Churchill The Hollywood Years - The Memorable TV DVD Review

It's really a complete fantasy using "historical" characters. The story opens with the current British PM revealing in a meeting the truth about wartime leader Winston Churchill. He was actually a gung-ho American GI (Christian Slater) who heroically arrives in London with a captured German Enigma decoding machine and proceeds to tell the wartime PM how to win the war.

But the PM (Leslie Phillips) has made a deal with Hitler (Anthony Sher) who secretly arrives in England with Eva Braun (Miranda Richardson ) for a meeting with the king (Harry Enfield). Meanwhile Princess Elizabeth determined to do her bit for the war joins the women's reserves under the pseudonym "Jane Commoner" where she meets GI Churchill - and naturally they fall for each other. The main plot then revolves around Hitler's plan to marry Princess Elizabeth and Churchill's efforts to save her.

SO IS IT ANY GOOD?

It sounds like it should have been but it turns out to be fairly weak. Possibly the inspiration for the film was the tendency for Hollywood to re-write history to give things an American slant and spoofing up this could have been good.

But the laughs are few and the script generally weak comedically. Some good points though are Hitler's secret arrival in England and then having to travel by taxi and bus to get to Buckingham Palace and being mistaken for Charlie Chaplin. Neve Campbell as the young Princess Elizabeth was good - and her posh and proper English accent was excellent. Some of the best jokes actually came from playing on the fact that Churchill's GI buddy Eisenhower was black. And fans of Reeves and Mortimer might appreciate their double act as some effeminate palace footmen. During the end credits are some outtakes which are amusing.

It might have made an OK instalment of British TV series "The Comic Strip Presents" (especially as some of the same people were involved in this film) - but as a film it's a bit of a mis-fire unfortunately.

ANY SPECIAL FEATURES?

Unpreviewed.