Into the Storm 2009 DVDRip XviD-GFW

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Into the Storm 2009 DVDRip XviD-GFW
DVDRip | 624x352 | AVI | XVID 842 kbps | 23.976 fps | Aspect ratio: 16:9 | Audio: MP3 128 kpbs @ 48 KHz | Duration: 99Mins | 699 MB
DVD Date: 00.00.0000 | Release Date: 11.17.2009 | Audio Language: English | Subtitle: en/es/fr
Genre: Biography | Drama | History | War
In INTO THE STORM, the HBO Films/BBC coproduction biography of the life of Winston Churchill, Brendan ("Mad-Eye Moody") Gleeson plays Churchill as a scowling, grumbling, tenaciously stubborn bulldog of a leader. STORM was intended as a sequel to an earlier film called THE GATHERING STORM, which starred Albert Finney as Churchill and covered the years encompassing his political rise to power. This second STORM covers the period of time beginning with Churchill's assumption of the mantle of Prime Minister after the resignation of Neville Chamberlain, and running through the end of the war, the Yalta conference, and Churchill's Conservative Party's own defeat at the hands of Labour and the disintegration of his wartime coalition government. These stubborn personal qualities of Churchill the man were, director Thaddeus O'Sullivan argues, precisely the sorts of qualities which were needed by the British populace during the darkest period of WWII, when London was being pounded nightly by the German Luftwaffe and the British Army barely scrambled to get out of being massacred at Dunkirk with most of its troops intact; the British people needed a leader who was capable of stirring them to great inspired heights through the power of his uncompromising gift of oratory, and who could also put the full-court diplomatic press on the Americans to enter the war in the European theater, and provide much-needed ground and air support to the beleagured British forces. Churchill's loyal but substantially more genteel wife, Clementine (Janet McTeer), repeatedly says during this film that war, and specifically the process of being a wartime leader, was 'what [Churchill] was born for', and, by blustering and raging his way doggedly through one scene after another, Gleeson puts the exclamation point on that proclamation.

During a slice-of-life biographical presentation which really only covers about five or six years of Churchill's long and otherwise distinguished career (from 1940 through late '45, after the war is over and he is awaiting the results of his re-election campaign), we are able to view him at, arguably, the peak of his political powers. We see him bullying and cajoling his senior military staff including famously dandy-ish Major-General Bernard Montgomery (Patrick Malahide), who was so amusingly parodied in PATTON as being the epitome of British stuffiness. As well, we see Gleeson's hulking Churchill doing a delicate diplomatic two-step with his Labour counterpart Clement Attlee (Bill Paterson), the substantially smoother, more conciliatory sort of politician who reported to him as his second-in-command in the Parliament coalition government during the war, and who would eventually succeed him in office when the British people decided they no longer needed a wartime leader. We see him building a sort of friendship based on mutual respect with George VI (Iain Glen), trying to make nice with Roosevelt (Len Cariou), and practically holding his nose while attempting to find common ground with Stalin (Aleksei Petrenko). And, perhaps most memorably, we are treated to what amounts to a greatest-hits revue of his preparatory process in writing, editing, and polishing probably some of the most well-remembered speeches of his political career, including the "We shall fight on the beaches" oratory which made clear his feelings about continuing Chamberlain's policy of appeasement with respect to Hitler, and of course the famous "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few" speech, which we get to see him rehearsing over and over again, in embryonic form, before confidently unleashing it on the House of Commons and on cheering British crowds.

Most of INTO THE STORM, as befits Churchill's reputation, is heavily talky, in that special, boomingly academic, srs-bznss kind of way that you sort of expect from BBC productions which are probably heavily financed by public-television grant money. Very little in the way of actual wartime action is shown, although a lot of it is hinted-at on the periphery, and things like the D-Day invasion at Normandy are reconstructed through bits and pieces of newsreel footage shown to Winston and Clemmie Churchill and their supporters in the safety of their screening room at Number 10 Downing. But this is really more of a film about speeches than about action, and a good chunk of it is taken up, as is Roger Donaldson's stylistically-similar Cuban Missile Crisis film THIRTEEN DAYS, with the sight of a bunch of serious-minded men sitting around war council tables and pontificating about strategy. Those who are looking for stirring action need not apply, and it's true that O'Sullivan's film, which is based off of the second of six volumes of personal memoirs written by Churchill himself in the days after the war, can be a little dry at times. But if you're looking for an interesting peek inside the corridors of power and a history lesson which doesn't necessarily take the form of straight documentary, and which posits that the force of Churchill's persuasive personality was probably just as much a factor in terms of the Allies eventually winning the war as the American intervention or the seemingly-limitless Soviet army resources, then this film is probably as good as any a place to begin.