“The King’s Speech” is, as advertised, a riveting view, even for those who might have no special interest in the history so vividly described in this new film. King George VI always has been one of the 20th century’s most uplifting examples of rising to the task. He was thoroughly overshadowed by his glamorous brother David, King Edward VIII; and his natural shyness was intensified by a paralyzing stammer. He actively wished not to be king, and would have gotten his wish had David’s liaison with an allegedly (according to Scotland Yard) promiscuous divorcée not raised issues about his suitability for the throne.

It is hard to imagine such a problem arising now, given the tragic soap opera involving Princess Diana, and the long-standing adulterous love triangle involving Prince Charles’ lover-turned-wife, Camilla Parker-Bowles. (Queen Elizabeth II, who appears in The King’s Speech as the Duke of York’s 10-year-old daughter, has seen an astounding kaleidoscope of mores as well as of personalities and events in her 74 years as heiress presumptive and monarch.) Even back in 1936, Edward VIII’s situation easily could have been finessed if he had gone through his coronation and maintained some mystery about his intentions regarding his stylish but raffish and very unroyal paramour, Wallis Warfield Simpson. She already had been married twice and was an American of the kind the British do not easily assimilate. (Mrs. Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, is now rivaled only by Babe Ruth, Edgar Allen Poe and H.L. Mencken as the most famous Baltimorean of all time.) If he had put his best foot forward, the new king would have built a large following, and could have married Mrs. Simpson following the customary decent interval — especially by 1939, when Britain’s desperate ambition for intimacy with the United States on the eve of war would have stifled most concerns.

Instead, Edward VIII appeared louche, hag-ridden, impressed by Hitler, and altogether weak — not, in all probability, an entirely inaccurate impression. The eldest of his brothers, the central figure in this film, seemed, and proved, solid, upright, brave, likable, passably intelligent, of good judgment, and happily married to a capable and popular wife who proved one of the greatest and most beloved of monarchical consorts in all history.

Concerns about Edward’s kingly aptitudes snowballed, as such concerns do unless they are counteracted with intelligent reassurance. Soon, inevitably, prime minister Stanley Baldwin, the fussy and irritating archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, snivelling alarmists in the press and Parliamentary factions milling about like worried sheep (as only the British can when not jarred into their real emergency mode of inflexible, cold and cunning courage) had confected a consensus that the new king was not up to it, and that his brother, despite his stammer, was.

Both perceptions probably were correct. If Edward were fit to rule, he would not only have probably had a more adaptable (and in the context, suitable) fiancée, and seemed less frivolous, he would have reminded the Archbishop of Canterbury that the king was the supreme governor of the Church of England, and have told the querulous ninnies in Parliament that their bungled management of the Realm and Empire did not confer on them the least right or aptitude to dictate the private life of their sovereign. Unless it is a matter of fatigue, as with Charles V, after 37 years of ruling most of Europe and South America, or Sweden’s eccentric Queen Christina, anyone who abdicates a throne should never have been on it in the first place.

This film tells the moving story of a quirky Australian speech-therapist’s relationship with King George VI, concluding with the king’s moving and effective address to the Empire on the outbreak of the Second World War. The king’s courage, humor, humanity and decency are evident in Colin Firth’s brilliant portrayal.

There are some historical liberties and errors that don’t add or detract much, but that are worth noting. There is a good deal of evidence that Edward VIII and the Duchess of Windsor had a designer version of a storybook marriage and that the abdication crisis truly was a moving love story. They did live happily ever after. The Duke of Windsor was slightly delusional, but not the champagne-swilling nincompoop of this film, and certainly not the bully making fun of his brother’s speech impediment.

Stanley Baldwin did not retire as prime minister from remorse at misjudging Hitler, praising Churchill on the way out. He probably was the only British Conservative leader to depart his post altogether voluntarily, in good physical and electoral health, since the Marquis of Salisbury in 1902. He also probably had the intelligence to realize how bad things would get with Hitler — though when the German Air Force bombed Baldwin’s family business in the Midlands in 1942, Churchill’s comment was, “That was very ungrateful of them.”

Nor was Churchill quite as prescient as is claimed here. He was a strenuous advocate of Edward’s right to rule, and had not entirely given up on Hitler even in 1937, when his relatively hopeful sketch of him in his book Great Contemporaries was published. George VI, and even Queen Elizabeth, were ardent supporters of the Munich agreement. The Dowager Queen Mary, faithfully played by Claire Bloom, was far from a tactile person, but she grasped the hands and arms of her neighbors in the Parliamentary gallery when prime minister Neville Chamberlain announced to the House of Commons that he would go to Munich.

George VI favored Halifax over Churchill as Chamberlain’s successor in 1940, though he quickly warmed to the new chief. Not all the accents had the cut glass distinction of the people portrayed, and George V would not have referred to “Marshal Stalin” in 1934, as Stalin gave himself that title only in 1942, after the initial repulse of the Germans from the gates of Moscow and Leningrad.

It is unfortunate there was no opportunity in the film to show the great success of the royal visit to Canada and the United States in the summer of 1939. The king then did little public speaking, but he made a fine impression and the Anglo-American grand alliance was presaged in the warm relations developed with President Roosevelt. As the king and queen departed from the little railway station near the Roosevelt home at Hyde Park, the large crowds on both banks of the Hudson sang Auld Lang Syne. Six weeks later, Britain was at war.

These are small points. The acting, script, and photography in “The King’s Speech” Speech all were superb. The film captured the heroism of the king, the quality of the relationship with his therapist, Lionel Logue, and the desperate urgency of the approach of war. The dreary sequence of previews in the theatre of coming attractions, six or eight violent dramas based on people being cheated of their identity or in other ways assaulted and abused, only served to whet my appetite for a true and gripping story of real people and great events.

Conrad Black was a founding director of The New York Sun and writes for the National Post, from which this is reprinted.