The Finest Hours

The Finest Hours is a skillfully assembled and frequently moving sketch of the magnificent statesman-warrior-historian-painter-orator-bully who turned 90 yesterday, Winston S. Churchill. The film has nothing to offer in the way of balanced evaluations of Churchill's place in world history. But it does provide some insight into the qualities of his life.

No movie about Churchill, even a standard patch-up of newsreel clips and familiar speeches, could fail to be moving and dramatic, for he was one of the few consciously theatrical performers in the history of democratic government. His grave and measured voice, somehow made even more sonorous by his lisp, and his majestic, defiant prose gave each of his countrymen a sense of historic purpose and helped keep alive a reassuring belief in the possibility of individual heroism throughout the mass slaughter of World War II. To see a film clip of, say, Neville Chamberlain is to see a man who was swept along by history; to see a film clip of Churchill is to see history itself.

In The Finest Hours, Jack LeVien, who produced the film, and Peter Baylis, who directed it, have opted for something far better than the standard patch-up. Their most startling achievement is to have made a successful color film about a man whose active political life was largely over before color photography came into general use. The black-and-whiteness of other historical documentaries distorts the visual history they are supposed to record: the human eye could see color in 1925, even if the movie camera could not.

The Finest Hours is necessarily made up mostly of newsreel and government footage shot in black and white Science is as yet unable to convert this kind of film into natural color; so LeVien and Baylis color-dyed the segments. The result is black and whatever light color is appropriate to the mood, such as orange or green, rather than black and white.

As for genuine color interludes, they are used imaginatively throughout. While Orson Welles, the narrator, describes Churchill's childhood, the color camera follows a small boy through Blenheim Castle; as he describes Churchill's school days, the screen fills not with stilted Dauguerrotypes but with color shots of Harrow boys as they are today, unchanged from 75 years ago. When Churchill is summoned by the King to form a government in 1940, a Rolls-Royce drives up to Buckingham Palace in another color scene. Even though newsreel clip of the real thing. Churchill himself, as senting what eyewitnesses saw than would a scratchy staged, the scene, thanks to color, comes closer to repre-his paintings show, loved color and was intensely aware of it.

The Finest Hours is less a historical biography of Churchill than an uncritical tribute to him. The Churchill of Victor Wolfson's unobtrusive, and, I think, appropriate screenplay is a Churchill who was always right: right about the potential of air power and tanks in 1916, right about the futility of appeasement in 1938, right about the danger of Soviet expansionism in 1945. And it is true that his historian's mind had few equals in its grasp of European international politics. But his vision sometimes failed; he was poorly equipped to deal with such postwar problems as economic adjustment to peace and the necessity to "preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." Churchill's defeat in the 1945 general elections seems completely unjustified in The Finest Hours.

At the end of the film, President Kennedy reads the proclamation making Churchill an honorary citizen of the United States. I thought of the striking contrast between the young life, cut off and unfulfilled, and the old, enormously full life now drawing to a tranquil close. Kennedy died at 45. When Churchill was 45, the year was 1919; he was a recently deposed First Lord of the Admiralty who would not return to office for twenty years. His amazing career spanned those of a dozen American Presidents. Whatever its weaknesses as history, The Finest Hours conveys, affectionately and well, the scale of the man and his life.