Here’s some books about historical inaccuracies in movies:
Reel v. Real: How Hollywood Turns Fact into Fiction by Frank Sanello
Past Imperfect: History according to the Movies, edited by Mark C. Carnes, Ted Mico, Jon Miller-Munzon, and David Rubel
History Goes to the Movies by Joseph Roquemore
American History/American Movies: Interpreting the Hollywood Image edited by John E. O’Connor and Martin A. Jackson
My movie buddies have forced me to shut up about accents. I’m hardly Henry Higgins, but I get frustrated by lots of movies. Like “Ever After.” So they’re in France and they all speak with British accents? And the background music is vaguely Irish? Ooookay.
Same with Moulin Rouge - I realize it would have been weird to have Ewan and Nicole doing their Scottish and Australian accents respectively, but having nearly everybody in the movie be vaguely British drives me up the wall.
In The Patriot we’re suppose to believe that Mel Gibson’s southern plantation is being worked by free blacks, not slaves. That just completely took me out of the movie and I had trouble getting back into it.
Marc
FWIW, I talked about Elizabeth just after it came out with my history supervisor, who didn’t like it. She thought the historical adaptation with the movie made it turn out all wrong! Just like Baker I guess…so maybe less politics were needed.
No matter how much I love this movie I have to agree here. They couldn’t have let Nicole keep her regular accent, because it doesn’t make sense, obviously–Australian hooker in France? But Ewan’s would have worked. He’s supposed to be coming from Britain to France with the Bohemian Revolution. He could have kept his accent. It’s just too bad he didn’t.
Besides that, the only one that really seriously annoys me is the ‘right of first night’ and Braveheart.
No, I haven’t. Should I be grateful?
** FisherQueen: **
We watched that excreable thing not too long ago. I didn’t have a problem with the rock music as much as the funky hairstyles and makeup of the lead actress. The premise of injecting modern music and behaviour might have been vaguely interesting if they could have been consistent in at least one area! Some of the costumes were spot-on-- why not carry that throughout the film, or conversely, modernize all of the costumes? One woman in the ballroom scene was wearing PANTS!!!
I couldn’t agree more. What I find even more aggravating is when they make a big effort to get the details right, and then make a huge glaring mistake. On of my biggest peeves is in Gladiator: they do a pretty good job with the Roman uniforms and weapons (even get the centurion helmet crests the right direction, from side to side, for once) , but in the opening battle seen theyhave the legionaires break rank and fight in a free-for all. The whole success of the Roman army in beating the Gauls and Germans was due to the fact that they didn’t break rank, kept formation, and hacked the bear-chested barbarians down from behind those huge shields. All those Gauls, who were looking for glorious man to man combat, ever saw was a wall of sheilds with short swords poking out. It was like sending them against a belt grinder with teeth.
Makes for boring cinema though…
Cheers,
-Trupa
PS.: Hi everyone, first post on the boards.
I’m willing to completely forgive any errors in Braveheart, because it has Mel Gibson in a kilt. Sorry, guys.
So, do y’all freak out when you go to see Richard III and he’s protrayed as a hunchback? When you read the Iliad, do you get pissed off at all these clearly fictional gods being on the battlefield?
Seriously, history has been altered to make better entertainment for as long as we’ve had the concepts of “history” and “entertainment.” If you want a history lesson, read a book. You don’t go to movies to learn history, you go to movies to be entertained. They could have had William Wallace fighting Imperial Stormtroopers, and I wouldn’t have cared so long as it made a good movie.
That would be great if people read a book about the subject every time that they saw a movie. They don’t. Lots of people know nothing about history except what they’ve seen in inaccurate movies and TV shows.
Is it surprising that many historical movies are wildly inaccurate? Perhaps not. Is it suprising that we are going to complain about that fact? Of course not. This is the SDMB. That’s what we do here. We fight ignorance.
I think this spells out my main beef with Hollywood “history” quite well. Considering that a great deal of Americans get all of their history from the movies, my gut reaction is that there’s a vague responisbility that Hollywood should have towards accuracy. I know that Hollywood’s response would be that they’re there to entertain, not to educate, but do the two need to be mutually exclusive?
Well, there are people who do, you know… 
(Actually, I have a friend who was a history major as an undergrad, and she has issues with Shakespeare’s history plays precisely because “people read them, and they think that’s how it really happened.” I love and obsess over these plays, but we get along swimmingly anyway.)
BTW, I really liked Topsy-Turvy. But then, I would…
Okay, so the recent The Mummy series of movies isn’t supposed to be a documentary, but I still haven’t gotten over the sheer amount of mystery they attach to the Book of the Dead. For crying out loud, I can go to Borders and buy a copy! Even in the '30s, when the film is supposedly set, anyone who could read heiroglyphics could read the Book off tomb walls.
My view of Braveheart’s alterations of Scottish history is a mite skewed, because I’m best friends with a Coman/Comyn and some kinda removed cousin to the current holder of the Bruce’s titles.
I do recognize that fanatical attention to historical accuracy in entertainment is a recent phenomenon (Even Shakespeare’s ‘historical’ plays have people the wrong ages, in the wrong places at the wrong times, etc etc etc) but I figure if you’re gonna make the pretense of being accurate, you should do it all the way. Or at least get the important bits right.
Mutiny on the Bounty (1936) is the one people think is historically accurate, but it is pretty far off the mark, for the most part. Just a few facts:
–Bligh was not the one-dimensional ogre he was made out to be.
–Bligh and Christian were good friends before they went on this particular voyage.
–Nobody much liked Fryer.
–Ned Young may have actually incited the mutiny.
–There was no Roger Byam.
–Tom Ellison was a teenager, unmarried, no kids.
And so on.
And Christian certainly would not have had an American accent.
The Bounty (1984) is much more accurate.
In a single movie, you may see scenes where the art director has made a fetish of authenticity, only to have it spoiled by ridiculous things in the script. For instance, in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves they went to the trouble of getting short-legged cows to be in the background (supposedly similar to 12th century breeds), and then blithely threw telescopes and gunpowder into the story.
In the case of Gladiator, it wasn’t meant to reflect history, but rather to be inspired by 19th century French artistic visions of Rome. Too bad, because real history would have been a lot more interesting.
This may be a stretch, but I think one of the problems with historical inaccuracies in movies is just the day and age we live in. We have a modern bias based on our own familiarity with the world, plus our own interests. We like to think the past was full of neat discoveries, so movies always have to have pivotal technologies blatantly thrown in. Gunpowder is the biggest example- According to ‘Hollywood’ history, Gunpowder was independently invented/forgotten by about three dozen various eccentric intellectuals who use it in alliance with the ‘good guys’ generally for nothing more than a diversion/eye candy. (I think the most obnoxious example of this was Scorpion King. Yeah, I know the movie was entirely fiction, but it was set in like like 8000 B.C. and we have gunpowder used.
Another thing I noticed is that when a movie is 100% historically accurate, it is no longer a movie, it is a documentary. Frankly if I wanted to actually learn about it, I’d look it up in the encyclopedia. However if I wanted to see a visual deptiction taking very generous liberties, I’ll shell out 8 bucks at the movie theater. At the very least it will be worth some laughs.
I could go on forever about factual screw-ups in movies, but my absolute favorite is at the very end of THE SOUND OF MUSIC, when the Trapp family is shown crossing the Alps in the wrong direction–into Germany! Of course the makers of the film knew that that was Germany in the distance, but thought that the mountains in that direction looked prettier, and figured that no one in the audience would know.
I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by Topsy-Turvey, Lissa. I’m not an expert on Victorian civilian costume, but they had some great stuff on Victorian technology that I think you’ll really appreciate. Besides, great film, great story, great music!
The worst part about The Sound of Music is that their escape just didn’t happen that way. The Von Trapps did not make a dramatic run for it, they just drove out of Austria. And Maria had had time to birth at least one child before their exile. Captain von Trapp was hardly the martinet he was depicted as either. I could go on, but their real story is just as interesting as the Hollywood version.
I loved Topsy Turvy – there was a real effort to get as many historical details right as possoble (without messing with the story, of course).
One thing that the spouse and I always marvel at in films is how good medieval orthodontia was. Sure, they’re dressed in rags, but wow! Everyone has clean, white, straight teeth! (Unless it’s a British-made film, of course. ;))
Does anyone else remember the brief-lived TV show Covington Cross, starring Ione Skye? I realize it was semi-tongue-in-cheek, but I used to love watching it anyway just to play “Spot the Anachronism”.