37 Days (2014)

Three episodes of a docudrama that present the background to the First World War, since the assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand to the declarations of war of various contenders. That means the thirty seven days elapsed between 28 June and 4 August 1914. The scenarios are the Foreign Office, the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose secretary was Sir Edward Grey series, and the German Chancellery in Berlin, so that the action is narrated by two young clerks who, after thirty-seven days, enlist in the armed forces . The miniseries is a mixture of drama and documentary, its tone is somewhat aseptically dry in which many details are simplified, but it highlights some aspects in order to answer the question that the viewer makes constantly: how we go from peace to war in just over a month? Though the series lop sides at a very British viewpoint and can't help to look at characters often caricatured, as Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, the indecisive elderly Franz Joseph I, and the French Foreign Affairs Minister, Paul Cambon, it also balances a sense of levity avoiding to endorse the British character. Winston Churchill , First Lord of the Admiralty, the prime minister Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer or Treasury Minister, are not complimented. The series shows the struggle between pacifists and warmongers in the British Cabinet, as well as the growing opposition among military, led by Helmuth von Moltke, generalissimo of the German armies and civilian politicians, with Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg to the head.