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Wudpecker
Life of Churchill
You know, Moggy, I once had the complete set of Churchill's WWII history. It's gone with the vicissitudes of life.
What bothers me about Hollywood movies is that the real life characters become the actors to the audience. George C. Scott becomes "Patton", but the actual Gen. Patton was not George C. Scott. Only outstanding documentaries give us an inkling of who these people really were. That, and books.
The true character of this great man is elusive and hard to catch without meeting him in the flesh. Nor was he the only factor of vital importance in that crucial time.
There is a very nice imaginative series on the German takeover of an island in the English Channel (I didn't catch which one--Shetland? Argyle???). Running on the Public Broadcast TV channel here. British made, I'm certain, because it's so well done and acted showing the humaness of both sides and their differences. What is outstanding is the portrayal of the English people as complex themselves, not always nice and polite, but filled with the petty prejudices and problems of any peoples anywhere. I will not speak of the extra spark the English seemed to have in that world crisis because only Englishmen and women have it in their hearts and could explain it.
What bothers me about Hollywood movies is that the real life characters become the actors to the audience. George C. Scott becomes "Patton", but the actual Gen. Patton was not George C. Scott. Only outstanding documentaries give us an inkling of who these people really were. That, and books.
The true character of this great man is elusive and hard to catch without meeting him in the flesh. Nor was he the only factor of vital importance in that crucial time.
There is a very nice imaginative series on the German takeover of an island in the English Channel (I didn't catch which one--Shetland? Argyle???). Running on the Public Broadcast TV channel here. British made, I'm certain, because it's so well done and acted showing the humaness of both sides and their differences. What is outstanding is the portrayal of the English people as complex themselves, not always nice and polite, but filled with the petty prejudices and problems of any peoples anywhere. I will not speak of the extra spark the English seemed to have in that world crisis because only Englishmen and women have it in their hearts and could explain it.
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Moggy
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That would be the Channel Isles - they invented a fictitious one for the series, but the reality was Jersey, Guernsey, and Sark which were and arethe last part of the Duchy of Normandy under British jurisdiction.
Agree about films, they have become modern popular history with all their faults and characterisations. We can only hope that somwhere there isn't anyone who actually believes Churchillwas a US Marine looking rather like Slater
The Auschwitz anniversary should give us all pause for thought as to how ordinary people get involved in genocide. Blair rightly observed Auschwitz started with a brick through the window of a Jewish business.
You should get hold of a film called "It Happened Here". It's a film student production, but very well made. It'sthe story of what happens to an ordinary British nurse after the German invasion suceeds. She joins the blackshirts, because you don't get a work permit otherwise. She ends up in a euthanaesia clinic in a nice English Surrey village where exhausted slave workers are taken to be killed off.
Pause for thought indeed.
Agree about films, they have become modern popular history with all their faults and characterisations. We can only hope that somwhere there isn't anyone who actually believes Churchillwas a US Marine looking rather like Slater
The Auschwitz anniversary should give us all pause for thought as to how ordinary people get involved in genocide. Blair rightly observed Auschwitz started with a brick through the window of a Jewish business.
You should get hold of a film called "It Happened Here". It's a film student production, but very well made. It'sthe story of what happens to an ordinary British nurse after the German invasion suceeds. She joins the blackshirts, because you don't get a work permit otherwise. She ends up in a euthanaesia clinic in a nice English Surrey village where exhausted slave workers are taken to be killed off.
Pause for thought indeed.
Moggy
www.mogggy.org
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