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E-mail"Appeasement is feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last," Winston Churchill once aptly observed. Writer-director Stephen Poliakoff shows how this applied to the British aristocracy and ruling eélite who sought to do a deal with Hitler to save their privileged lifestyle in the fraught run-up to the second world war.
Employing the period genre conventions of a John Buchan-style suspense thriller, Glorious 39 gradually divulges what the plotters are up to through the eyes of the beautiful adopted actress daughter Anne (Romola Garai) of a prominent Tory peer (Bill Nighy) who discovers that her cosy world is not what she assumed it to be. Neville Chamberlain, the authoritarian prime minister who achieved "peace in our time" at Munich in 1938, has set up a spy network that intimidates opponents of appeasement and even secretly bugs the phone of Churchill.
The story unfolds in flashbacks, framed by a search for truth by the son of one of the protagonists that leads him to an intimidating uncle (Christopher Lee) who may have answers from the past. Julie Christie has a lovely cameo as a matriarchal aunt who can't be bothered by "this irritating war" and cuttingly makes clear to Anne that she doesn't really belong.
Poliakoff, best known for his award-winning television dramas like The Lost Prince and Joe's Palace, conveys menace through glances and nuances of speech observed through lingering camerawork and heightened by evocative music, slowly building up tension in a way that little implausibilities hardly seem to matter.
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