In the summer of 1942 Warner Brothers in Hollywood even conceived the idea of a film about de Gaulle, seemingly at the suggestion of Roosevelt himself. The novelist William Faulkner was commissioned to write the screenplay. He spent several months on the project and produced 1,200 pages of script portraying de Gaulle as an almost Christ-like figure. Faulkner’s problem was that de Gaulle’s representatives in the United States, consulted on the script, were continuously raising nitpicking points of detail. Faulkner became so exasperated that the project was ultimately abandoned. By this time the
...more
