Churchill: The Hollywood Years

The Hollywood version of the American involvement in World War II starts with the arrival in the Isle of Mann, sorry, England, of American soldier Winston Churchill. Churchill has heard of the Nazi armies sweeping across Europe and is keen to help despite being met by an air of total indifference by the British, who seem to be almost welcoming Hitler into their country. Befriending Princess Elizabeth gets him in the door but with incompetence and gayness all around him, Churchill must take a stand and win this war for America!

Despite terrible reviews I decided to give this film a try and what I found was a reasonable enough comedy that just doesn't have the material to stand up to be what it tries to be. The concept is sound as it is a nice little spoof of all those films that rewrite history to sell tickets – not just an American habit by any means, but market saturation alone means they stand out as doing it the most! The joke is a good one and it does produce some intermittent laughs along the way but it really struggles to convince as a "motion picture". In fact watching it all I could thing was that this would have worked if it could have been a presentation of The Comic Strip rather than a film, because that way it could have overplayed and existed on its own terms – that heading telling the audience that things that might be considering failings are actually fine. Looking it up on IMDb later and what do I find but that this was written and directed by none other than Peter Richardson from the Comic Strip! And I think this is the problem, Richardson has come up with a good idea but he has not had the Comic Script route to go with it and as a result has had to make it into a film, where the weaknesses and dips are rather exposed. It is a shame but the end result is still quite amusing albeit it rather messy and overly ambitious.

The starry cast certainly must have hoped for more because of the volume of people go are involved, just a shame that all their individual moments tend to stand as individual moments rather than flowing together. Slater gets the tone and gives a good performance, with Campbell OK but not as into it. I think these two must have been the only people to be on the set for longer than a week because other than them the support cast is a constant state of flux. Reeves & Mortimer, Enfield, Mayall, Phillips, Crook, Day, Culshaw, Cornwell, Sally Phillips, Schneider and a few others – they are mixed but generally they are good value and it is just a shame then that the film as a whole package is not as clever nor as funny as some of the specific moments are.

Overall then this is far from being as bad as some would have you believe it is but to appreciate it you really do need to have been a fan of the Comic Strip films from years ago. The concept is good and the cast is heavy with talent but unfortunately Richardson cannot pull it all together to the degree that is required. An amusing and messy try that is fun at times.

A patchy British send-up of the way Hollywood rewrites history in favour of America.

Although I enjoyed seeing a British film sticking two fingers up to Hollywood, in the end it only, and ironically, serves to demonstrate why Hollywood has won the war in the UK box office. A ramshackle gathering of comical ideas, just about held together around the idea that Churchill wasn't a fat old British aristocrat, but was in fact a young American hero who single-handedly saves England from the Nazis, while falling in love with the future Queen of England.

But too many times the script fell foul of going for the obvious gag, or just swearing for supposed comical effect. And the action sequences were so incompetently done, looking more like something out of an episode of Dad's Army, that they didn't work as a send up of Hollywood action sequences.

Whereas Monty Python had the talents of Terry Gilliam to give their movies style, Peter Richardson is somewhat less than gifted in that department. Some of it looks good, some of it just looks cheap.

Reeves and Mortimer are tedious as usual, and you just get the feeling that most of the Brit comedians who appeared were just here to amuse themselves. This gives a pretty amateurish feel to some scenes.

Still, I laughed and I think its worth seeing, simply because it does show up the absurdity of Hollywood history.

Great idea - overplayed in places, but still enjoyable.

If they'd have been a bit more subtle in places they'd have made a better film. Performances of Neve Campbell as Princess Elizabeth and Phil Cornwall as Martin Boreman (with a great east-end accent) really stand out. Pity they didn't have time to develop some of the supporting roles especially the irish cockney of Mackenzie Crook and Miranda Richardson as Eva Braun

One to look back on laugh. Just wish they could do a sequel but in reverse - the British all action hero Churchill saving America from the Communist threat !

The conceit: Winston Churchill was actually an American action hero and Adolf Hitler was about to marry then-Princess Elizabeth (against her will, of course; she was still alive when this was made and the filmmakers didn't want to wind up in the Tower).

Good: Anthony Sher has some delightful moments as Hitler.

Good: Neve Campbell is a (too) lovely, gung-ho Elizabeth.

Good: This movie has a few good laughs. Such as the pilot who flew Hitler into England. Hey, I laughed out loud at the clutch incident; and, having seen too many World War II movies, I enjoyed what they did with the table where they moved ships and things around (I'm no expert on the period: did such tables actually exist? And why?)

Good: Miranda Richardson made an intriguing, entertaining Eva and as for the portrait of Princess Margaret . . . What satire? And I loved the dog.

Otherwise, this flick amounts to "Carry On, Adolf and Eva." All it lacks are the nasal intonations of Kenneth Wiliams and the whisky-barrel laughs of Sid James.

Except that Williams and James had more genuine talent than most of those assembled here beneath the top tier of actors.

It's difficult to describe the good parts without giving away the few laughs in this one-note affair, which amounts to a sketch (or perhaps no more than a howlingly funny Kentucky Fried Theater trailer/commercial) stretched out like chewing gum to movie length . . . Well, the version I saw was, mercifully, lasted little more than an hour and a quarter and I thought I'd have to gnaw my own leg off to free myself.

Personal digression: though I was a poor boy in a small southern American town I grew up in the 1970s on a diet of P. G Wodehouse and Monty Python and the Goodies and Peter Sellers. Later on life, thanks to the Internet, I enjoyed the Goon Show, Hancock's Half Hour, I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again and The Burkiss Way. I bought a region-free DVD player solely to watch little English movies starring Ian Carmichael, Terry-Thomas, George Cole, Alistair Sim, Eric Barker and the self-same Leslie Phillips who makes a total, irredeemable (donkey) of himself in this . . . (to quote Adolf) . . . Thing.

British readers will know what I'm talking about: as with American comedy, I only care for the cream of British humor and, while I've endured worse, this is fairly close to the dregs. It starts out funny (enough) but quickly peters out. Here and there the humor shines, but most of it just is.

At rock bottom, all failed comedy may be traced to the same root cause: the writing. This movie has a roster of writers who should have known better. Perhaps, as a writer myself (I won't divulge under what name), I have too much imagination but I can see them in a little room as on "The Dick van Dyke Show" (and I bring up van Dyke for a reason, but I can't say why) snickering to themselves like schoolboys who scrawl dirty words on walls. They've forgotten the cardinal rule of writing: "good enough" isn't good enough. Especially where comedy is concerned. They should've rewritten it again and again.

And again.

If all else failed, they might've added more dogs.

When taken in the right spirit, this is a pretty enjoyable film, but it has its share of problems nonetheless. Sold as a parody of the way Hollywood tends to treat actual historical events, it doesn't really live up to its promises as it only occasionally does a decent job of lampooning its subject matter. When it does, it's very funny - my favourite exchange being (paraphrased) "It's up to the Americans to save the day again!", "God, I wish I was an American!". The rest of the time, though, it seems content to simply be a wacky slapstick comedy that gets its laughs from making prominent historical figures look a little ridiculous. Sometimes this works - I adored Neve Campbell's performance as Elizabeth, as well as her hilariously overdone accent... in fact she's probably the best part of the movie - but other times it doesn't, for example with Goering and Goebbels. It also has a habit of making its jokes too obvious at times, as if writer/director Peter Richardson was afraid that audiences wouldn't get it: it's not enough for Churchill's fellow GI, an African-American, to be relegated to the role of the stereotypical black comic relief character, he actually has to point this out to us.

Nonetheless, it's a fun movie, although I suspect that it will go down better with British audiences than American viewers. Provided you're not expecting sophisticated comedy or subtlety of any kind I expect you'll have fun. 7/10