On the heels of its 12 Academy Award nominations, “The King’s Speech,” an inspiring story of King George VI and his triumph over stuttering, is being criticized for historical inaccuracies.
It’s as predictable as the Oscars themselves. A new front-runner often means some fresh round of attacks, and the charge of historical distortion is a perennial one.
In this case, intellectual gadfly Christopher Hitchens and the New York Review of Books’ Martin Filler are charging that the monarch in question was no better than a Nazi appeaser and, in Filler’s words, “a nitwit.” They paint a portrait of the wartime king that is far different from the shy family man essayed by Oscar nominee (and favorite) Colin Firth.
“‘The King's Speech’ …perpetrates a gross falsification of history,” Hitchens wrote on Slate on Monday, saying the king was not worthy of hagiography. Fillers says the king had an uncontrollable temper and even struck his wife.
But Hugo Vickers, a historian who consulted on the film and author of a biography on the Queen Mother, disagreed: “He was a humble man and a courageous man and he was called upon to do a job for which he had not been trained,” he told TheWrap.
He said the depiction of a man struggling to overcome a crippling speech impediment is accurate.
The filmmakers themselves declined to comment, but have said publicly that the movie was carefully researched.
The appeasement charge stems from the king’s decision to pose with Neville Chamberlain on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after the prime minister negotiated the Munich Agreement with Hitler in 1938 (a fact that the movie skirts over).
Whether George VI’s evolving views of the threat of Nazism should be defined solely by that photo-op with Chamberlain are at the heart of the current debate.
Historians and journalists sympathetic to the film say the criticism is overly simplistic.
When war came, King George VI and his wife bravely remained in London even as the blitzkrieg raged. It was his brother, Edward, they say, who was known to have Nazi sympathies, while the king eventually rallied the country – as the film depicts - to meet the threat of war.
And anyway, they add, the film is about stuttering, and not wartime politics.
Filler goes further than the acerbic Hitchens, emphasizing George VI’s personal deficits as much as the king’s leadership deficiencies.
“‘The King’s Speech’ doesn’t dwell on George’s limited intellectual capacities, but many who dealt first-hand with him did,” Filler wrote in the New York Review of Books.
For journalists such as Harold Evans, who reminisces about a wartime George VI in his book “My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times,” Hitchens and Filler misinterpret the king’s legacy. He also maintains that Hitchens’ anti-monarchist beliefs have colored the social critic’s view of history.
“It is hard for Americans to understand the atmosphere in England in the thirties.
