Their Finest Page #3
- R
- Year:
- 2016
- 117 min
- $3,595,841
- 1,070 Views
Desk. Parfitt, you've met.
Writing partner.
Delighted to have you on board.
Report.
So, what do you think?
Uh, the father leaves a bad taste.
Drunken sailor angle's good, though.
Make him an uncle.
Uncle Frank.
- Yeah.
- Soused in the hold.
Wakes up in Dunkirk.
Double-take
when he sees the Stukas.
Gives us our laughs,
then takes a bullet in act three.
- Tears all round.
Yeah. First mate, bloke in France,
needs to be a boyfriend.
- Rose or Lily's?
- Either.
Both? What are they like?
Shy, quiet. Lily hardly spoke.
- One quiet, one chatty.
- They're both quiet.
- Not if we want any dialogue.
- How old are they?
- Thirty?
- Ah, marvelous.
Working title, Old Maids of Margate.
It's Southend.
Twenty-one, Lily sweet, Rose spunky.
Rose gets the boyfriend.
"My darling, I couldn't die
without seeing the cornflower blue
of your eyes a final time."
You can have that one on me.
What's his name, the boyfriend?
Eric. Eric Lumb.
Do you hear that noise?
That's 200 women in the one and nines
vowing aloud never to call their sons
anything as bloody feeble as Eric.
- Now give me a hero's name.
- John.
- Dull.
- Johnnie.
- Mmm-hmm.
- He'll have to make it back.
- Injured.
- A risk. A rescue.
"Don't be a fool, Johnnie.
There's a sniper out there!"
- Yep. Mm...
- Saves his commanding officer.
Fellow soldier?
Saves the dog.
But he didn't.
In real life, he didn't.
Film, Mrs. Cole.
Real life with the boring bits cut out.
Don't confuse facts with truth
and, for Christ's sake,
don't let either of them
get in the way of the story.
Now we know how it starts.
Johnnie in France.
- We know how it ends.
- Home safe.
And we know that
somewhere in between
we have dog, Dunkirk,
engine failure, and uncle's death.
Now all we have to do is fill in the gaps.
I'm buying it.
Down payment.
Call it rent, call it what you like,
but I am not leaving London.
- Hmm!
- Sorry. Bad night.
Buckley, Parfitt, meeting now.
Ministry of War Transport.
Seems they've had wind of
your proposed filmic scenario.
Apparently, they're concerned
that "the Nancy Starling's engine failure
may cast morale-sapping doubt
on the quality of British engineering."
It was her.
Bloody Ministry spy.
What if it's not the engine?
What if it's the propeller?
It gets snarled up with flotsam,
Uncle Frank goes in the water
to free it, gets shot,
and the girls have to finish
the job under fire.
- Not the girls.
- Not the girls?
- No. Uh, Johnnie.
- Johnnie?
- Is there an echo in here?
- Why him?
- Because he's the hero.
- So?
Well, how do we know he's the hero
if he never does anything heroic?
Well, he's called Johnnie.
Are you trying to pick
a fight with me, Mrs. Cole?
Johnnie can't go in the water.
He's injured, badly injured.
for Christ's sake.
He's not gonna be leaking spleen
through his trousers.
This is Rose and Lily's story,
and you won't let them do anything.
- They go to Dunkirk.
- And Johnnie pilots them home.
They're girls. Girls don't
want to be the hero.
They want to have the hero.
They want to be had by him.
- Tom, cab.
- Oh!
And if that ginger viper
so much as gets her nose
through the office door
while we're out, you're sacked.
And don't think I won't know.
I can smell her shaving cream on the wind.
Anything else?
Since you're so keen to flex
your femininity, you can tidy up!
I heard furniture.
"Angels of the Sea.
Across the Waves.
Two to Dunkirk.
Three to Dunkirk.
Dunkirk or Bust.
Busts to Dunkirk."
Somewhere in the world there is
a bullet with that man's name on.
Why hasn't he been called up?
I mean, Parfitt's too old, but Buckley...
Baker persuaded someone
that Buckley was more use
to the war effort with a typewriter.
It won't last.
He'll end up in uniform,
like every other mother's son.
That is, if he ever had a mother.
More likely, Parfitt found him in a pub,
spawning spontaneously
in the sawdust.
You know,
a lot of men are scared
we won't go back into our boxes
when this is all over.
It makes them belligerent.
Something's changed.
I tidied.
What happened at the meeting?
I outlined our proposed changes.
They accepted them.
- What's this?
- Lunch.
The girls can pilot
the boat home, all right?
They can pilot the bloody boat.
They can lead the damn fleet,
for all I care.
But Johnnie frees the propeller.
Hmm.
You're late. I took
the liberty of ordering.
Sorry. We have guests staying,
friends from Poland.
Things are very bad in Europe.
It's not exactly a picnic here,
if you hadn't noticed.
You can't find a decent waiter in SoHo
They were all rounded up as so-called
enemies of the state,
apart from Geppetto over there,
who almost certainly is a spy.
Cerberus!
' " Ugh!
Christ, a dead sheep?
- Ugh.
but Cerberus can't live
on crusts and scraps.
Ugh...
Sophie's going to boil it up
and make him some broth.
Lucky fellow.
Well, perhaps your sister would
like to start feeding me, too,
unless, of course, you've actually
found me some work.
So, Baker's outline for the Dunkirk film,
you read it?
It rattles along rather better
than one might have expected.
Johnnie's escape from the steel thrust
of the German war machine.
The rescue of the dog was very good.
Here, boy. Here.
No, no. No, not you, Cerberus.
Of course, it all depends on who
they're planning to cast as Rose.
Uncle Frank?
"A shipwreck of a man"? Sammy!
"Sixties. Looks older"?
Senior roles are not
to be sneered at, Ambrose.
- Gravitas. Experience. Maturity.
- Ugh.
We all have a part to play
in defeating Hitler.
Not this part. It's a corpse role.
He's dead before the end of act three.
Mr. Smith.
- Mmm-mmm.
- Mr. Hilliard.
Ambrose, you must see...
You, me, the industry, we are all
at the service of the war now.
The war. The war.
Damn the bloody war!
The war has skimmed off the cream,
and we're left with the rancid curds!
I'm sorry I took so long.
There was a bomb crater
on the Marylebone Road. Oh!
No one told me there was a meeting.
No, we've been rather trying to keep this
under wraps for the present.
It seems that there's a someone
in Mr. Swain's department
who knows a someone who says that
the Starling sisters never got to Dunkirk.
That their engine broke down before
they were even out of British waters.
Pity. Pity all round, really.
Your first draft boded so well.
- Well...
- So the Starling sisters lied?
What difference does it really make?
For God's sake, of course it makes
a difference. It's not the truth.
The truth is, they stole a boat
from a man who terrified them
and set out to cross 5O miles
of open sea into a war.
- They never got there.
- Because their engine failed.
Now, there's a truth we won't be telling.
Morale-sapping, apparently.
We pick our truths.
Isn't that the point?
We're saying this is based
Translation
Translate and read this script in other languages:
Select another language:
- - Select -
- 简体中文 (Chinese - Simplified)
- 繁體中文 (Chinese - Traditional)
- Español (Spanish)
- Esperanto (Esperanto)
- 日本語 (Japanese)
- Português (Portuguese)
- Deutsch (German)
- العربية (Arabic)
- Français (French)
- Русский (Russian)
- ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada)
- 한국어 (Korean)
- עברית (Hebrew)
- Gaeilge (Irish)
- Українська (Ukrainian)
- اردو (Urdu)
- Magyar (Hungarian)
- मानक हिन्दी (Hindi)
- Indonesia (Indonesian)
- Italiano (Italian)
- தமிழ் (Tamil)
- Türkçe (Turkish)
- తెలుగు (Telugu)
- ภาษาไทย (Thai)
- Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
- Čeština (Czech)
- Polski (Polish)
- Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
- Românește (Romanian)
- Nederlands (Dutch)
- Ελληνικά (Greek)
- Latinum (Latin)
- Svenska (Swedish)
- Dansk (Danish)
- Suomi (Finnish)
- فارسی (Persian)
- ייִדיש (Yiddish)
- հայերեն (Armenian)
- Norsk (Norwegian)
- English (English)
Citation
Use the citation below to add this screenplay to your bibliography:
Style:MLAChicagoAPA
"Their Finest" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 19 Nov. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/their_finest_21713>.
Discuss this script with the community:
Report Comment
We're doing our best to make sure our content is useful, accurate and safe.
If by any chance you spot an inappropriate comment while navigating through our website please use this form to let us know, and we'll take care of it shortly.
Attachment
You need to be logged in to favorite.
Log In