I like to think I’m smart enough not to see historical films as accurate depictions of the events they portray, although I do admit that I believe they reveal something about the eras in which they were made: forget about 1865, what does “Gone With The Wind” tell us about 1939?
So, I take it nobody else here liked Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure?
In May, Cecil wrote a very controversial column about MLK. (I thought it was a fascinating read). My understanding of the Lincoln thing is that his views were not as concrete as you’re presenting them, though.
Possibly not. My source for this is a general statement to that effect by Stephen Jay Gould, in an essay related to this very topic (that is, seeing historical figures as black or white with no shades of gray). But Lincoln was a product of his culture, and his culture was what we now consider racist.
My points still stands, I think. The heroes of history are not all shining knights sans peur et san reproche. (In fact, I can only think of one man who even came close to that ideal: Robert E. Lee.) But that does not invalidate the good they did.
I think the warts-and-all approach to biography is reassuring, actually, and challenging. Sir Galahads are rare on the ground, but flawed and fallible humans are not.
He wasn’t a nincompoop, but any genius he had was for administration, not for battle strategy and tactics (which was an even more fluid science in the late 18th century than it is usually).
Where I thought that movie was going was this: I thought that Gibson’s character, who had already been revealed to have resorted to bloody and terroristic tactics during the 7 Years War, would ultimately become so brutal and consumed in his quest for revenge that by the end he would be as bad or worse than the Tarleton character. I don’t know why I thought that as the Mel Gibson character was played by Mel Gibson.
Speaking of Elizabeth, kudos to the BBC production of ELIZABETH R, incidentally, for being everything that ELIZABETH wasn’t (interesting, accurate, well acted) on a tiny fraction of the budget. Glenda Jackson WAS Elizabeth and while they took some liberties they were venial and forgivable. The DVD’s commentary by historian Carrolly Ericson is one of the few DVD commentaries worth listening too; often the truth of what happened was more interesting than what was shown in the miniseries but couldn’t be filmed due to time or budget or sheer grossness (e.g. the maids who became wealthy for reporting to foreign ambassadors whether the 40something queen was still menstruating, or the full torture administered to rebels against Elizabeth).
One of my favorite anecdotes, supposedly true, is that when GWTW premiered in Atlanta all of the surviving Confederate veterans who werent’ too mentally or physically infirm were brought to see it (this much is definitely true; they were also dressed in new Confederate uniforms [many for the first time]) and during the famous hospital scene, when the camera pulls back to reveal the thousands of sick and dying soldiers (and mannequins) one of the veterans said “Goddam! If we’d had that many soldiers in Atlanta we’d have won the war!” To me the most overblown part of the movie (which I have no trouble accepting as a classic and masterpiece, btw) is Twelve Oaks: if any Georgia planter had seen a house that was 1/10 that grand he’d have either had a massive stroke or been speaking to a French tourguide on his vacation to chateau country. (The set was just wayyyy overboard, much more suitable for a movie about turn of the century robber barons; the Twelve Oaks mansion in the book actually resembled the Tara mansion in the movie, while the Tara in the book was described as an ugly rambling two story house with mixed and mingled architectural styles and no particular plan.)
BTW, did anybody see the recent Benedict Arnold miniseries on A&E? I thought that Kelsey Grammer was superb as George Washington, capturing his charisma, egomania, genius, temper, compassion and all else whenever on screen. Washington is an extremely complex character, in ways the most so of any Founder, and good film portrayals are rare, complicated perhaps by the fact that biographies of him tend to be either hagiographic (like the Barry Bostwick miniseries very loosely based on Flexner’s work) or portray him as one of the evil dead white millionaires who founded the country (ignoring the fact that more than almost any other Founder he loathed slavery [ultimately freeing his own in his will and pensioning many for more than a generation later] and risked his life and wealth on what few would have considered anything less than an impossible cause). Grammer captured the complexity better than any screen performance I’ve ever seen and I hope he’ll play the role again (perhaps in a bio of LaFayette or dramatization of Vidal’s Burr, two that could be fantastic if done properly).
BTW, I don’t know if this qualifies since it’s actually about a movie’s merchandising more than the movie itself, but I was majorly p.o.d by the marketing around the movie Malcolm X . The movie had more than a few inaccuracies in the name of dramatic license (one of the biggest perhaps being how Malcolm converted to Islam) and generally tried to soften his character both before and after he became Malcolm X (Malcolm never tried to downplay his past and it was actually much rougher and more violent than it was shown in the movie; the movie glossed over some of his more inflammatory comments or his misogynistic views [he said his wife was the best woman he’d ever met and he still only trusted her 75%]). However, the merchandising was nothing short of shamelessly incendiary.
Does anybody else remember the posters, T-shirts, and caps that had pictures of Denzel/Malcolm standing with a gun in his hand and a stern look on his face and the slogan “By Any Means Necessary”? Perhaps I’m reading more into it than was there, but I don’t think so; I took it as an ominous veiled threatening mass produced slogan with racist overtones that completely mangled the message of Malcolm’s life.
Malcolm X certainly wasn’t a great champion of universal brotherhood- he once called the report of 30 white people being killed in a plane crash “good news” and often joked that his coffee was the only thing he liked integrated- but his message changed radically after he broke with Elijah Muhammad. From the moment he began to educate himself in prison his greatest banner was that “education is empowerment- read everything you can”, and that never changed even after his views on race relationships changed sharply. He preached education, economic independence, and ultimately even brotherhood, but I felt all of this was undone by the logos using the rifle- while he always preached that self-defense was not only permissible but mandatory “by any means necessary”, the shirts and posters have a definitely “offensive” message as opposed to defensive, besides which he only holds the gun for a few seconds in the movie and THAT was when he was guarding his house against a death squad dispatched by his former mentor and father figure Elijah Muhammad.
Am I being overly sensitive or was anybody else angered by the “By Any Means Necessary” marketing?
I don’t know much about it really, but a friend and I recently rented Asoka, an Indian film about a king evidently from the 2nd century BC or so (who we felt pretty embarassed about never having heard of before), and upon poking around on the internet a bit to see what people thought about it it seems to really resemble any similar Hollywood historical production - all sorts of complaining about the emphasis given to the love story, that sort of thing. Very interesting, and it seems to support the idea that yeah, historical films are internationally kind of like that.
However, it also seemed from the extra materials on the DVD that Bollywood dosen’t do many historical epics, and thus this one might have been more taken from American film tradition than otherwise would be the case.
He was a skilled administrator, as Sampire pointed out. His administrative reforms during his tenure as Governor-General in India lasted into the 20th century. As a commander, he could probably be described as more-or-less competent tactician and perhaps a somewhat indifferent strategist. The campaign you are thinking of was the second half of the Third Anglo-Mysore War ( 1790-1792 ), where he performed just fine against a reasonably capable native opponent, Tipu Sultan, though one with the deck stacked heavily against him ( but to Cornwallis’ credit, Tipu had mostly outfought the previous British commander, Medows, in the earlier stage of the war ) He also came in on the tail end of the Second Anglo-Maratha War in 1805, but only after the major fighting was over and he died before he got a chance to really do anything.
In the U.S. his biggest battlefield victory as an independent commander was probably at Camden ( though he participated as a sub-commander at larger British victories like at Monmouth and Brandywyne ) and there you’d have to give more credit to the American commander Gates, who made the not terribly bright move of engaging in open battle an only slightly smaller force of prepared British regulars with an army consisting of 2/3 green militia, who were promptly broken and routed.
- Tamerlane