a Man for All Seasons wasn’t meant to be straight historical drama – Robert Bolt was trying to make his points, as well, and chose the story of Thomas More to do it. Nevertheless, Bolt is always much more historically accurate than Peter Schaffer. An awful lot of this play uses actual quotations or writings by the original people as lines. Whenever i say that this play is pretty close to reality, people inevitably say :“But it doesn’t say anything about More doing X”. Which is true, but completely beside the point – bringing up X might be great for a historical completist, but wouldn’t help Bolt make his dramatic points. And, moreover, he didn’t deny it, anyway. So burning Protestants (did he do so? I hadn’t heard), if he did, or the martyrdom of John Fisher, or whether More was really strictly legal in his silence or making an indirect statement about the legitimacy are pretty much beside the point.
I loved 1776 when I saw it on stage, and in the movies. I think I like the fact that they finally treated the Founders as real people, rather than demigods, made a huge difference. Peter Stone spent a lot of time researching this, in places like Rutgers University library, and the play, like AMfAS, includes many actual quotes. David MacCullough, however, seems to dislike the play. He’s never mentioned iyt in his writings, although you’d think it merited a note in his John Adams. On the other hand, he dredges up the same quotes Stone used in the play, more often than chance would give them, I suspect, and gives the actual circumstances, to highlight when Stone has used the quote in a different circumstance, or put it in the mouth of the wrong person. Again, this strikes me as pretty damned irrelevant – the quotes are the legitimate thoughts of folks from back then, and the errors introduxced by this are minor.
There are plenty of other quibbles you could more legitimately introduce. James Wilson wasn’t the spineless nonentity the play suggests. Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress, was a mch more interesting person, and so on. But the play makes up for it by introducing so much real history – Franklin’s illegitimate son, his gout, the petty bickering in Congress (the bit about Melchior Meng’s mule really happened), and other tidbits I never heard of before this. The Lion in Winter definitely isn’t real history, and I never mistook it for that. It was obviously a witty and intelligent fantasy based on a real historical situation, and was worth it for the verbal fencing and maneuvering.
Re-reading the Burr-Hamilton duel entry, and… maybe it did look like that.
“Taking their places” doesn’t necessarily mean pacing away from each other, but I wasn’t able to find an explanation of how that duel or duels like it were actually conducted.
Actually, the most disappointing historical truth is that, although Franklin was a wit, really did write all that stuff in Poor Richard’s Almanac, and did all that scientific work, he apparently wasn’t at all as he was portrayed in 1776. His contemporaries complained that he didn’t take a very active part in debates and in the Continental Congress. When he was later in France, according to McCuloch, he often seemed to not do anything positive to advance the status of the fledgling nation. (Nevertheless, Franklin was immensely popular over there. He must’ve had a good sense of what would work, eve n if that was “not much”) All in all, I get the impression that Franklin mostly just sat there and operated more behind-the-scenes, rather than being an easy, epigram-spouting Central Figure
Having grown up near New Brunswick, and seen the still-extant tavern at which they would have stayed, this scene always fascinated me. When the film played in nearby East Brunswick, this line brought down the house.
Peter Stone’s original script for 1776 had a scene where Franklin and Adams shared a room in that tavern. Adams wrote down an account of it, which McCulloch mentions in his book on Adams, and which undoubtedly served as inspiration for the scene. Apparently te scene didn’t go over well, and Stone excised it before the show hit Broadway. But I’d love to read it, someday.
Yes and no. What you say is true, but the addition of extra wheels made it a really far more difficult code to crack (Ultra). Alan Turing deserves a hell of a lot of credit. I’m not sure the principles were quite the same.
Those who were decorated were actually drowned when the sub went down weren’t they? That to me seems pretty daunting and enough to keep audiences going to sleep.
And there was also the previous ruse to capture the code books from the German weather trawlers off Lofoten Islands.
There was a lot more to cracking Ultra than stealing a machine from a sub (as Dropzone correctly points out- there was also French input).
In the show “The Tudors”, I couldn’t get past the fact that the actor playing Henry VIII, eye candy and theatrically accomplizhed as he was, was too young for Henry. He was portrayed as about the same age as Anne Boleyn and only a few years older by the time he marries Catherine Howard. Henry was almost twenty years older than Anne. By the time he married 17-year-old Catherine, he was in his fifties and grossly overweight. Catherine was accused of infidelity and historians think she was probably guilty. If he had actually looked like the actor in the series, perhaps she wouldn’t have bothered.
I just love when they make up inaccuracies to sell movies to kids.
Anastasia was an okay film, but the inaccuracies were striking. Other than the whole “Anastasia lives” thing, there’s plenty. It claims that Grand Duchess Anastasia was 8 at the time of the Russian Revolution, when she was in fact a teenager. And her grandmother, Marie, moved to Denmark, not Paris, after the Revolution (after all, Marie was a Danish princess by birth). And Anastasia was no beauty - IRL she was short and rather fat. The only thing that they got right about her appearance was her red hair (though IRL it was not as pronounced). At least the whole Rasputin being crazy was somewhat accurate, but only in the fact that he was crazy - he wasn’t green and didn’t have a bat sidekick.
One of the worst is in this Italian cartoon called Titanic: The Legend Goes On. It features a rapping dog aboard the Titanic in 1912. Rap didn’t exist until many decades later. (There is another cartoon about the same subject, also from Italy, that contains its own fair share of inaccuracies - such as a giant octopus being tricked into sinking the Titanic. But that one’s mistakes are so bad you’d laugh.)
On par with that movie is The Magic Voyage, an animated movie which is about Christopher Columbus. What disturbed me was that it perpetuated the myth that Columbus wanted to prove the world was round. In fact, he just wanted a quicker route to Asia. But what’s worse is the addition of a talking woodworm (that looks nothing like a worm), a fairy princess, and a Mayan temple in what is supposed to be New York (I thought he landed in the Bahamas IRL), with stereotypical Native Americans.
The math and algorithmic principles were the exact same, the problem simply turned into a question of computing power. The Polish “bomb” could theoretically crack even Ultra, but it would e.g. have taken a month to crack one daily cypher. At which point every message written on that day would be open to decyphering, but… yes.
Turing’s machines (and the factory-like organization of the work at Bletchley Park; along with other methods to extract information for coded messages, such as analysis of recurrent expressions, formatting syntax etc…) streamlined the process tremendously and performed far more computations per minute, to the point that they could more or less have the day’s code cracked before nightfall.
So to say that “the Poles had cracked it first” is indeed misleading, in that they did, but it didn’t matter because they didn’t have the resources to crack it quite hard 'nuff.
[QUOTE=CalMaecham]
(Nevertheless, Franklin was immensely popular over there. He must’ve had a good sense of what would work, even if that was “not much”)
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He did a lot of fucking. That’ll make you popular in France
In the movie The Wind and the Lion Candice Bergen played a widow kidnapped in Morocco in 1904, along with her two children, by a Barbary chieftain, played in the movie by Sean Connery.
While there was a kidnapping, it was of a man, Ion Perdicaris, along with the son of his wife Ellen. She’d divorced her husband to marry Perdicaris, a man who was of Greek extraction and, although claiming US citizenship, had renounced it for Greek.
Teddy Roosevelt sent warships and troops to rescue Perdicaris, although he may have already known the man would have been released anyway.
Possibly a winner. Jonathan Rhys Meyers actually had washboard abs in his first scene with Catherine Howard. The real Henry was well over 300 pounds by that time and had all manner of physical infirmities (many of them probably related to diabetes but assigned to other causes).
The complete budget 1970s BBC miniseries with Keith Michell, adjusted for inflation, probably wouldn’t have equaled Jonathan Rhys Meyer’s salary for 6 episodes of this show, but with said low budget and few outside shots and nothing remotely like today’s prosthetic makeup they managed to take Michell from an able bodied slim teenager to somebody believable as morbidly obese, barely able to walk, and suffering from erectile dysfunction on his wedding night. (Scene from the movie with Michell- also low budget, but the takeaway being Michell was in reality in his early 40s and of average weight; it would have been very possible to make Meyers look the historical part without bankrupting ShowTime.)
