The Peaky Blinders film is pandering to these populist times – I should know, the Nazi in it is my father | Francis Beckett
The film-makers would say they’re making drama, not history. But this is not the moment for yet another second world war film with a heroic mythThe new Peaky Blinders film,...
By Francis Beckett · The Guardian Opinion
The film-makers would say they’re making drama, not history. But this is not the moment for yet another second world war film with a heroic myth The new Peaky Blinders film, The Immortal Man , offers us a character, John Beckett, who is a British Nazi. One of the two founders of Britain’s first Nazi party in 1937, alongside William Joyce and John Angus Macnab, was indeed a man named John Beckett. He had been director of publications for Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, but that year he fell out with Mosley. I’m Beckett’s biographer . I’m also his son . So I can tell you authoritatively that he did not bear the smallest resemblance to the Peaky Blinders character. The film Beckett is a villain out of central casting who enjoys killing people, and who says in November 1940 (the year the film is set): “I need to know that you are willing to take part in an act of treason that will decide this war for Germany.” Continue reading...