Yes that is ridiculous. It should have been called Saving Private Niland. Fritz Niland was one of four brothers who were serving in the army. Two of them died on D-Day. One of them was classified as MIA in Burma at the same time (but he turned up alive eventually). Niland was ordered out of the combat zone when those in Washington heard about it. It took awhile to find him since he was in the 101st Airborne and they were scattered all over Normandy in heavy fighting. He was eventually found by an army chaplain who had heard of the situation and he was sent back to England.
No it is not the same as the movie. It is pretty easy to see how the real life drama could be fictionalized to make a movie.
One thing I found very interesting is one of the inaccuracies. PVT Albert Blithe did not die from his wounds received in Normandy. He in fact stayed in the army and served in combat in Korea. He died in the late 60s in Germany while still in the army from complications from an ulcer.
Hmm…A Bridge Too Far suffered from a dose of 1970’s star overload, but I’ll forgive it a lot of oversimplification of a complex operation if only for that wonderful scene of the Dakotas taking off…and all pre-CGI!
A much more realistic (though much less ambitious) telling of the Arnhem tale/tragedy is Theirs is the Glory, an utterly obscure 1946 film that used the actual men of the British 1st Airborne to re-create the battle. There’s even real Panther and Tiger tanks in it, one of which is actually shot up with a real PIAT for the movie. What it lacks in polish (and, it must be said, narrative flow), it makes up for in accuracy (it was filmed in Arnem and Oosterbeek only a year after the attack).
It focuses pretty much entirely on the British paratroops, rather than the US/British effort to push through over the bridges. The Royal Canadian Engineers get a look-in at the end, with the same powerboats that brought back many of the Arnhem defenders. Sadly, the gallant Poles are not mentioned.
Special aluminum tickets were struck for the premiere, made from melted-down wreckage of the gliders that delivered many of the troops.
I always figured late '30s, judging from the book. The movie does look good for the period. Even my dad (a bugbear on cars in movies being right for the period) couldn’t find a nit to pick. However, they made a major gaffe in costuming, as far as I’m concerned. The mother’s hair was all wrong for the period. Irritates me every time I watch it.
Not to be confused with Mountie on the Bounty, a highly amusing episode of Due South involving a company of Royal Canadian Mounted Police setting sail in a full-scale replica of the HMS Bounty to fight pirates on the Great Lakes.
They made another serious screw-up. The book version of the story is set in Hammond, Indiana, the movie is set in a fictional Indiana town, but the phone in the upstairs hall is Canadian. (Specifically, it’s a Northern Electric #2)
Reason that happened is the house interiors were a set in Toronto. Oops.
No way. No way at all is that movie even approaching accuracy. There’s way too much polyester chiffon, way too many female armorers, and entirely too few covered heads for that movie to even approach historical accuracy. Elizabeth – a movie where the director forbid to the costume designer to do research – is truer to history than A Knight’s Tale. Any movie that uses zippers pre-20th century for the lead actors’ costumes is automatically out of the running.
(Sorry, WhyNot, I’m not harshing on you – you’re totally cool. I personally have a great hatred for that movie and its claims of historical accuracy. Guess I’m off to attack the IMDB page.)
Although speaking of Elizabethan movies, Shakespeare in Love is a disaster for accuracy in many ways, but the crowd scenes are very, very good. Fantastic mix of classes, stays worn as exterior garments by the women, good mix of headgear, everything a terrific crush – crowd scenes can’t get much better.
Perhaps they meant authentic in the sense “made or done in the original way” as opposed to genuine – articles actually made in the 17th century. I could see a museum willing to lend reproductions of period garb for the costumers to copy, if not use use in the movie itself.
I like the image of Kubric vs. the guards, though.
I just got this visual, you have two guards, Al and Bob. Bob goes outside through the loading dock and shuts the door behind him, and Al is going to let him inside when he needs to get back into the museum. Stanley has snuck in, and clubs Al over the head just before Bob needs to get back inside (cause, you know, it’s cold out there).
I’ve heard that the thing that made Heaven’s Gate so expensive was the amount of work to get every detail exactly accurate, historically speaking. Every extra in every scene had carefully researched costume with every stitch exactly right for the period.
My father grew up in London during the Blitz, and he always said that Hope and Glory was a remarkably accurate picture of life during wartime, for kids.
Nobody’s mentioned the best part of Barry Lyndon, which is that a lot of the interior scenes have period lighting! They used some kind of NASA lens to enable them to shoot by candlelight. Some people say there’s no artificial light in the movie, which is obviously not true, but the candlelight scenes are real!
What I thought of was: Every '50s movie needs to take some stand on the crewcut.
In Quiz Show, set in the late '50s, no male visible on screen had a butch. Not even an extra. How likely was that at the time?
Then again, in GN&GL, when Friendly is visited by senior Air Force officers in 1954, they have totally hardass buzzcuts, which I happen to know weren’t Air Force regulation then (especially if you didn’t wear a crash helmet every day).
