1944 and all that

The star of this film is the music, composed by Lorne Balfe. I really liked it, which was just as well, because it plays for about half the 98 minutes, while a superannuated Churchill, played by Brian Cox, moons about on beaches, deeply penitent for his catastrophic authorisation of the Gallipoli disaster in which a quarter of a million Allied troops lost their lives on the beaches of Turkey. It is the summer of 1944, and an apparently almost pacifist Churchill is timidly begging Eisenhower and Montgomery not to go ahead with the Normandy landings. He dreads the loss of life, you see.

Not being a Churchill scholar, indeed being, I must admit, Churchill-allergic, I have no idea if this is true or false. It did not ring any more true to me than the depiction of a benevolent and politically astute Mountbatten in Viceroy’s House, woodenly rendered by Hugh Bonneville.