Possibly not the plot, but in terms of evoking what Elizabethan society was actually like, it was pretty much impeccable: you could watch Elizabeth and for all the money they spent on costumes and sets, not get a feel for the era. Shakespeare In Love though, pretty much nailed it: you got the feeling that these people actually belonged in 1590.
The best screen Elizabeth, however, is Miranda Richardson as Queenie in Blackadder: “Percy - who’s Queen?”
Really? I only got the impression that they belonged in 1990.
Queenie is great, but, I suspect, also not historically accurate. 
Mind you, she probably comes as close as most of the other representations of her (especially her fickleness), and is way more entertaining.
And skinny.There was plenty of Marty but Feinnes is a mere slip of a boy.
Once while channel-surfing I saw about 5 minutes of a movie – seems to have been made in the '50s or early '60s, by style and technicolor – where Troy is under siege and Helen is quarrelling with Paris and regretting that she left Ulysses.
Not “historically” inaccurate strictly speaking, as the Iliad is not history, but, still! :rolleyes: Were Hollywood screenwriters really that ignorant/indifferent in those days?!
:dubious: So?! It is not almost insulting, it is totally and justifiably insulting. The Spanish were like Muslim fundamentalists. They did not cease to be so until well into the 19th Century, and that after much kicking and screaming, and Muslim-fundamentalist echoes persisted into the 20th Century and ultimately gave the victory to Franco.
According to Colleen McCullough, FWIW (and IW a great deal – she is so well-versed in Roman history that classical scholars call her for guidance), the Third Servile War was not primarily a slave rebellion against the institution of slavery (abolition being inconceivable at the time even to slaves), but a Samnite war against Roman rule.
For instance, Wallace could not have fathered a child on the wife of the prince who was later Edward II, because Wallace was executed in 1305 and Prince Edward did not marry until 1307.
Also, Wallace was no blue-painted Celtic savage, but a well-cultured scion of his country’s nobility.
Not to mention that Isabella was all of ten when Wallace was executed ;).
Actually . . . in the Middle Ages, that would not have made much difference, except WRT the physical ability to conceive.
There wasn’t much marrying of 10 year olds going on in Medieval Europe. Men tended to marry in their mid 20s and women in their mid teens. In those rare cases when children were married, which was almost entirely among the high nobility and not really marriage, (At the age of 7, generally, a party could enter into a sponsalia, a premarriage contract, which would then be carried out when both parties had reacted the age of puberty, defined as 12 for girls and 14 for boys) there was almost never consummation of the marriage until puberty.
Look for instance at the hagiography of Ida of Lorraine, written in 1113 in the monastery where a saintly cult developed around her. The hagiography makes sure to portray her as the ideal woman and it points out that her marriage at 17 was correct in all particulars…that she married at the proper age of a woman to marry, that she married a man of her social rank who was honorable and attracted to her chastity and purity and so on…
Even though the slave uprising was largely in Samnium, I don’t think there’s any evidence that Samnites made up any significant portion of the revolting army. The Samnites were in no position to revolt at that point, having lost the Social War and having been pretty brutally crushed by Sulla just 13 years before. The Social War had devastated Samnium. I think McCullough put large numbers of Samnite veterans in the slave army as a narrative device (and makes Spartacus a Roman for the same reason.) In fact, in the book, after Spartacus is defeated, she has the Romans say to each other, “Let’s never mention that Spartacus was a Roman or that the Samnites were involved in this at all ever again.”, which is kind of cute.
There’s a notion that I guess is born of Beverly Hillbillies reruns and the fact so many nobles entered into marriage contracts as adolescents or younger that child brides were common all around in the Middle Ages and in Colonial and antebellum America. What I think is interesting is that most women married for the first time at about the same age as they do now, maybe just a bit younger. While there were 14 year old brides, they were rare and outside of the nobility at least an unmarried 23 year old woman in 1850 or 1750 or 1550 would not have been considered an old maid.
The two “bookend” classes- the wealthy and the especially poor- were the two most likely to marry young. It’s because the rich girls were provided with dowries that their groom could use towards purchasing land, while the really poor girls were in poverty and their grooms were probably in poverty themselves and the one nice thing about poverty is you don’t have to save up for it. Girls in the middle classes however tended to be the most likely not to marry as teenagers, because their grooms were most likely the young men who had little family help in acquiring land, and they had to acquire land before they could provide for a wife and children. (In my own family I have far more 18th/19th century direct ancestresses from this class who married in their 20s- sometimes even their 30s- than who married in their teens.)
To be fair, the movie does portray him as well-educated - he does, after all, speak Latin and French - and well-traveled. Gibson’s blue-painted savage is a persona, something the character does consciously to inspire his men and unsettle his enemies (and his allies). *That *may not be historically accurate, but it’s less of a departure from the original.
I thought Gladiator was a very good film, very visceral, gave a real feel for the times (even if the story is total fiction). However, something bugs me about it - the biggest inaccuracy is in the battle scene.
At about halfway in you can see the Romans break formation to engage the Germans one-to-one, by the end there’s random cavalry and infantry all over the shop. Romans would never have fought like this; one-on-one a German infantryman would wipe the floor with a Roman.
Like 300 (which I can forgive as being obvious fantasy - Rhinos, for God’s sake! Rule of cool), film-makers seem to assume that all this strategic, tactics and formation business is something that gets thrown right out of the window for a good old man-to-man scrap once the enemy closes. It makes for better drama, admittedly, but is massively inaccurate.
Well, yah. Pretty much goes without saying I"m afaid. Even the stories we’re taught in tx history class are pretty much fiction. Goliad too. I hear the capture of Santa Anna was pretty spot on though.
Am I right?
Never got into the film, but it must be mentioned here: in Gladiator, Ridley Scott apparently wanted to have female gladiators with–oh, it just sounds too ridiculous to type, please read it here(scroll down a bit).
Yep. I recall about two and a half instances of the Spartan (Greek, if we’re really nitpicking the history, but anywho) phalanx-style shield wall- the first encounter, the brief shot as the non-Spartan auxiliaries poured into the enemies’ flanks in a night battle, and the final stand with the turtle-style shield dome, which I’m counting as half an instance.
I enjoyed the fight choreography, but the rest of that movie was lousy. The only good writing was stolen directly from Herodotus, anyway.
Is that a real picture, or is it Robert Downey Jr?
It’s Robert E. Lee, ca. 1859.
The miniseries ROOTS has a side plot that was on the “historically inaccurate to the point of silly” side and one that was not in the novel.
For those who haven’t read ROOTS, it’s based on Alex Haley’s family’s oral history that supposedly told of their African ancestor remembered in tradition as Keen-tay. The story of Haley tracking this ancestor is almost as famous as the book he wrote. Haley never denied that his book was mostly fiction, for unless your ancestors were royalty or very very rich and well documented it’d be impossible for almost any family to write a historically accurate book about them that included any real detail or dialogue, and that problem is exponentialed when they were 1) illiterate and 2) slaves (who weren’t even listed by name in censuses or tax records), so the fact the book is largely conjecture and often imagination is no problem to me. It was still an important book.
That said it has some narrative problems. Haley spent years and years working on it, missed many deadlines, and when he finally turned it in the second half felt a bit rushed. It’s a very long book, and half or more is the story of Kunta Kinte from his birth/childhood/capture in Africa until the selling away of his daughter Kizzy (when he basically disappears from the book), so the first 50% or more goes from about 1750 to about 1800.
The next quarter or more of the book is about the life of Kizzy on the Tom Lea plantation from the time of her sale/rape/impregnation through the childhood of her son, Chicken George, or roughly 1800-1820, at which point Chicken George becomes the main character and remains such for a good part of the story. In the novel, the Civil War just sort of happens- it’s not a huge deal- descriptions of George’s son making horseshoes for both cavalries (the rebels and then the occupying Union) and the like. After the war Chicken George returns home and takes his family and many other black families (and a few white ones) to a new settlement in Tennessee- peacefully.
Now then, by the time the Civil War is fought and ends (which again is anticlimactic- there’s infinitely more detail on Kunta Kinte’s middle passage) the book is 90% or more over. The remaining 10%, which is not an afterward but very obviously the skeleton of a book that wasn’t written (and would later be the miniseries ROOTS: The Next Generations) goes from 1865 to Haley’s own childhood and early years (about 1935 or so).
Now, since the book is so uneven in its pacing, and since the Civil War is such a major part of our history- especially on films about the 19th century- the producers and screenwriters had to flesh it out a bit or else it would be 15 minutes from Sumter to Appomattox on the screen, which wouldn’t be satisfying, they add in a sideplot about two brothers, Colonel Evil (Lloyd Bridges) and his little brother Cap’n Eviller (Doug McLure) who harass the slaves and then when the war is over form the local section of the KKK. After an ingenious bit of forensic investigation George’s son Tom finds a way to identify all the KKK members- wasn’t in the book and almost certainly never happened and if it had surely even an illiterate slave would have known better to pursue it the way he did (i.e. don’t give it to the sheriff and expect help, give it to the Feds who are occupying the area and have orders already to crush the KKK). But that’s not the part I have the most problem with.
Through a convoluted sequence, George’s son Tom ends up killing McLure’s character during the war, and then finally traps Col. Evil (Bridges) in a series of plot twists. Col. Evil and his fellow KKK henchman had tied Tom to a tree and lashed him almost to death, and in the end Tom turns the tables by tying Bridges and his henchmen to trees. He starts to use the bullwhip on the sobbing hysterical cowardly Bridges character, but because he’s the better man he decides not to, but just to leave him tied there. Chicken George tells him that he and his clan are going now, and that if Bridges attempts to bother them again, he’ll personally kill him.
Okay, it’s viscerally satisfying plotwise, but historically there’s no end to problems with the whole final episode. I’ll only go into the most obvious:
A group of black men, newly freed from slavery, have tied one of the community’s leading white citizens (never mind he’s a Klansman, he’s a rich white man in the Reconstruction) to a tree and humilated him and his henchmen. Then they’ve “fled” the area in a caravan of mule drawn wagons. Okay, even supposing that the Colonel and his men remain out at the farm for 3 days or so (highly, HIGHLY unlikely as they’d be missed at their homes and or businesses and their movements relatively easy to track [everyone knows Bridges manages this place], then that means that Tom and family have a 3 day head start.
Now Col. Evil is a seasoned cavalry officer and there are many other cavalry in the community just back from the war, and even the occupying bluecoats aren’t going to look very lightly on a black man doing what he did to the Colonel (plus they’re far more likely to take the Col’s word for any version of events). A muletrain containing many women and children is going to make a few miles per day, absolutely maximum; even with a 3 day head start men on horseback are going to overtake them in a day, maximum. It’s not likely they’d have honored any promises made when outsmarted and tied to trees by these men- a few mounted KKK or even just plain clad vigilantes would have- sadly but surely- overtaken and made very short work of the encampment, or, if they wanted to handle it legally, had them arrested at any time (a muletrain full of several families is going to have some difficulty hiding or avoiding roads). Even once they got to Tennessee it would be impossible to avoid them; the Tennessee authorities would probably expedite the men at least in a heartbeat to stand trial.
So, like* Shenandoah,* it makes a good story, no question, but it never would or could have happened.
As you might have expected, TVTropes has pages on this subject – see Hollywood History, Politically Correct History, and You Fail History Forever.