# Historically inaccurate movies **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 21, 2008, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269 "2008-03-21T21:21:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![vison](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/e47774/32.png) [@vison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vison)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2008, 6:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/61 "2008-03-25T06:14:22Z")
I foolishly spent $6.95 CDN to see “The Other Boleyn Girl” this evening. _sigh_ I don’t know. Why do they do it? They got nothing right. **Nothing.** But the costumes were lovely. Really lovely. What’s up with all these Tudor TV shows and movies right now anyway? I like the Tudors a lot, myself, but this seems a bit over the top. ---
**Author:** ![Miss\_Purl\_McKnittington](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e9a140/32.png) [@Miss\_Purl\_McKnittington](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miss_Purl_McKnittington)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2008, 6:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/62 "2008-03-25T06:23:59Z")
**vison** , whatever you do, don’t spend an additional money on the book, because your brain will _explode._ Or so I understand. Friends have encouraged me not to read it, to avoid the 'splodey. I don’t know what’s up with the Tudormania. Probably just inertia, since it kicked off with _Elizabeth_ and _Shakespeare in Love_ about 10 years ago, and there’s been about one production a year since then. Those movies are like documentaries compared to _The Other Boleyn Girl,_ though. As _TOBG_ is to _The Tudors._ ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2008, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/63 "2008-03-25T13:12:27Z")
[QUOTE=Guinastasia] And let’s not forget Wallace sleeping with the heir’s wife, even though she would have only been two years old at the time. [/QUOTE] And also considering that the Prince of Wales/King Edward II did not marry [her](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_of_France) until 1308 – after his father Longshanks had passed away, and three years after [Wallace](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wallace) was executed. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2008, 1:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/64 "2008-03-25T13:17:46Z")
[QUOTE=Miss Purl McKnittington] I don’t know what’s up with the Tudormania. [/QUOTE] Assistant Well, you’d be surprised, actually sir. The Tudor economy’s booming, ever since Sir Humphrey Gilbert opened up the Northwest passage to Cathay, and the Cabots’ expansion in Canada, there’s been a tremendous surge in exports, and trade with the Holy Roman Empire is going… no, quite right, it’s no good at all. Customer What? Assistant It’s a dead loss. We haven’t put anyone in a job since 1625. Customer I see. Assistant That’s all? Customer What? Assistant That’s all you say? Customer Yes. Assistant No, no, we were the tops then. Drake got all his sailors here. Elizabeth, we supplied the archbishops for her coronation. Shakespeare started off from here as a temp. Then came James the First and the bottom fell out of the Tudor jobs. 1603 - 800 vacancies filled, 1604 - 40, 1605 - none, 1606 - none. The rest of the Stuart period nothing. Hanoverians nothing. Victorians nothing. Saxe-Coburgs nothing. Windsors… what did you want? Customer Dirty books, please. Right. (produces selection of mags from under counter) Sorry about the Tudor bit, but you can’t be too careful, you know. Have a look through these. ---
**Author:** ![BaneSidhe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/c5a1d2/32.png) [@BaneSidhe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BaneSidhe)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2008, 1:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/65 "2008-03-25T13:26:28Z")
I haven’t seen _Memoirs of A Geisha_ but I’ve read the book. What’s inaccurate about the movie [I loved the book BTW]. ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2008, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/66 "2008-03-25T15:15:36Z")
My irritation with _The Tudors_ isn’t that they changed things for the miniseries so much as that 1- they changed things that were _way_ too important to be tampered with 2- often the truth was no more complicated and far more interesting Most specifically Henry’s sister’s marriage: they switched the old king from France to Portugal and the sister from Mary to Margaret. Now, the French marriage is relatively unimportant to history, it’s a “survivable” change since, as with the Portuguese marriage in the miniseries, it was short-lived and childless and resulted in the young widow queen marrying the king’s friend Charles Brandon, BUT since _every single monarch from 1603 to the present_ is a direct descendant of the _real_ Margaret’s \*real \*marriages in Scotland (a country I don’t recall even being mentioned in the miniseries), and since Henry’s _real_ sister Mary married the _real_ Charles Brandon, why did they make this change? Was it a typo? Were they afraid U.S. viewers would get his pre-teen daughter Mary and his sex-kitten sister Mary confused? Plus, they rob themselves of a great real life character- Margaret Tudor was a piece of work who hated her first husband then hated her brother for killing him in battle and then went on to have disastrous further marriages, and since she married before the action of the Tudors and was years older than her brother she’d be a great cameo role for a well known over 40 actress. Same with the death of Henry Fitzroy- why have him die in early childhood when in real life he died as a teenager. In real life the idea had been tossed around that he incestuously wed his half-sister Mary, which would have made for an interesting move on the miniseries that would have shown the king’s desperation. And I ain’t even going into how Wolsey died… that was just waaaaaaaay too “deviant” from history. ---
**Author:** ![Rocketeer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rocketeer/32/4437_2.png) [@Rocketeer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rocketeer)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2008, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/67 "2008-03-25T15:19:12Z")
[QUOTE=commasense] Here’s a comprehensive list of historically inaccurate movies: [www.imdb.com](http://www.imdb.com). [/QUOTE] Well, I, for one, thought this was pretty clever. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2008, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/68 "2008-03-25T15:57:11Z")
[QUOTE=MGibson] I thought “Bill the Butcher” of _Gangs of New York_ was based on Bill “the Butcher” Poole and Isaiah Rynders. Poole was an uptown politician associated with the Whigs and the anti-immigration Know-Nothings and Rynders was a flamboyant gang leader in the five points area. In the movie P.T. Barnum was acting as a pimp in one scene. “What do I hear bid for this flaxen haired teutonic beauty?” or something like that. The presence of the Chinese was way overrepresented while Italians, Jews, and Germans were underrepresented. The Irish were treated a bit unfairly. When they were coming off the boat it appeared as though they were being drafted with no idea the country was even at war. In reality a lot of Irish people knowingly fought in the war on account of their own convictions. The U.S. Navy did not shell the Five Points area. Other than the lame romance plot I still enjoyed the movie. Marc [/QUOTE] Also, the big Five Points rumble between the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys happened in 1857, the Draft Riots in 1863. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2008, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/69 "2008-03-25T16:47:34Z")
[QUOTE=Sampiro] And I ain’t even going into how Wolsey died… that was just waaaaaaaay too “deviant” from history. [/QUOTE] In real life he died from natural causes. How’d he die in the series? ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2008, 5:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/70 "2008-03-25T17:01:46Z")
[QUOTE=Sampiro] Especially ironic since one of Edward I’s claims to fame was that he was the first English king to have actually _learned_ any English (he’s said to have been fluent which probably means he could say the 13th century equivalents of “Hello”, “Goodbye”, and “Let’s continue in French”). I love the fact that the [Battle of Stirling Bridge](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stirling_Bridge) had no bridge in it. [/QUOTE] This part of the wiki article really got my attention: > [@](#): > > Only one knight, the Yorkshireman Sir Marmaduke Tweng, showed great presence of mind and managed to fight his way through the thicket of spears back across the bridge; but over a hundred of his fellow knights were slain, including the plump Hugh de Cressingham, whose body was subsequently flayed and the skin cut into small pieces as tokens of the victory.\*\* Wallace himself took enough to make a new sword belt.\*\* Wallace had a _human-skin_ sword-belt? That is seriously bad-ass. :eek: ---
**Author:** ![BMalion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e274bd/32.png) [@BMalion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BMalion)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2008, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/71 "2008-03-25T17:11:30Z")
[QUOTE=An Gadaí] This was the film I was gonna mention, this and **In The Name Of The Father**. [/QUOTE] Not as accurate as **The Quiet Man** , eh? 😃 ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2008, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/72 "2008-03-25T17:24:05Z")
[QUOTE=Earl Snake-Hips Tucker] “Jason and the Argonauts,” on just this evening on TCM, had two ridiculous situations in one scene: There are some walking skeletons, about to do battle. They’re only skeletons. No muscles. How the hell are they able to get the bones to move? Then, as they’re about to attack, they let out a scream. Hellooooo! No vocal cords or lungs. Not happen’n’. [/QUOTE] Agreed. In my experience, **real** fighting skeletons never scream. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2008, 5:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/73 "2008-03-25T17:27:54Z")
[QUOTE=Lust4Life] Scots didn’t wear woad when going into battle at that time,that was a slightly thousand years out of date. [/QUOTE] Furthermore, they did not wear [kilts](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_kilt#The_great_kilt) in battle. > [@](#): > > For battle it was customary to take off the kilt beforehand and set it aside, the Highland charge being made wearing only the léine or war shirt. And for that matter, there’s no evidence of the kilt (the big wraparound great-kilt, I mean, not the skirt-thing later invented) being in use any earlier than the 16th Century. ---
**Author:** ![mlees](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba8739/32.png) [@mlees](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mlees)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2008, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/74 "2008-03-25T20:04:09Z")
[QUOTE=MGibson] So here are a few of the arguments against history as a cinematic genre according to Robert Toplin in _Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood_. #1. It simplifies the historical evidence and removes many details. #2. Movies are beholden to the three act formula of exposition, conflict, and resolution. #3. Partisan views of the past. #4. Morally uplifting stories involving Davids vs. Goliaths. #5. The simplification of plots by combining multiple characters into a few key characters. #6. The injection of romance into the plot when it bears little importance on the historical event. (Ostensibly to attract a female audience, especially for war movies.) #7. Filmmakers often make a point of communicating to the public about the authenticity of their work. \*Titanic \* is probably the best example I can think of off the top of my head. Marc [/QUOTE] _Pearl Harbor_ is another. Ugh. [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0213149/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0213149/) ---
**Author:** ![BMalion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e274bd/32.png) [@BMalion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BMalion)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2008, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/75 "2008-03-25T20:46:11Z")
**BrainGlutton** , whereas, the movie version of William Shakespeare’s _Gay Boy In Bondage_, was much closer to the truth, what a poet. ---
**Author:** ![detop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/bcef8e/32.png) [@detop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/detop)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2008, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/76 "2008-03-25T21:53:11Z")
I’m ashamed. 75 posts and I’m the first one to mention this piece of [recycled food](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058947/) ---
**Author:** ![ryobserver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b2d939/32.png) [@ryobserver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ryobserver)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2008, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/77 "2008-03-26T00:08:04Z")
A couple of classics: **The Charge of the Light Brigade** , with Errol Flynn and a very young Olivia de Haviland (with eyebrows for which I hope she shot the makeup artist). Weirdly, this film has a pretty accurate reconstruction of the siege and surrender of Cawnpore during the Indian Mutiny–except they move it to Afghanistan instead of India, and before the Crimean War instead of after. (It would be impossible to stage the riverside massacre in Afghanistan, which according to the World Almanac has no navigable rivers.) The titular Charge is then portrayed as a deliberate act of retaliation for a massacre which hadn’t happened (against an Afghan khan who didn’t exist and wasn’t in the Crimea anyway), instead of the pure accident it actually was… Idiocy piles on idiocy until you just give up and wait for the Tennyson poem to finish scrolling up the screen. **Mary of Scotland** , with Katharine Hepburn, and even her presence can’t redeem this stinker. Even if you don’t know the history this isn’t very good (she and Frederic March, who plays Bothwell, have zero chemistry and can’t be bothered to actually kiss in their one actual embrace). If you do it’s unspeakable. Just for starters, everyone full, modern-style Highland dress (or at least a freakish Hollywood version of it), even Lowlanders and Borderers like Bothwell who wouldn’t have been found dead in the kilt IRL. Enjoy the scene in which Bothwell walks up to a fireplace and hoists his kilt to warm his backside, then turns and hoists it again to warm his frontside. The film also insists that Mary married Darnley out of cold political calculation and Bothwell out of True Love, which is almost exactly backwards (she married Darnley out of true lust, and was more or less forced to marry Bothwell). The inevitable face-to-face meeting with Elizabeth I (something Elizabeth evidently wanted to avoid, and which certainly never took place, yet it keeps turning up in films about Mary Queen of Scots) nearly turns into a screaming match. This film is a great argument for an MST3K for historical films (MHT3K?). ---
**Author:** ![Raguleader](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/258eb7/32.png) [@Raguleader](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Raguleader)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2008, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/78 "2008-03-26T01:51:55Z")
[QUOTE=mlees] _Pearl Harbor_ is another. Ugh. [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0213149/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0213149/) [/QUOTE] Heh, one of my favorite goofs in Pearl Harbor is the bit where Ben Affleck’s character is advising his comrades on the best way to fight a Zero: The P-40 Warhawk couldn’t outrun it, so they’d have to out-maneuver it. Which is, well, completely backwards. The Zero could out-turn just about anything the Americans were flying at the time, but the P-40 was faster and more rugged, especially in diving hit-and-run attacks. Nevermind that it’s debatable how the guy could have come across this information flying Spitfires over Britain in 1940. :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![Miss\_Purl\_McKnittington](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e9a140/32.png) [@Miss\_Purl\_McKnittington](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miss_Purl_McKnittington)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2008, 2:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/79 "2008-03-26T02:34:19Z")
[QUOTE=Sampiro] My irritation with _The Tudors_ isn’t that they changed things for the miniseries so much as that 1- they changed things that were _way_ too important to be tampered with 2- often the truth was no more complicated and far more interesting [/QUOTE] Yeah, that’s pretty much my problem with _The Tudors,_ too, though I haven’t seen a season all the way through because our Showtime preview ended. The Tudor family is enough of an historic soap opera that you don’t need to go changing things around to make things more dramatic. Or even sexy. My main beef with the miniseries is that they [rented/borrowed a lot of Tudor/Elizabethan costumes](http://www.costumersguide.com/reused_tudor.shtml) for lead female characters, and then proceeded _not to fit the costume to the actor._ I’m OK with them dressing Anne Boleyn in a dress that wouldn’t have shown up until [about 50 years after she died](http://www.costumersguide.com/elizabeth/misc7.jpg). (That dress is from _Elizabeth,_ and despite QEI’s seeming youth, it’s definitely 1570/80s.) But they should at least make alterations so [it fits.](http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i31/costumersguide/The%20Tudors/TU107_0908_200.jpg) That’s not historical inaccuracy; that’s just shoddy work. ---
**Author:** ![vison](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/e47774/32.png) [@vison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vison)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2008, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269/80 "2008-03-26T03:42:11Z")
I wish I’d had you guyz with me last night when I endured the tedium and nastiness of The Other Boleyn Girl. I would have left except my boys were in another part of the complex watching Owen Wilson in Drillbit Someone-or-Other and I suspect I would have liked it a LOT more. The real Tudors were so fascinating, their real lives so dramatic, that I fail to understand, as someone above said, why film makers change so much. As for Braveheart, when it was released I heard my Grandpa spinning in his grave. He taught me to recite “Scots wha hae . .” when I was a mere slip of a lass and he gave me supreme hell for daring to wear a kilt - a girl? Wearing a kilt? They don’t make grandpas like that any more. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/historically-inaccurate-movies/442269.md?page=5)