With the country apoplectic at the entitled behaviour in Downing Street, does the world need the reputation of another Tory flop, Neville Chamberlain, redeemed? As Robert Harris’s historical thriller hits Netflix this week.
A naughty party on a lawn. Drunk posh people swanning about while oozing entitlement. Everyone acting like the normal rules don’t apply to them. Men urinating openly. Though the booze has run out, someone’s got a cheeky plan to obtain some more… No, this isn’t Downing Street during the pandemic, this is the opening scene of Munich: The Edge of War – an intriguingly pointless film adapted from the book of the same name by historical fiction colossus Robert Harris.
It would be churlish to damn a film for the unfortunate timing of its release, but as it drops on Netflix this week, it’s hard to take Munich seriously amid the howls of national indignation at the recent antics in No 10. For while the film is an attempt to repair the reputation of pre-war PM Neville Chamberlain (witness David Davis quoting what was said to a disgraced Chamberlain in 1940: “In the name of God, go”), it’s mainly a film about powerful yet inept people from privileged elites making a mess of things. I mean, tell me: what’s not to hate right now?
Harris’s promotion for the film has centred around this slightly renegade desire to redeem Chamberlain (prime minister 1937-1940), who at the Munich Conference of 1938 took Hitler at his word that he didn’t want to enter into war – only for Hitler to confound his policy of appeasement by being a bastard and not a gentleman. Every world leader ever since, including in recent years Cameron and Obama, is at some point said to be acting like Chamberlain. It’s become an accepted synonym for being weak, overly trusting or unable to grasp a situation. But where the world has been happy to designate Chamberlain as a totemic figure of embarrassing Tory failure, Harris regards Chamberlain’s failure as “noble… not squalid”.
Read more at:
Munich: The Edge of War is Netflix posh-washing for an elite that’s still in charge today | The Independent
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