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It won't win an award for historical accuracy

"The King's Speech" soft-pedals English Nazi-philia.

By John Rossi

Every few years, an unheralded film comes out of nowhere to seize the public's imagination. This year it's The King's Speech, a historical investigation of a previously little-known aspect of King George VI's life: his struggle with stammering. The film garnered a dozen Academy Award nominations this week, more than any other.

Apart from its aesthetic quality, which is high, the movie is an interesting example of what happens when filmmaking confronts history. The usual result is that historical objectivity gives way to dramatic license. The King's Speech is no exception.

The film tells the story of King George's physical and emotional fight to overcome his serious stammering problem. The second son of King George V, Albert Frederick Arthur George - "Bertie" to his family - had an awful childhood. His father was cold and aloof, and his mother was equally distant, which was typical of Victorian attitudes toward children.

Bertie's older brother, David - later King Edward VIII - was the more popular and outgoing heir to the throne. Perhaps because of his stammer, Bertie was painfully shy. He was also a poor student, finishing dead last in his class at the Royal Naval Academy.

During World War I, Bertie took part in the Battle of Jutland, making him the first British monarch in two centuries who had been under fire. After the war, he married a commoner, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who would be a bulwark throughout his life and aid him in overcoming his affliction. Later known as the "Queen Mum," she was extremely popular with the British public, and she outlived her husband by a half century, dying in 2002 at the age of 101.

The King's Speech focuses on how Bertie overcame his stammer with the help of an amateur speech therapist, Louis Logue, who was part genius and part charlatan. The roles are played beautifully by Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush. Firth has already won a Golden Globe for his performance and is considered an odds-on favorite for an Academy Award.

But The King's Speech has a markedly loose way of dealing with historical fact, especially England's attitude toward Hitler's Germany in the 1930s. Bertie's older brother, the Duke of Windsor - as he became after renouncing the throne to marry an American divorcée, Wallis Simpson - toured Germany in 1937 and came away impressed by the vibrancy and dynamism of Hitler's regime. The duke appears only briefly in the film.

Bertie himself was a great admirer of Neville Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement in the years before World War II. In October 1938, when Chamberlain returned to England after signing away Czech territory to Hitler in the Munich Pact, the king and queen invited him to appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, a rare honor usually reserved for royalty.

Winston Churchill also appears in the film, and it's made to seem as if he and King George were close. In fact, Churchill was a supporter of Edward VIII and jeopardized his political career by defending his right to the throne in the House of Commons. This was at a time when the British establishment had turned against Edward because of his relationship with Simpson.

When Chamberlain fell from power in May 1940, Bertie did not favor Churchill, whom he distrusted, for the premiership. During the war, however, they became close, largely because Churchill, a strong monarchist, went out of his way to cultivate the king. They lunched together weekly for the duration of the war, and Bertie came to appreciate Churchill's talents and loyalty.

The film also omits the fact that the king shared in the unthinking anti-Semitism that pervaded British elite circles before the war. Like many in his government, he opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine, then a British territory, even as Jews in Germany were being publicly persecuted.

None of this is brought out in The King's Speech, and in fact it doesn't detract from the essential story of how the king overcame his stammer. The film has everything an audience wants - likable characters, tension, conflict, and eventually, triumph. It's also an example of filmmakers' reluctance to let the facts get in the way of a good tale.