MUCH repeated in the intellectual discussions these days is the expression ‘Golden Age of Cinema’ which is supposed to be dead now.
Cinema actually did not die a natural death but was throttled and thrown into the litter bin by a new generation of film-makers to whom a movie is only business and a cinema fan nothing else but a consumer.
Speaking of political subjects only, in the 2011 film The Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher was shown deteriorating with Alzheimer. Mrs Thatcher was still alive when the film was released but no critics or any sort of associations objected to this and, on the contrary, Meryl Streep was awarded the best actress Oscar.
This year Darkest Hour, winner of the best actor award for Gary Oldman in the role of Sir Winston Churchill and Three Billboards push this point a little further.
The less said of the second film the better. To round it up, it is about a woman who wears riding boots, starts every sentence with a four-letter word and kicks men between their legs. She also drives a hole in her dentist’s index finger with an electric drill while he is taking care of her teeth. Frances McDormand won best actress Oscar for her performance!
But let’s go a bit deeper into Darkest Hour.
The film begins with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signing the Munich Agreement with Hitler in 1938. He had the support of all the politicians, whether Conservative or Labour, except that of Sir Winston Churchill who famously commented: “We had the choice between war and dishonour. We chose dishonour, now we’re going to have war!”
If you have the image of Churchill as a dignified Englishman who saved his country from ultimate Nazi domination, forget it. In this movie he is a comic figure, most of the time in his underwear, drinking whisky straight from the bottle and unceasingly smoking a cigar.
Gary Oldman had proven to be a good actor as the blood-thirsty vampire in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992) or as President Kennedy’s assassin in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991). But director Joe Wright has succeeded in turning Oldman into a perfect clown in this post Golden Age work.
At one point as he is being driven in mid London, to his chauffer’s surprise Churchill suddenly slips out of the Rolls Royce and walks into an underground station. Once on the Tube he is encountered, among others, by a black man who completes a Macaulay poem that Churchill is reciting. This is 1940 and the historic encounter takes place in the Westminster area!
The buffoon we are supposed to take for Churchill later comes out of the Tube and heads for the parliament where he makes the historic speech promising to offer nothing but ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’.
He also makes a phone call to US President Franklin Roosevelt insisting that America must immediately deliver all the naval ships that UK had bought “with the money that we borrowed from you”.
If you are already sick and tired of these farces, let us finish the column with a real episode in which Churchill comes out with his refined sense of humour that no modern film-maker will find interesting.
Soon after his criticism of the Munich Agreement and having been abandoned by his many ardent supporters, Churchill received a letter from George Bernard Shaw.
“You are most cordially invited,” wrote Shaw, “…to the opening night of my latest play. Find in this envelope another ticket so that you could bring along a friend …if you have any!”
Churchill answered: “Thanks for the kind invitation. Unfortunately, owing to a previous engagement, I won’t be able to make it the first night. But I can come to the second night …if there is any!”
The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, April 29th, 2018
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