Young Winston

I got a five-movie box set of Columbia "war" movies some time ago, from which I watched two movies so far, although surprisingly a search of the blog claims I haven't blogged about either. One of those movies is Young Winston, which I also recorded off of TCM, so recently I watched that airing to do a blog post here.

Simon Ward plays Winston Churchill, at least as a young adult. The movie starts off in about 1897, when Winston is 22. He's a reporter who had been in the military, covering a British military operation on the Northwest Frontier, which would be roughly the modern border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The British army isn't exactly happy to have him there, especially when it turns out he's ambitious and using the experience to try to advance what is soon to become a nascent political career.

But after this opening, we go back to when Winston is about 7, about to be sent to boarding school by his parents, Lord Randolph (Robert Shaw), a member of parliament for the Conservatives under Lord Salisbury (Laurence Naismith), and Randolph's American-born wife Jenny (Anne Bancroft). Winston always has a difficult relationship with Dad because of a bunch of reasons, including Dad's advancing syphilis, which eventually kills him in his 40s.

Winston is a middling student at best, taking multiple tries to pass the exams to enter the military academy, and only being admitted as a member of the cavalry, which is apparently less prestigious. This eventually gets Winston sent to Sudan, where he meets with General Kitchener (John Mills), who had heard of Winston and absolutely didn't want Winston serving under him.

Winston's ambition has him try to get elected to Parliament after his father dies, but it doesn't work the first time, although of course we know from history that he would eventually win election and then become Prime Minister during World War II. At any rate, Winston, having failed for now in politics, goes to South Africa to cover the Boer War, again ostensibly as a journalist but still really helping the military. This gets him captured and sentenced to a POW camp.

But Winston escapes, and becomes a worlwide cause célèbre as he evades capture (and likely execution) by the Boers despite not speaking Afrikaans. We know from history that he escapes and returns to England, which he parlays into his second run for Parliament, this time successful, despite seeming a bit too chummy with Liberal lader David Lloyd George (Anthony Hopkins).

Sir Richard Attenborough directs Young Winston as a series of set pieces, any of which would have made a decent portion of a miniseries of Winston Churchill's life. Winston most likely embellished his life story, on which the movie is based, but apparently even the unvarnished truth would have made for acceptable episodes. But each scene is an opportunity for a quality actor to get a cameo; among the ones I haven't mentioned yet are Edward Woodward and Jack Hawkins (who has almost no dialogue since his cancer had already cost him his voice).

Unfortunately, as one long movie, the stories strung together don't quite work; the material definitely would have worked better as a multipart TV miniseries. I think a lot of that is down to Attenborough's languorous direction, along with an extremely irritating technique of giving each of the the Churchills an extended solo scene where they're being interviewed by a never-seen off-screen voice. These don't work at all, and bring the movie to a screeching halt. To do it once is bad; to do it three times is unforgivable.

While I didn't exactly hate Young Winston, I definitely think the material could have been made a whole lot better. Still, watch and judge for yourself.