Customer Rating: 
Summary: Forming a Leader
Comment: Young Winston is the story of Winston Churchill. It begins with him being sent off to school at about six, but spends much of its time with him as a young officer in the British Army. The best part to me was the episode during the Boar where he was captured and then escaped. I've been to the spot where he was captured and it was rendered very well in the movie. Indeed it was to see this event that I bought the movie and I was not dissappointed.
Although he had a craving for publicity and perhaps over stated his own abilities, he was certainly no coward.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Great Ripping Yarn!
Comment: They don't make movies like this anymore, and that's a sad fact. The movie recounts Winston Churchhill's life before he entered politics, and boy what a life he led before his 25th birthday! If Winston had never entered politics, he would still have gone down in history as a noted soldier/writer.
Winston saw it all. He was there in the 1897 punitive expidition on the northwest frontier of India when the area went up in flames. He was there too in 1898 in the Sudan when the Viceroy of India, Lord Herbert Kitchener, decided to take back Khartoum from the Mahdi forces, who 13 years earlier had taken Khartoum and killed General Gordon. During this campaign, Winston took part in the last charge of British cavalry! He was there in the Boer War (1899-1901). While helping British soldiers retreat from a Boer commando trap, Winston was captured, but subsequently escaped. Unknown to Winston during the time he was running from the Boers, his escape had turned him into a world celebrity. All the papers from America to Europe were speculating as to the fate of the young Winston. Those papers on the British side of the war were hoping his escape was successful, while those who favored the Boers were hoping for his re-capture. After three weeks on the run, Winston crossed into East-Portuguese territory and FREEDOM! Needless to say, when he ran for a second time for public office, he won, and Winston started the second part of his life, which is the part the history books and television shows like to concentrate on.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Churchill light
Comment: If you want a good but "light" version of W.S.C. life then this is a good place to start. I just wish that someone would do say like Manchestors books on him into a film. It is one hell of a good story that needs telling more now than ever. I frankly feel that Churchill will be rated the Man of the 20th Century and a sort of Cassandra to boot. He had that much vision into the future.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Fine bio pic
Comment: Winston Churchill's early years make for a fine movie. By all rights young Winston should have been an upper class twit or a hopeless depressive. Although born in a palace he had a childhood none of us would want. His parents were terrible as the movie plainly shows. Her father was a brilliant, complex man and is wonderfully portrayed by Robert Shaw (Quint from Jaws and Red Grant in From Russia with Love). On his good days Lord Churchill is a distant father, and a poor husband but Robert Shaw makes you care about him when he destroys his career and you pity him when his mind starts to decay.
The late Anne Bancroft plays Jenny Churchill who although one of the most beautiful and charming women in England was a somewhat negelctful mother who didn't seem to pay attention to her son until he was grown and began to pull away from her.
Then the movie goes from sad to funny to sad again. Teenaged Winston developes a brittle cocksureness that alienates quite a few people but is an effective cover and reaction to the crappy childhood he endured.
Finally, after his father's death Winston ungergoes a Henry V-esque transformation. The neglected, "dumb" kid becomes a soldier, briefly a POW, writer and then a politician who would eclispe everything his fahter ever did. Simon Ward does a great job of playing a Winston Churchill most of us are unfamiliar with. The costumes are great. The scenary is great. The battle scenes are disturbing. It's a worthwhile and entertaining film.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Faithful to its source (unfortunately)
Comment: This film is quite faithful to its source, "My Early Life", a partial autobiography published in 1930 when WSC's career was fully in the dumpster and he was thought to be a mere divider between the two brilliant Randolphs, his father and his son.The book is a crackling read, full of the old umpity-oof, as P. G. Wodehouse might say. It is particularly engaging in that every reader knows more about the brash young upstart at its center than did the middle-aged failure who wrote it.
I have given the film just three stars because of this very faithfulness. Alas, the film is paced like a book, not a movie. What seems dazzling in the leisurely spaces of the 367-page 1949 edition is simply leaden when put on the screen with its quite different rhythm.
By the way, WSC's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, died of syphilis, not of a tumor, as the film makes quite clear.
