"The film Beckett is a villain out of central casting who enjoys killing people, and who says in November 1940: I need to know that you are willing to take part in an act of treason that will decide this war for Germany. The real John Beckett would never have said that."
"By November 1940, he was safely locked up in Brixton prison under a wartime regulation that suspended habeas corpus. It doesn't matter that much, but it's part of a trend for popular films to create populist myths about the second world war."
"The 2017 film Darkest Hour was rightly mocked for a ludicrous scene in which, in 1940, Winston Churchill goes on a London tube train. The Mass Observation data shows that he would have heard a rather less heroic message."
The Immortal Man features a character named John Beckett, a British Nazi, but misrepresents the real historical figure. The actual John Beckett was a director for Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists but fell out with him in 1937. By November 1940, he was imprisoned and would not have made the statements attributed to him in the film. This trend of creating populist myths in films about World War II can be harmful as society confronts modern fascism.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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