"We shall never surrender"

Rating: 8/10 (10 May 2018)

Last year the film Dunkirk told the story of Great Britain's most anxious moments
from the point of view of various British soldiers, sailors, and civilians helping to
get the British Expeditionary Force off the beaches to fight another day. Had these people not done their job on those beaches Winston Churchill's moments
here would either have never happened or would have been an empty gesture
of defiance. No doubt had the Wehrmacht successfully invaded and occupied
the United KIngdom, Winston Churchill would have been shot post haste by
the Nazi occupiers.
But because the job was done at Dunkirk Winston Churchill got to do his. After the Nazi invasions of Denmark and Norway, Neville Chamberlain's wartime government was ready to go, but the only Tory that the Labour Party
would serve under was Winston Churchill who had been consigned to the
back benches for most of the 30s. Labour itself was tinged with pacifism early
on and Churchill was the one who had consistently warned of the danger's
Hitler's rearmed Germany posed.
Nevertheless events made it a 'close run thing' as another British prime minister of another century described a crisis he faced. In Churchill's cabinet
were a number of potential appeasers and their choice for prime minister was
Chamberlain's former Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax played by Stephen Dillane. If the members of that cabinet had their way Halifax would have been
prime minister and would have sought a negotiated peace.
Gary Oldman has Churchill down perfect with all the bulldog defiance that comes through in those old WW2 era newsreels I well remember. No one else
in Great Britain would have pursued the policies he did at that time. He gave
the British people the blood, toil, tears, and sweat he promised and Great Britain and its Commonwealth partners carried on alone until the following
year Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
Oldman got a well deserved Best Actor Oscar.
Best scene in the film is when the aristocratic Churchill goes into the London
Underground for a sampling of public opinion. Even with the memories of
the stalemate in the trenches of WW1 still in their memories as they are in the
various Cabinet members like Lord Halifax they don't want to give up.
The next chapter of the saga is contained in the all star epic The Battle Of
Britain which tells of the Royal Air Force beating back the German Luftwaffe
while the bombs rained on British cities.
That's not to be missed either.