Word: finests
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...civilization itself. As he said in the hour of victory: "We gave thanks to God for the noblest of all His blessings, the sense that we had done our duty." The Voice. It seems a distant victory now, with yesterday's friends and foes dizzyingly reversed. His own finest hour remains the summer of 1940, with the clamor of fighters overhead, the army trucks clattering along country roads, the crunch of falling bombs, the civilians digging trenches against the invasion that could come at any hour. All this is not memory but only history to a new generation...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...