL—not Stalin or FDR or Poland or Jock Colville or Yalta—and it is more effective than anything since Robert Hardy's multi-part "Wilderness Years" in honestly portraying Churchill's true persona. It resists many opportunities for cheap political hackery, as over the bombing of Germany, "poison gas," and all the stuff so beloved of media ignoramuses. We should be glad Ridley Scott is not one of them, that Hugh Whitemore stuck so well to facts, and that Brendan Gleeson made such a good WSC. My review of "Into the Storm" is posted at http://richardlangworth.com/2009/06/into-the-storm-the-end-of-glory The same review will run more or less as in the summer number of FINEST HOUR. I will gladly publish any interesting ripostes and have already gathered in Tony's questions above, on whether certain scenes actually happened. PLEASE EMAIL OFFLINE. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ChurchillChat" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/ChurchillChat?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
