STEVE KOGAN writes:

The King’s Speech gave me much food for thought that I would like to share with your readers. One idea, in particular, flashed through my mind several days after I saw the film and in a telling way, for it came to me all at once in the midst of my everyday routines. It was as though the film had taken on a life of its own in me, and in that moment I became aware of a wonderfully rich dynamic in the work that unfolds quietly and naturally, without ever once drawing attention to itself in any intellectualized or programmatic way. 

Knowing nothing in advance about the film except that it was about King George VI, I wondered if it would touch in any way upon his older brother David’s affair with the American divorcée Wallis Simpson, their Nazi sympathies, and his brief reign before his abdication, or if anything about the king’s contribution to English morale in World War II would enter into the work. As soon as the film began, my questions fell away. Unlike Christopher Hitchens, who seems to have come to it armed for bear with his anti-Royal and anti-Churchill politics (“Fighting Words: Churchill Didn’t Say That,” Slate, Jan. 24, 2011), I was taken with its artistry right from the start – dialogue, acting, directing, and above all unity of vision, for there was not a false or contrived note anywhere – so I was doubly satisfied when the large historical themes began to unfold, and at the end I was moved almost to tears when the king, having undergone a long and painful process to control his crippling fear of public speaking, flawlessly broadcasts his tragic speech on the day of England’s declaration of war with Germany in September 1939: “For the second time in the lives of most of us, we are at war.” This simple statement of fact spoke to the nation’s grief-stricken memories of World War I and the consequences of England and France’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938, exactly one year earlier to the month. 

Given these calamities, the king’s speech shines all the more bravely in summoning the resolve of Britain and the Empire to confront the menacing future, and its dramatic effect is heightened by the director’s choice to accompany the king’s words with the exquisitely tender, dirge-like strains of Beethoven’s A Minor movement from his seventh symphony, which not only contribute to the dark solemnity of the occasion but also serve as a kind of pre-funeral march for the death and destruction to come. To have chosen the music of Beethoven for this moment of high historical drama was stunningly right in more ways than one, for Beethoven is at the living heart of German culture, and the decision to borrow from his music is beautifully symbolic of the fact that England was about to defend not only itself but also European civilization and indeed the entire civilized world. As Churchill warned the nation four days before the fall of France in June 1940, “if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” 

There is more yet. In a review of the film in The Telegraph Heraldonline, Eileen Mozinski Schmidt writes that her aunt, “a classical music aficionado,” noted a parallel between the king’s speech disorder and Beethoven’s “advanced stages of hearing loss” while composing the Seventh, which “would have been nearly impossible for him to hear” when it was performed in 1812. Even the date curiously parallels the occasion of the king’s address, for it marks the fateful year when Napoleon expanded his war on Europe by invading Russia. Perhaps the director, Tom Hooper, was inspired by a related use of Beethoven in episode 9 of Band of Brothers, which centers on the discovery of a German concentration camp by men of Easy Company. In the opening scene, German civilians are combing through mounds of rubble while four musicians are seated in the town square playing their stringed instruments with the artistry of concert performers. As the clearing continues, the camera moves upward to a building whose front wall has collapsed, and we see several men of the company quietly listening to the music. For a brief moment, we are in the presence of the other Germany as we hear the supernal sounds of the sixth movement of Beethoven’s late string quartet in C# Minor. One of the soldiers thinks they are playing Mozart, but Captain Nixon softly replies, “Not Mozart … it’s Beethoven.” It is as though both directors had taken their cue from the late conductor Leonard Bernstein, who, in a brief introduction to one of his televised performances, wondered why it is that, of all composers, people who love classical music turn to Beethoven in times of grief. 

All this came to me upon reflection and with the aid of some research (the screenplay is also online), but my unbidden thought about the dynamic of the film had to do with Shakespeare and the opening scene of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, in which Antonio sums up a Renaissance commonplace when he remarks that “A prince’s court is like a common fountain” and that his land will reflect its character, for good or ill. What Antonio states as a principle Shakespeare develops in the very web of his plots. Whether the setting is the medieval England of the history plays or Caesar’s Rome, Macbeth’s Scotland, the Anglo-Saxon Britain of King Lear, and the Denmark of King Claudius, the condition of the country, down to the precise mood and atmosphere of each particular play, is reflected in the character and actions of its rulers. 

For all the changes in the political status of the English monarchy after Elizabeth and James I, the intertwining of king and country remains at the heart of the film. It is never openly stated, but the whole experience of a weak and unprepared England is mirrored in Edward’s fecklessness and George’s traumatized psychology, both of which cut them off from the nation and the empire at large, each in its own way. During the party scene at Balmoral Castle, David, now King Edward VIII, tells George that he has been too busy “Kinging” to see him; and when the future King George VI replies that “Kinging” is a risky business (he reminds him of the former Kaiser and the murdered Czar) and then chastises him for spending a small fortune on Simpson while people are singing “The Red Flag” across Europe, David brushes him off with “Herr Hitler will sort that lot out,” a common refrain among Nazi sympathizers in high places during the 1930s (Hitler as “bulwark against Bolshevism”). As for George (still Prince Albert, or “Bertie”), there is a painful scene in Regent’s Park when he becomes enraged at his speech therapist for insisting that he can learn to control his fears and even outshine his brother if the king abdicates in order to marry Simpson and he is forced to assume the throne as next in line. Cutting Logue to the quick as “a disappointing son of a brewer” and a “jumped-up jackeroo” from the Australian outback, he fires him on the spot. “You’re nobody. These sessions are over!” We are meant to understand that this eruption of class prejudice is a defense against his overpowering anxiety at the prospect of kingship and the weight of its responsibilities, the very ones that his smooth-talking playboy of a brother has shirked. It is one of the most brilliant moments in the film and in fact its turning point, for his rupture with Logue brings to a head the personal issues that he will confront and resolve in the concluding scenes. 

Following his breakdown over his brother’s renunciation of the throne for “the woman I love,” Bertie and his wife return to Logue’s apartment, where the two men quickly apologize to one another (“I understand what you were trying to say, Logue.” “I went about it the wrong way. I’m sorry”). Bertie has already confessed to Logue in an earlier scene that when he rides through the streets of London he is struck by how little he and “the common man” know of each other’s lives. It is Logue who provides the bridge, the first in their reconciliation scene and the second during the preparations for the future king’s coronation at Westminster Abbey, where Logue tells him that everything he knows about treating speech disorders he learned from experience during “the Great War,” when “our boys were pouring back from the front, shell-shocked and unable to speak.” Logue’s brief account of his background, coming when and where it does, is for me the high point of the king’s education, for it goes to the heart of everything that was false and cruel in that terrible cry, “You’re nobody.” 

George’s anxieties keep bubbling up in the scene, yet from this point on his trust in Logue is complete. He defends his reliance on him against the doubts of his advisors; and we recognize that the deepest source of his healing process is not in Logue’s techniques alone but in Logue’s faith in his character and humanity, which is no different than what he felt for those young men from the outback, “shell-shocked and unable to speak.” It is this all-embracing faith that the king has made his own and now incorporates into the very first words of his speech, which he delivers just when England needs to hear his most intimate public voice at this excruciating moment of trial: “In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in history, I send to every household of my peoples, both at home and overseas, this message, spoken with the same depth of feeling for each one of you as if I were able to cross your threshold and speak to you myself.”
It is the subtle convergences between George’s weaknesses and England’s, together with his bravery in confronting his worst fears, that make his speech to the nation so incredibly moving, even more so if one appreciates how England managed just by the skin of its teeth to hold off Hitler from invading. The emotional depth of the moment is enriched by the music of Beethoven, but a silent echo of Shakespeare is present throughout, for the threat of failure under pressure parallels what actually happens in the history plays and tragedies, where characters such as Henry VI, Richard II, Romeo, Juliet, Ophelia, Othello, and Lear have burdens placed upon them that are too great, or in Hamlet’s case, almost too great for them to bear. 

The appeal of the film is all the more fascinating to me because of the seemingly narrow range of the subject: the speech impediment of an English prince in line for the throne; yet its lessons are profound. Whether or not audiences come to the film with any knowledge of the period or the cultural values that inform the work, its great success speaks to the hunger that people still have for serious representations of the human spirit in adversity.

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