Also the judge portrayed in the play, Thomas Danforth, was one of the most reasonable and moderate judges and one of the ones to say “Whoa…” when he became increasingly skeptical of the witnesses. In the play it’s the opposite- he’s a total ideologue and completely convinced of the righteousness of the hangings, and when he does begin to have doubts due to Abby’s disappearance and other matters he doubles down and insist the hangings continue unless the accused confess (and thereby clear him of any misdoing).
Quite true. There was a great deal of difference between classes, and men on average married at an older age.
Widows, of which there were many, would also remarry later in life, especially if they had been left with private means (e.g., Martha Custis). This would skew the average female age somewhat toward the high end.
Another example of which I have some personal experience: Col. Josiah Snelling, who founded Ft. Snelling at the junction of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, met and married his wife Abigail during the War of 1812, when he was around 30 and she was 15 (he was already a commissioned officer in the US Army). Together, they had (as I recall) three children, one of whom died in infancy, before the good Colonel died of chronic diarrhea in 1828 at the age of 45. Abigail, I believe, went on to remarry in her 30s.
Correction: He was 45 in 1827, making him 46 or (possibly) 47 at the time of his death.
This one’s fairly minor, but we finally watched Precious last night. It’s set in 1987 Harlem. At one point, Precious is envisioning all the important news of the day and the recent past that she’ll share with her baby. We see broadcasts of such iconic moments as Oliver North being sworn in to testify before Congress, Malcom X, the lone man stopping the line of tanks near Tiananmen Square, the … Hold on. Tiananmen Square?? That was 1989.
Why does anyone think U-571 should be accurate? It doesn’t purport to be the true story of an actual event, does it? Like “Saving Private Ryan,” it was inspired by some actual events but told its own fictional story.
I want to mention one scene from a movie I actually like a great deal: The Longest Day. It serves to point out how young so many officers were in WWII. The scene is when Lt. Col. “Vandy” Vandevoort (played by John Wayne at 57 years old) comes to see Brig Gen. James “Jumpin’ Jim” Gavin (played by Robert Ryan at 52 years old.) The bitch of it is that Vandevoort was 27 years old and Gavin was only 37 at the time of the Normandy landings!
To represent that scene more accurately today imagine Frankie Muniz (from Malcolm in the Middle) coming to see Tobey Maguire in those respective roles. Ah well, one can dream.
A Bridge Too Far was more accurate. They cast Ryan O’Neal (36 at the time) as Gavin. They also cast Sean Connery (47) as Roy Urquhart (43); Gene Hackman (47) as Stanislaw Sosabowski (52); Michael Caine (44) as Joe Vandeleur (41); and Anthony Hopkins (39) as John Frost (31). All were at least in the neighbourhood of the ages of the character they were playing.
Royalty and nobility had a different situation, where marriages were more about politics than anything else, and the man’s ability to provide is irrelevant.
It’s all about expectations. If one looks at the movie as telling a story about what happened in WWII, then it is inaccurate and misleading. If one looks at the movie as a fictional story set in WWII that might have happened in an alternate world or whatever, then sure, it doesn’t matter.
The key to differences in historical settings is how likely is that this could have happened. If telling a story set in WWII about some random soldiers on some battlefield, and how they lived or died, that doesn’t affect the recorded historical events, so it is plausible and possible and, therefore, acceptable. But U-571 tells a story of an action to secretly capture a German submarine, and thereby capture an Enigma machine. Except the actual events that did capture Enigma machines that played important parts in the war were different. Ergo, the acceptability goes down.
It’s just as fair a criticism as the one about Americans in The Great Escape, or Scottish clan tartans in Braveheart.
While not exactly related to history, I’ll mention since it was a true story and is one of my favorite “The hell?” castings in relations to age:
The movie Yours, Mine, and Ours was a comedy based on the romance and marriage of Frank and Helen Beardsley. When they met, Helen was a 30 year old widow (of a Navy lieutenant) with 8 children and Frank (a Chief Warrant Officer) was a 45 year old widower with 10 children. They had two children together for a combined Yours, Mine, and Ours of 20 kids. (Both Beardsleys were devout… very devout apparently… Catholics.)
In the original movie, Helen was played by Lucille Ball who was easily old enough to be the mother of the real Helen (she was 19 years older than Helen, more than 25 years older than the real Helen was in the events portrayed) and was portraying a pregnant woman at 56. Henry Fonda was in his early 60s, again almost old enough to be the father of Frank at the time of the events in the movie.
(The 2005 remake featured a greatly changed plot and starred Dennis Quaid and Rene Russo, both in their early 50s.)
I couldn’t say. I don’t know if Hamilton and Burr counted paces, but it sounds like their duel at least somewhat fits in with traditional accounts… except to this day nobody is sure if Hamilton was trying to kill Burr or missed him on purpose.
I assume that change was made to serve the allegorical purpose of the play and make Danforth a more McCarthy-like figure.
Um…
Averages can be misleading, so you shouldn’t say “you were lucky to live to 40 or 45.” Life expectancies were very short historically because infant mortality was so high. If you survived to age 5 or so, you had a good chance of living much longer than that and you probably wouldn’t be expecting to drop dead at 40 or 45. However it’s always good to see somebody say “In a world…”
Even if they hadn’t been, William Wallace wasn’t a highland Scot, and lowland Scots didn’t wear kilts. Edinburgh Castle has a statue of William Wallace, and in it he is wearing armor and chain mail, not a kilt. Lowland Scots have generally looked down on Highland Scots. They generally wouldn’t have been wearing clothing associated with Highland Scots. Some Scots (at least, I assume they were) in Edinburgh do wear kilts now, but they’re street performers wearing them for the tourists. When I visited Scotland a few years ago, I don’t remember seeing anybody wearing a kilt who wasn’t involved in something that was aimed at tourists.
Royalty operated by different rules than most people did. They didn’t have to earn a living. They needed to produce a healthy heir, and generally didn’t need to worry about having too many children to support. Under those conditions, starting your family as young as possible is advantageous.
It happens to this day. Not everybody who has credit card debt now is poor. You can live above your means at almost any level of income. Henry VIII managed to do it on a royal income augmented by money from the dissolution of monasteries.
*King Arthur *set out to paint a historically accurate (at least they hyped it as such) portrait of Arthur and his knights as Sarmatian warlords turned auxiliae in the Roman Legion. Which is fine - that is indeed one road historians have pursued to look into the origins of the legendary character. Then you get to the part where the Romans defend Hadrian’s Wall from the Picts. Err… okay then… not really the same geographical location at all but whatevs, I can roll with that.
Then the Picts bring fucking trebuchets to bear. In open battle, no less.
To put it in perspective, that’s not entirely unlike making a film about the War of US Independence, touting its historical accuracy, then have the Red Coats actually be Spaniards. And they have M-16s. No, scratch that, M-16s really are close combat weapons: make that Spaniards with B-52s doing strafing runs.
(I’d totally watch that film by the way, someone has to make it happen. Couldn’t be worse than The Patriot anyway.)
Wallace was a Norman-Scot by background - as in the statue, he would have looked more like a French Knight than a Highland Clansman. Let alone a woad-wearing Pict. 
Though he did allegedly make a sword-belt out of the English Treasurer’s flayed skin … :eek:
Inaccurate though it is, I have always enjoyed the Horrible Histories version of Wallace:
As a truism that is largely correct. But there are exceptions. People often talk about life expectancies in ancient Egypt ( say the New Kingdom ) as being in the mid-thirties. But that may in fact be unrealistically high, as I suspect nobody has a great handle on infant mortality rates from that period. Instead that is based on the fact that the archaeological record shows that the average Egyptian peasant rarely lived much past 35. Life for those folks was truly miserable. Endemic disease, a life of usually back-breaking labor and apparently near universal chronic malnutrition. The agricultural revolution in the Nile allowed for the development of a surprisingly dense population, but simultaneously a horribly unhealthy and short-lived one. The high nobility of course being somewhat excepted.
Let’s not forget Pearl Harbor (if it wasn’t mentioned earlier). Seems to have been many inaccuracies there. One I recall off the top of my head is no serviceman who was at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack participated in the Jimmy Dolittle raids.
Nor was there any American who served in the RAF during the Battle of Britain and then was at the Pearl Harbor attack and the Doolittle raid.
But I’m not going to give them too much grief over that. There were American pilots who did all of these things so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to combine them all into a single pilot. That falls within the limits of fictional license.
Besides that movie had enough other much more serious problems.
My two examples of WWII inaccuracies were the characters of “Oddball” in Kelly’s Heroes and Carson in U-571. Both characters were wildly anachronistic for the nineteen-forties. Oddball was a hippie and Carson was John Shaft.
I remember an interview with a WW II German U-boat commander on American TV when the movie opened.
The elderly gentleman took part in the media hype but politely pointed out, that it was impossible to operate a WW II era German submarine with almost no crew, even by officers, NCOs and sailors who were actually trained and experienced with that type of ship.
A Man for all Seasons whitewashes Sir/St. Thomas More a bit. It’s doubtful, for example, that the families of the Protestants he burned to death when he was in power under Henry VIII would be that moved by his persecution under the same king. (There’s also some character merging (e.g. Thomas Howard, D. of Norfolk is a composite of the real Thomas Howard and other characters) and subtracting (e.g. More had more children than just Alice- in fact his most important early biography was written by his son), but that’s to be expected when you’re cramming so much into two hours.)
1776 is one of my favorite movies and, while it takes liberties with (but never declared independency of) history for dramatic purposes, it stays generally correct. However, it’s actually one of the movies that, due to time constraints, had to remove historically accurate material that was in the original drafts: a Mohawk Indian who came to negotiate with Congress during this time and spoke in a perfect Oxford English accent, the junket to New Jersey during which Franklin and Adams and another delegate had to share a bed in a crowded tavern, and a couple of randy goings on outside of Congress with some of the members.
As far as historical changes, they were mostly to condense the constantly coming and going dozens of members of the Congress into a few who you could remember and keep track of, and a few characterizations were changed. Perhaps the most serious things changed biographically would be the role of James Wilson and the climactic moment when he switches his vote; we don’t really know why he changed it, and he was really not in the shadow of Dickinson (who was his former law professor but they weren’t chums; incidentally, Dickinson’s considerable holdings were mostly in Delaware and in his political career he was usually the representative from DE, not PA, though he was representing PA in 1776). Also, Caesar Rodney, while he did leave due to health reasons related to his skin cancer, wasn’t really at death’s door like he was in the play/movie, he was just severely uncomfortable; he in fact lived for several more years. Also, Thomas Jefferson’s wife never actually came to Pennsylvania and was in fact recovering from a stillbirth in 1776, but I don’t think any fan of the show minds as we got a great number out of it and you get to see the Tom:Martha dynamic and compare-contrast it with John:Abby without both relationships being telepathic.
The Lion in Winter implies that Eleanor is very rarely “trotted out to court”, but in fact she spent months at a time at a time at various courts in France and far away from the castle in England where she was officially a prisoner. Admittedly, she was under guard when there and could not leave the castle without an “escort” whose number one job was to make sure she didn’t escape, but, she did have a lot more freedom than Christmas and Easter away from her confinement (which, of course, was luxurious by the standards of the time; house arrest in the royal quarters beat freedom in a peasant’s hovel). Not so much an error as not mentioned: Geoffrey was Count of Brittany by right of marriage, not through pre-inheritance from Eleanor and Henry as is implied. Also not in the play because it did not go far enough: when Henry II died [during a campaign against Richard… again] Richard released Eleanor asap from her confinement, and tossed Alice into her former quarters. (Eventually she was freed as part of a treaty, and she married and had a family and all and faded from history.)