Earlier this week a trailer dropped for the new movie Churchill starring Brian Cox as the British wartime leader.
The movie, which also features John Slattery as Dwight D. Eisenhower, chronicles the British Prime Minister’s life in the run-up to the Normandy landings of June 1944—codenamed Operation Overlord—during World War II.
Leading historian Andrew Roberts, who is currently writing a new biography of Sir Winston Churchill, has highlighted several inaccuracies in the two-and-a-half minute trailer.
Churchill is depicted in the trailer as being in conflict with Eisenhower over D-Day. Eisenhower instructs him, “We’ll take care of it.”
He is also shown at odds with his senior army officers Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery and Sir Alan Brooke. In the trailer Churchill shouts, “I must not be stopped from speaking my mind!” and that “I would have us [the allies] do more!”
Roberts argues the scenes centered around Operation Overlord redirect the biopic into the realms of fiction. “Churchill didn’t try to widen Operation Overlord in the days or weeks prior to 6 June 1944,” he tells Heat Street. “And the Americans couldn’t have stopped him if he had. Montgomery and Brooke wouldn’t have overruled him either.”
Another scene showing Churchill making his ‘We Shall Never Surrender’ speech is also wide of the mark according to Roberts: “Churchill made the invasion speech in 1940 not in 1944 when there was no danger of invasion.”
Roberts also has sartorial-related concerns over a scene in the movie showing Churchill discussing strategy while dressed in white tie: “This is more trivial but Churchill didn’t fight the war dressed in white tie. He only wore white tie once a year at the Mansion House dinner [the annual banquet at the residence of the Lord Mayor of London].”
Churchill was written by historian Alex von Tunzelmann and directed by Jonathan Teplitzky who made The Railway Man.
Another Churchill biopic Darkest Hour, starring Gary Oldman, is also due for release. Let’s hope the trailer for that isn’t as light on facts.