RICK MCGINNIS: Truth, Myth or Both? Getting History Right in Battle of Britain:

The film made $13 million on a $14 million dollar budget (not helped by the cost of the aerial unit) and only turned a profit years later with home video sales. There’s been plenty of pictures set during the Battle of Britain made since then, but Hamilton’s film is still the only one that’s about the whole of the battle as a hinge upon which history turns and not just a backdrop.

“Given time,” [Michael] Korda writes, “all historical events become controversial*. That is the nature of things – we question and rewrite the past, glamorizing it or diminishing it according to our inclinations, or the social political views of the present.”

“Nobody in academe,” he adds, “gets tenure or a reputation in the media by examining the events of the past with approval, or by praising the decisions of past statesmen and military leaders as wise and sensible.” And yet nobody has managed to debunk the victory of Dowding and the RAF over Goring’s Luftwaffe. “As at Trafalgar,” writes Korda, “the British got it triumphantly right” and that might explain the longevity of Guy Hamilton’s Battle of Britain – a deeply unfashionable film that we’d never be able to make today.

Read the whole thing.

* Tucker Carlson, Kier Starmer, and David Lammy could not be reached for comment.