"Bad history! BAD!!!": Historically inaccurate movies and TV shows

Cafe Society
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A companion perhaps to the bad historical novels thread, this one is for movies set anytime before they were filmed that portray history incorrectly.

I take for granted that all movies based on novels or on historical events or personalities must condense source material. If you have 10 minutes to get from point A to point K you’re going to have to cut out B, C, E, and J altogether, only hint at D, roll FGH into F+, and switch I for i. This is why Scarlett’s first two children and many side characters disappear in Gone With the Wind or why Tina Turner meets Ike during an open mike singalong at a bar in What’s Love Got to Do With It (she met him several times but began singing after she started dating his saxophonist)- it simply takes too much time.

However, sometimes the screenplay goes overboard in being untruthful to history or to a story. Generic examples include shootouts where neither side has to stop and reload (most people used single shot rifles until well after the Civil War) or a man saying “ouch” and having a little bit of blood when shot by a 19th century rifle (a slow moving .57 caliber just hit your arm- you’re gonna say more than ‘ouch’ and chances are you’re not going to keep that arm very long). Specific examples from the above include- as I’ve mentioned a ridiculous number of times probably- the grossly exaggerated Twelve Oaks mansion in GWTW (it was a Tsar’s palace rather than a Georgia planter’s house) or the number of wounded that allegedly caused one of the veterans watching the film to say “if we’d had that damned many men we’d have held”, or from What’s Love… changing the father of Tina’s first child from the saxophonist to Ike is a bit of a serious stretch.

So- what are some movies whose historical inaccuracies bother you? (I’ll end the OP here and be back with some entries.)

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A lot bothered me about The Legend of Zorro. The worst was Abraham Lincoln showing up to welcome California into the Union–ten years before he was first inaugurated.

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It would be quicker to list the historical movies without significant errors. But you knew that.
Part of the problem is, as a friend of Anthony Shaffer was supposed to have said, that “God writes lousy theater”. Inevitably, you have to telescope events, combine people, and create scenes to explain things or to give it greater dramatic emphasis. I love Dalton Trumbo’s script for Spartacus, but the damned thing’s not history – it goes off the rails many times. A friend of ours who’s into Scottish history thinks Braveheart is a hoot because of all the gaffes. Lawrence of Arabia departs from Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom all the time. And those are three of the good ones.

The movie [Lady Jane Grey had its good points, but making Guilford Dudley a compassionate, noble hero seems pretty much at odds with reality (I researched the situation carefully – at one point I started writing my own play based on it).

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My advice is not to learn history from movies, as I can’t think of a single one that even tries to be historically accurate, especially when it comes to ancient and medieval history.

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I can usually forgive historical inaccuracies. Sometimes the over-all story is well written, or an actor does a great job, or the sets and costumes are accurate, etc., so it makes up for the mistakes. I happen to love Gladiator, but I certainly wouldn’t use it to teach Roman history. I really like Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, but it should have been called Dragon: A Bruce Lee Story.

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The reason I started this thread was because the other night I watched a movie I’d really remembered liking: Shenandoah. For those who haven’t seen it-

Charlie Anderson (Jimmy Stewart) is a very prosperous Virginia farmer during the Civil War. He owns no slaves and is proud of it. He’s a widower with a daughter (who marries a Confederate officer) and six sons, ages 16 to around 30 who work the place with him. There’s a lot to like about the movie (his blessing of dinner is one thing) but the history is generally dreadful.

Charlie feels that because he does not own slaves he has no business fighting for the Confederacy, though being a Virginian himself he will not take up arms against his neighbors, and thus he sits out the war refusing to take a side; it’s not “my war”. He remains neutral even when the cannon blasts are literally shaking his house and men are being shot and killed within earshot of his farm. He shoos away the Confederate Home Guard when they come to conscript his sons and he and his sons physicall fight off purchasing agents for the Union cavalry when they come to buy some of his horses (which are not for sale).

Okay, lots of problems with this, first and foremost being-

It’s unlikely Charlie Anderson would be neutral to begin with. He may be like Robert E. Lee (or Mrs. Jefferson Davis or many others) who thought the south was morally and politically in the wrong and that (to quote James Best’s character in the movie) “we ain’t got a dog’s chance in hell of winnin’”, but chose to stand with the state rather than fight against it. OR, it’s conceivable that he and his family would side with the Union- many residents of the Southern states did. (General George Thomas, “The Rock of Chickamauga”, a Union general and war hero, was not only a Virginian but a slaveowner, and Virginia fielded at least one regiment of Union troops.) But it is highly doubtful that Anderson would be neutral, and unthinkable that his five adult sons would also all be neutral.

In the second place, NO family with five able bodied sons over the age of 18(and one who is 16) could be in Virginia AND have none of them fighting. This wasn’t just a matter of principal but was because ALL able bodied men in Confederate states were required to serve in the military or to show just cause why they be exempt. Of the most common cases for exemption- manager of a farm with 20 or more slaves, a manufacturer of a product vital to the war effort, sole provider for a large family, willing and able to pay a substitute, an uncle in the Confederate Senate who gets you an exemption, etc.- NONE apply to this family. They would have been ordered into service, and while the Home Guard may take no for an answer once, they’re not likely to take it for an answer twice, and this takes place in 1864 as the war is winding up to its close.
As Virginians they would have been exempt from the Union conscriptions act obviously, and certainly millions of men in the north either got exempt status or were never called up to begin with, but again- this is Virginia, and while the movie isn’t really clear where the Anderson farm is other than evidently somewhere in the Shenandoah valley, and in Virginia rather than West Virginia.
As for the federal agents seeking horses, ditto but only moreso: driving them off is the worst thing you can do, because when they return they’ll have troops and they are completely free to confiscate the horses without pay since you have proven yourself a rebel. The best thing to do, unfair as it is, would be to negotiate the best price you can for them and perhaps you can convince them to let you keep your two favorites or so, and just be damned glad that it isn’t the rebel army requisitioning them and paying for them in worthless currency if at all.

What else… ah yes, the youngest son, called ‘The Boy’ (he doesn’t have a name in the movie), is best friends with a slave from a neighboring farm. At one point the slave runs away from his master, and when next seen- a few days later- he is a rifle/bayonette wielding soldier in an integrated Union regiment. Uh… no. While basic training was certainly abbreviated at times, it’s unlikely an illiterate black recruit would just be put in uniform and given a rifle and sent onto the battlefield, and while Colored Regiments had white officers (exclusively at their beginning) the army itself wasn’t integrated and in fact most units were segregated until after World War II.

And there are other problems. For a wartorn state this Virginia is very green and blossoming with no evidence of shortage or want anywhere. The Anderson farm has never been pillaged by either army (my family lived in isolated farms in Alabama hundreds of miles from the nearest front and they were pillaged by the rebels, and later by the Yankees when they came through Alabama; Anderson is close to both armies).

And while this is not a historical inaccuracy it’s just stupid: ‘The Boy’ is fishing and finds in the river a rebel private’s cap (name for which illudes me- a kemi? In any case it looks like this). He picks it up and wears it. His father picks at him about it but doesn’t make him take it off or stop wearing. The boy also goes out squirrel hunting a lot with his rifle, and wearing his grey pants and his dark grey jacket, and his rebel cap. Take a wild guess what happens. (Damn! How stupid and unobservant is this family? Or do they just hate the kid? “Boy, why don’t you put on that Confederate cap and run out in the fields where we’ve heard battle sounds all week and get us some squirrel!” Though even a 16 year old you’d think would have some sense in the matter.)

Anyway, I could go on, but this is a rare case of “good movie (in general)/BADDD history”. Of course it was filmed as Vietnam was accelerating and was probably intended as an anti-war piece, but today it’s a Civil War piece and as such doesn’t work.

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IIRC, the real Guilford went to his death kicking and screaming after repeatedly offering to say anything they wanted to say about his wife and his father (up to and including that they were witches) if they’d give him a lesser sentence. But we did get to see Cary Elwes naked because of him, so his death wasn’t in vain.

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There are a LOT of historical inaccuracies on The Tudors, but the thing that bugged me the most - even more than all the chronological problems and the made-up homosexual affairs and the fictionalized characters - was the armor that Henry and his courtiers wore when they were tilting. It looked like it was from fucking Toys ‘R’ Us. Nobody would have ever been armored for the tilt like this or, even worse, THIS. Nobody would have dared to joust in anything less than a full harness. Nobody would be suicidal to go without full neck and face protection - that second image is absolutely fucking ridiculous. Henry the Eighth did not wear a goddamn silly, anachronistic Saxon-style half-helmet with a chain mail neck-guard, nor did anybody else in Tudor England or at any other time in history.

Henry VIII was obsessed with armor designs and he even had a special workshop set up in Greenwich to create English armor that would rival the best suits from France and Germany. Here is a photo of one of Henry’s many suits of armor - he would never have been caught dead in that ridiculous get-up that the idiot costume designers on The Tudors put him in.

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A kepi.

I use any number of historical movies in my classes, but one of the key parts to the assignment is to identify where the movie was inaccurate. But some movies are very useful at giving a bit of the flavor of an era.

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I agree with all of the above. And a film can be historically inaccurate and surprisngly accurate at the same time. Example: Shakespeare in Love is not and was never intended to be historically accurate but a light romantic ‘fantasia’ and tongue in cheek comedy. However, I actually would use parts of it to teach history, for its portrayal of the Elizabethan theater (out of doors, vendors, boys playing women, etc.) is actually great, and Judy Dench’s Elizabeth I is undoubtedly a lot closer to the real one than Cate Blanchett’s godawful interpretation in the two Elizabeth movies.

Speaking, Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth movies: did they manage to get anything right? My vote for possibly the worst big budget interpretation of a historical figure ever.

And of course The Tudors… HOW THE HELL DO YOU BLEND MARGARET AND MARY TUDOR INTO ONE AND THEN KILL HER OFF BEFORE SHE’S WHELPED!!! Is this like a STAR TREK reimagining alternate timeline? Without Margaret there’s no Mary Queen of Scots, no James V of Scotland, and no monarch of England since 1603.

Same with HBO’s ROME, a show I generally liked a lot until the second season went way too far afield. They took out Octavius’s first two wives… whah? One of them, no problem- she had no children, it didn’t really change history that much, but the other one gave birth to his only child, Julia, from whose line came Caligula and Nero. They took away Livia’s second child (Germanicus) from whom came Claudius (and also Caligula and Nero). And then- not historically inaccurate since the character’s fictional- there’s the kid who’s a baby when Caesar crosses the Rubicon (49 BCE) and when the series ends a year after Antony’s death (29 BC) the same kid is about 8.

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Not surprisingly there are several books on this subject, such as:
Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies
History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film
History Goes to the Movies: A Viewer’s Guide to the Best (and Some of the Worst) Historical Films Ever Made

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Good examples of this include Amadeus, The Crucible and Deadwood. Any resemblance twixt the real Mozart/Salierie/John Proctor/Abigail Williams/Al Swearengen/Seth Bullock and their filmatic counterparts is completely coincidental, but they give a great sense of 18th century Vienna/Puritan New England/a wild west town.

After years of Gunsmoke and Bonanza and a thousand other western TV shows and movies I particularly loved Deadwood. Characters step into a street in which their boots sink into the horse manure and mud, and the whores are not pretty women with hearts of gold and the Chinese aren’t all comic relief or spiritual.

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Another good book is The Hollywood History of the World, by George Macdonald Fraser. Yes, that Fraser.

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It doesn’t protray important historical events like most of the movies mentioned but one that really annoys me is Invincible. The main event that the movie revolved around was false. Vince Papale did not make the Eagles because of an open audition. He was not just a bartender who hadn’t played football since high school. He tried out and made the Philadelphia team in the WFL and played for a couple of years. His work there got him a look by Dick Vermeil. Changing that fact kind of ruins the movie for me.

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Speaking to that…

There’s a scene in the second Blanchett Elizabeth film showing the queen actually watching the Spanish Armada going down in flames, just off the English coast. I’m guessing that that’s not historically accurate. It was just a little too cinematic.

But what do I know. Where was Elizabeth during the Armada’s attack?

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These are good examples of another fact about Hollywood (and Broadway) Interpretations of history – sometimes they aren’t really meant to be historically accurate.
The Crucible was written by Arthur Miller in the wake of the HUAC and McCarthy investigations, and those events are very clearlt alluded to in the play. By that time a more sophisticated understanding of the actual events in Salem in 1692 was emerging, and Miller’s play isn’t really good history. Read as a study of Blacklisting, though, as it was clearly intended, it’s still powerful.

peter Schaffer (brother of the Anthony i cited above) wrote Amadeus as one of his usual comments on God and Man – not to be at all historically accurate. Why would he call his play “Amadeus” instead of “Mozart”? Why not “Salieri”, in fact, since he’s the central character? It’s because “Amadeus” means “God Loves” – Mozart is the beloved creature of God that Salieri (in the play – not in real life) sought to destroy in his War on God. Again, it’s a powerful play, but Schaffer didn’t for a moment think he was writing sober history in either the play or in the grealy different screenplay. It’s the same way his play The Royal Hunt of the Sun isn’t really about Pizzaru’s conquest of Atahualpa and the Incas – it’s about Man and God. And Equus isn’t really about the real-life incident in which a British boy blinded six horses in his care – it’s really about Man and God.
Plays are rarely simply about the narration of historical events – there’s almost invariably something else going on – some examination of a character trait, or analogy to present-day situations, or allegory. So when a movie is based on a historical play, you shouldn’t expect reliable history, and this is often the case with historical movies that aren’t based on stage dramas.

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In an episode of the American Life on Mars, Sam is called to investigate a bombing by the Weather Underground in which half a dozen cops are killed. The only people the WU managed to blow up were themselves, and their bombing campaigns were designed so as not to endanger people. Obviously, if things had gone down differently, they could very well have killed a lot of people by accident. But they never murdered anybody, and they never tried. (A similar error was made in a recent episode of Without a Trace, but I don’t believe the characters there were explicitly called Weathermen.)

–Cliffy

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Inaccurate “true” sports stories are often frustrating.

“Remember the Titans,” for instance, makes it appear as if the Titans had a rocky road (both on and off the field) on their way to the Virginia state championship. In reality, everything went very smoothly, and they never had to work up a sweat the entire season! They blew out virtually all their opponents,

And the fights/racial tension that pervaded the locker room all through te movie? All the players, black and white, agree that it just didn’t happen. Virginia in 1970 was no racial utopia, but it wasn’t Alabama in 1896, either. Almost all the players had played with and against other races many times before.

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JFK. I have a real problem with fiction masquerading as fact.

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ANY Oliver Stone movie, for that matter.