You could make the same case for “Gettysburg” as well as “Gods and Generals”.
Although I doubt that everyone in the 1860’s from West Point grads to illiterate southern farmers broke out in complicated monologue-like speeches every 5 minutes.
Recently there was a programme on the History Channel called [I think] Hollywood and the Pentagon. If a movie is being made involving the USA in a war, the directors have to knuckle under, as far as numerous rewrites and script approval goes, if they want any help with the loan of equipment etc. Movies that didn’t get approval but were made anyway included Platoon, The Deerhunter, A Few Good Men, The Thin Red Line, Apocalypse Now - and a lot more that I can’t remember. This help from the Pentagon is worth quite a lot of money to film-makers.
They were quite honest about films like Black Hawk Down, and the Jessica Lynch movie, where they admitted changing a lot of facts to keep the USA in a good light. The spokesperson for the Gov’t even said that these movies are propaganda. They also back the JAG TV series, even though some of the plot lines are ‘really improbable’ as they have found it really good for recruitment.
I think the war film I have seen that was most historically accurate was probably Gettysburg.
The use of the Mozart Requiem at the end of **Elizabeth ** to portray Queen Elizabeth’s rejection of her real persona and her transformation into Gloriana. A musical inaccuracy which ruined the whole film.
The black judge (played, I think, by James Earl Jones?) in the pivotal trial scene in the Civil War film Sommersby. When I saw this film the whole cinema erupted into laughter at the implausibility.
Well, one reviewer calls The Viking Queen (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062443/)
one of the worst historical movies ever.
Seems to me it would be too cheesy to even qualify as historical, though.
Well, if you can overlook the fact that the characters and plot are fictitious, Master and Commander gives a very realistic view of life in Nelson’s Navy.
Not as implausible as you think. That scene in Somersby was set in Tennessee in the post-Civil War era, when Union troops occupied the South, former slaves were now enfranchised, and anyone who had taken up arms against the Union was ineligible to vote. Louisiana had a black acting governor and a black lieutenant governor. South Carolina had a black majority in its lower house, a black lieutenant governor, a black secretary of state, a black congressman, and a black associate justice of its Supreme Court. The Mississippi secretary of state was black, as were two of its U.S. senators. Why should it be unlikely that Tennessee had a black circuit court judge?
Of course Shakespeare (and movies based on his plays) must have set a record for most historical inaccuracies for one author: Richard III wasn’t a satanic monster (at least no moreso than most of his opponents), Brutus wasn’t such a noble fellow, Richard II’s real second queen was a little girl, etc. etc., but it doesn’t distract from the beauty of his prose or his drama. I only become really irked with historical inaccuracies when the producers/authors claim it to be or when it’s about a real person and deviates for absolutely no point. Such as:
Elizabeth- this movie had everything going for it- Cate Blanchett could have been a perfect Elizabeth, there was a hefty budget, Joseph Fiennes is talented and could pass for Dudley, but they LITERALLY hired a director who had never even HEARD of Elizabeth I. Consequently it becomes filled with such crap as poisonous dresses [how exactly does one poison a dress? True Medea did it, but then she was a sorceress], murdered queens, a Godfather christening rip-off, and a queen who decides to become a religious icon by shaving her head and applying clown powder (could they not afford smallpox make-up?). Ironically the same year Shakespeare in Love was released- a romantic comedy not even intented to be historically accurate- and yet I’d have no problem showing it to my classes as the closest they’re ever likely to see by way of what an actual Elizabethan theater would have looked like, plus Dame Judi was superb (but nowhere close to Glenda Jackson in the wonderful and very accurate miniseries).
While I understand why Hollywood invariably makes Mark Antony and Cleopatra much more attractive than they really were (who wants to see a big budget toga and horse opera featuring Danny Devito and Rhea Perlman as the leads?), I’ve always wondered why they omit Cleo’s three children by Mark Antony. (It’s pretty certain that they were Antony’s, while Caesarion may or may not have been Caesar’s, plus her only descendants were with Mark Antony.)
I love both the book and the miniseries I CLAUDIUS, but they were both way off the mark historically. The real Claudius doesn’t seem to have been quite so bumbling or naive, Brian Blessed is way too robust for Augustus [I’d cast Ian McKellen today], very little is known about Livia [there’s certainly no evidence that she poisoned half of Rome, plus Augustus was nobody’s fool- after a few decades he’d surely have noticed that “gee, the family sure does keep getting smaller ever since I married Livia”], Claudius’s sexual tastes were a bit more excessive in real life than in the fiction, Caligula never actually made his horse a senator (and probably wasn’t nearly as insane as he’s usually portrayed, though John Hurt’s performance was outstanding), etc etc. Still a great miniseries.
There are several threads about inaccuracies in The Last Samurai, but the jist is that the samurai weren’t quite as noble as they’re portrayed in the film and that it’s not that usual for an American soldier to be hailed as a hero after killing a superior officer on a battlefield full of witnesses and after turning against the man who hired him. There are also a thousand threads on The Passion of the Christ which address its many ahistorical and non-biblical inaccuracies.
Hidalgo is billed as a true story but is probably mostly if not entirely bunk; the real Frank Hopkins was pretty much a pathological liar.
Return of the Jedi- in fact, Jabba was actually a well educated and quite urbane fellow while the Jedi were notoriously corrupt. Darth Vader habitually told his opponents in saber duels he was their father trying to get a rise out of them and Luke was just the first one stupid enough to believe it. The real Princess Leia was an obese drag queen who never went anywhere near Tatooine while the Ewoks, portrayed as lovable little teddy-bears in the film, were in fact cannibal drug smugglers.
Here’s one historical “inaccuracy” that isn’t, for the benefit of anyone who may not have heard of this before:
Some people point to the scene in Casablanca where Ugarte is describing the letters of transit as being inaccurate, because they hear it as “…signed by General De Gaulle himself…” and pointing out that De Gaulle was unlikely to have signed any letters of transit that the Germans were likely to accept.
However, it’s not De Gaulle; it’s Weygand (despite, incredibly, some of the English-language DVD subtitles, I understand). Maxime Weygand was the Vichy French minister of defence and Delegate-General for the North African Colonies.
(Of course, one would be hard put to imagine a movie that premiered in 1942 making an error as to who was Vichy and who was Free French.)
Still, the bit about the Americans “blundering into Berlin in 1918” is kind of droll.
One that I’ll mention because it’s an irritation: Inherit the Wind is a great play, has inspired two great (and one mediocre) movies (the Tracy/March version is a deserved classic and the Scott/Lemmon remake is in many ways even better, but avoid the Kirk Douglas/Jason Robards remake like the plague). It was also unarguably inspired by the Scopes trial- there weren’t that many court cases about evolution held in a stifling hot courtroom in 1920s Tennessee in which the opposing attorneys were a super-religious midwestern Presidential candidate has been and a Chicago lawyer notorious for defending rich sadistic murderers, after all. BUT, several times on television, in ads for the play, in magazines and other places I’ve read it referred to as a “true story” or at best “only the names are changed” depiction of the Snopes trial when in fact there are many fictional elements. The real schoolteacher was a substitute who neither knew nor cared about the accuracy of evolution but taught it in the classroom at the specific request of the city fathers, who not only wanted to challenge the law but also wanted to boost tourism to Dayton [and boy did they]. He was not in love with the preacher’s daughter but a married family man, and there were far more lawyers involved than in the movie. W. J. Bryan did not die on the last day of the trial but months later. The courtroom dialogue, however, is largely verbatim and some of the oddest scenes did actually take place (e.g. the cross examination of Bryan by Darrow).
A movie that is very accurate historically and very good dramatically: The Miracle Worker. I would love to see a more in-depth follow-up to Helen’s life (she was so much more than the little girl at the water pump and wasn’t at all the sweet little virginal icon she’s so often portrayed as) but Miracle is outstanding.
No, everyone heard it right the first time: In Casablanca, Ugarte says “General De Gaulle” signed the letters of transit. And it’s right there in black and white in the published shooting script, with an introduction by its co-author Howard Koch.
However, the “blundering into Berlin in 1918” remark by Captain Renault is a notable error: when the Armistice was signed in 1918, the Allied Forces were in France and western Belgium. The Allied Forces never came within 400 miles of Berlin. (Yes, that is my trivia note in the IMDb.) One might argue that Captain Renault is an ignorant phony, but surely Major Strasser would have corrected him on this point.
Hm. Apparently, the French-language subtitles have Weygand… go figure.
A miniseries that took some major liberties with the true story on which it was based: Helter Skelter. This miniseries scared the hell out of me when I was a kid and largely it was due to the supernatural elements that simply didn’t happen in real life: in the miniseries, Bugliosi’s watch stops the moment Charlie Manson looks at him grinning maniacally, which in fact did not happen (or at least nowhere near that dramatically or with that type of timing). There is also implicit ESP twixt Manson and his “ladies” (which we now know was planned to the nth degree) and even some implication of mysticism in how Manson got his bus into the desert hills (which was no mystery whatsoever- while the hills are impassable from one side, from the desert side it was no major feat and the tire marks were even visible). I haven’t seen the remake of the miniseries but would like to.
A great historical miniseries that avoided almost all the usual cliches (bad aging make-up, politically correct 20th century attitudes, beauty products on the frontier, modern English, etc.) was The Awakening Land trilogy based on the fantastic books by Conrad Richter. Hal Holbrook and Elizabeth Montgomery played a mismatched couple on the late 18th/early 19th century frontier (Ohio) and the attention to detail by way of dialect (courtesy of dialect coach Marge Champion, no-less- evidently she had a post-Gower post-dancing career), clothing, architecture (the evolution of their house from a one room cabin with sparse homemade furniture and an oiled paper window in the midst of an endless forest to a rambling log and brick homestead of a prosperous couple in the middle of a bustling town was a MASTERPIECE of set design) and age. Characters do not look like they just came from the gym, Indians were neither Great Spirit worshiping enlightened noble savages nor murdering heathens but somewhere in the middle, high infant and child mortality is addressed, the abolitionist isn’t by any stretch a perfect person, etc… I can’t recommend this series highly enough but regrettably it isn’t on video (though it’s mine the moment it is).
Speaking of architecture, I’m surprised more hasn’t been mentioned about Gone With the Wind. While there were certainly wealthy planters around Atlanta, if any 19th century Georgian had seen a house even remotely resembling Twelve Oaks he’d have drooled and died- not even in much older and much richer Savannah was there anything a tenth that huge or lavish. (The 12 Oaks in the book is much closer to the Tara in the movie, while the book Tara is an ugly rambling house much closer to the Awakening Land homestead above.) There were wwwwwwwway too many soldiers in the hospital (the biggest Confederate hospital in Georgia at the time was actually much further south in Americus and it still was nowhere near that size) and supposedly drew the line from one of the veterans to see the movie “if we had that many damned troops we’d have won”. The shelling and evacuation of Atlanta had more in common with the London blitz than with the large-but-not-yet-enormous city that was mostly empty long before the Yankees started shelling, and it’s amazing how many people have seen the movie a thousand times without ever catching that what Scarlett and Rhett were fleeing is not the burning of Atlanta (which wasn’t htat total and happened later) but the Confederate destruction of the trainside warehouses and munitions they were unable to move. Still a great movie though.
I always figured he was being figurative. Yes, they didn’t really march into Berlin, but Germany did lose the war.
Hey!! That part of the story is somewhat true, he was itinerant but proved himself such that he was sponsored for higher education. But you forgot to point out that most of the characters seem more at home in Bavaria than Copenhagen 
:eek:
Thank you Walloon. That’s very interesting. I don’t remember the film exactly now, but I don’t think it was set very long after the Civil War. At the time it simply seemed unlikely to me that there’d have been sufficient time for a black man to study law, practise it and gain the necessary experience to be appointed to the bench.
Yeppers- it was the Poles- actually they did a lot to break Enigma. But the Brits don’t mention them a lot… True, the Poles didn’t break the naval Enigma, but without their groundwork, the Brits would have been stymied.
Sampiro- you mention Hidalgo- the bad press on this comes from just one big horse club that has made up a lot of shit, and blackened Franks name. True, the story is very likely both exaggerated then “movieized”, but Frank Hopkins was a great man and long rider. The Indians remember him. That single horse club is responsible for all the lies and slander. Of course, since it was a Disney movie- eveyone has loved to quote them, and mention the bad stuff. But there is only ONE source of the bad stuff- and they hate Frank becuase they ride Arabians and not "mutt nags’ as they put it. They are exactly the kind of snooty “pure-breed” lovers that Hopkins loved to show up, and that the film was mant to annoy- and damn if it didn’t. But they lie- a LOT. Sure- i am not going to nominate Hildalgo as a “historical film” either- but “based on a true story” was correct.
mbh: well, said, and an accurate synopsis of Titanic as well. Lovingly re-created detail as to the ship itself, and a fairly accurate depiction of her sinking (by most eyewitness accounts) in spite of recent scientific evidence that she couldn’t possibly have sunk that way.
My biggest problem with Titanic is the unabashed liberty they took with First Officer William Murdoch And Margaret “Molly” Brown.
There is no evidence from eyewitness accounts that William Murdoch accepted bribes or that he shot anyone, including himself. In spite of the fact that the Titanic hit the iceberg on his watch, and that he woefully underloaded many of the starboard lifeboats, he has generally been credited with doing his duty to the last in an officer-like fashion. In his defense, the Titanic was listing to port, at one time somewhat severely enough to make launching lifeboats problematic from the starboard side. As the ship was initially listing to starboard, most people congregated on the port side; enough so that at 1:40 P.M., Chief Officer Henry Wilde ordered passengers and crew to starboard in an attempt to straighten the list.
And Mrs. J.J. “Molly” Brown threatened to brain Quartermaster Robert Hitchens with the tiller of lifeboat #6 if he didn’t shut up with his hysterics, eventually taking charge and organizing the rowers while Hitchens hid under a blanket and sulked until the Carpathia picked them up in the morning.
They didn’t call her “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” for nothing.
Well, I just saw bifar’s post, but why waste the wordage I’ve got?
SlickRoenick: in broad details, Tombstone was accurate; so was Costner’s Wyatt Earp. But a lot of history got truncated or just plain changed; enough so to put a significantly different twist on the story.
Racinchikki: Patrick O’Brian claims that the plots to most if not all of his novels are derived from real events and actions of the British Navy. He does admit to condensing or stringing together multiple events. I’ve also heard Dopers poo-pooing this claim, though.
Most accurate in my opinion is Gods and Generals- it seemed to have lasted as long as the actual Civil War. Joking aside, I can’t believe people actually talked that way.
I’ve always enjoyed Tora Tora Tora and The Longest Day. I’d also like to nominate the film Hiroshima. Apollo 13 was another that comes to mind as being fairly true to life.
Does anyone know if there are any 9/11 movies in the works? Perhaps the wounds are too fresh, but I thought a portrayal of the last hours of the WTC would be a pretty compelling movie.
It is unfortunate that young people watching movies like Gladiator gain a more than slightly distorted version of ancient history.
However, I am FAR more disturbed by young people, who are still in the process of forming their political beliefs, watching the historically even more appalling JFK.
Saving Private Ryan got so many details right, it’s difficult to understand why they gave the Germans two Tiger tanks, when there were none on the US front in Normandy at that time.