Are you as sick as I am of modern films portraying Winston Churchill as a faultless smiley hero, chatting merrily to citizens on the London Tube while the Luftwaffe roars overhead, and also winning all his battles?

These babyish screen depictions make it impossible to understand why King George VI didn’t trust Churchill and why much of the Tory Party pretty much loathed him, or why he was chucked out on his ear by British voters in 1945.

Truly great men, you see, are often misfits, awkward, even rude, and not always likeable, let alone popular. The modern syrupy accounts also don’t explain why Churchill was genuinely brilliant, that despite being profoundly right on several key occasions, he was often wrong. Or how he managed to spend so much of his life as an outcast tottering on the brink of bankruptcy, kept going by handouts from dubious men.

Now, in a fine new French film, De Gaulle: Resistance (in cinemas now), the superb English actor Sir Simon Russell Beale gives us a completely new view – a Churchill who is tricky, wavering, humiliated by the Americans and – gasp – sometimes wrong.

He also speaks French, as badly as I do, which is a joy to hear. Our education system has almost given up on teaching us to speak French. Why bother, as almost every French person now speaks embarrassingly good English? So it is getting harder and harder to experience the awful sound of attempts at French by a ‘Rosbif’ (this is the French equivalent of us calling them ‘Frogs’). Likewise, you now seldom see a French lip curling as an Englishman mangles and tortures the graceful, precise language of Moliere and Victor Hugo.

You may be sure that Charles de Gaulle had to struggle to suppress his horror at Churchill’s attempts to speak French every time they met, even as he struggled to drink the fluid which we then called ‘coffee’. He is said to have asked, given a cup of this substance: ‘Is this perhaps the famous English tea?’

The Frogs – this is very much a French film – make Sir Simon wear some very strange things, including a sort of reddish tweed suit, which would surely have got Churchill horsewhipped on the steps of any good London club he tried to enter. But despite these failings, Sir Simon’s Winston is completely captivating and wholly believable.

The deep irony of this very pro-de Gaulle drama is that it is based on a biography of the General by an Englishman, Julian Jackson. French professors have been fuming for years because Jackson’s account of France’s greatest modern leader is so much better than anything written by a Frenchman. What emerges from it is that de Gaulle was at least as great as Churchill, quite possibly greater as he had, to begin with, nothing at all.

Simon Russell Beale as Winston Churchill and Simon Abkarian as Charles de Gaulle in the new film

Churchill and de Gaulle walking together while on a visit to Paris during the Second World War

De Gaulle had won France one of its few battlefield successes in its futile attempt to halt the invading Nazis. He became a government minister for war before fleeing across the English Channel in June 1940.

The drama shows Britain’s initial cautious and mean treatment of him, awarding de Gaulle a dingy obscure room from which to work and to rally those few Frenchmen and women who still refused to accept their defeat. We have already seen the General briefly in combat, smashing a column of Nazi tanks with astute leadership and unflinching physical courage under fire, characteristics de Gaulle definitely possessed. So we know that he is not just a very tall, rather forbidding man who smokes too much.

The man who plays him, the French-Armenian actor Simon Abkarian, manages to convey de Gaulle’s giant 6ft 5in stature, even though he only just clears 6ft himself. De Gaulle always fretted that he was just too tall for most people to cope with him. Had he not been so magnificent, he would have been ridiculous. He looked like a camel, aloof and possessing secret knowledge, and he was given to silent brooding as well as to furious argument.

The drama shows Churchill at first browbeaten by his unimaginative War Cabinet into abandoning collaboration with de Gaulle right from the start. It will not be the last time he wants to do this, and it would have been very easy for him to have done so. But having made this mistake once, Churchill, seeing what others cannot see in this man he cannot stand, changes his mind. And so de Gaulle is allowed to make a BBC broadcast from London – the first of many rallying the ‘Free French’ throughout the war – on June 18, 1940, the day after his arrival. This marks the beginning of France’s rebirth.

For years afterwards he would make these broadcasts over and over again, and they gave hope to millions. But although the French came to know his voice as if he were a personal friend, almost nobody in France knew what he looked like, so that when he finally strode into Paris on Liberation Day in 1944, his extraordinary appearance was a complete surprise. Back and forth the two men go, Churchill growling and de Gaulle snapping, de Gaulle demanding the impossible and then himself doing the impossible by establishing bases in France’s muddy, decrepit African empire – and so beginning the defeat of the collaborating traitor Marshal Petain.

Perhaps the climax of the Churchill-de Gaulle struggle is a Downing Street meeting at which the General insists that he is in fact the embodiment of France, a claim Churchill bitingly contests. At this point, the French giant seizes an antique chair, smashes it to bits and storms off to his wife and daughter in Hampstead, there to sulk magnificently until events prove him right.

He is France, to all intents and purposes, crazy as this sounds to us in our world of peace and stability. For this is the true heart of the film. Churchill, who embodies Britain much as his rival embodies France, comes to see that this infuriating, almost crazy junior general does in fact know something about power and kingship which almost nobody else knows.

He also possesses a total ruthlessness and a wild gambler’s courage. Once de Gaulle’s utter refusal to accept defeat began to enter the minds of the French people, he was bound to win.

Winston Churchill outside 10 Downing Street in June 1943, gesturing his famous ‘V for Victory’ hand signal

But it goes deeper still. De Gaulle is hated by Franklin Roosevelt, who is portrayed in this film as a cold, harsh and tricky man, who at one stage prefers Vichy collaborators to de Gaulle because they are more pliant.

Roosevelt is shown icily berating Churchill at a White House meeting for not controlling de Gaulle, much as Donald Trump once berated Ukraine’s President Zelensky. Hearing of this, de Gaulle explains that he defies Roosevelt because, if he does not, even when he is weak and alone, France will end up as an American vassal. He warns that Britain faces the same fate if it is not careful.

And lo, France’s nuclear deterrent in 2026 is designed, made and controlled entirely in France. Ours uses American missiles and US designs, and probably could not be launched without US permission. History has consequences, and this piece of celluloid history has much to tell us.