What real people have been the most inaccurately maligned on film?

[Rodd_Hill]

I think Bligh’s second mutiny is generally held to be during his tenure as Governor of New South Wales.

http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/web/common.nsf/key/HistoryEarlyEuropeanSettlement

For the first 35 years after Europeans arrived in New South Wales, the Governor was generally supreme in the colony. The Imperial Parliament - nearly 20,000 kilometres and 8 months away by sea - was the only superior authority but because communications with the British Parliament were slow and infrequent, the Governors could use wider powers than Parliament intended. The first real opposition to this had nothing to do with demands for democracy. When Governor William Bligh (1806-1810) challenged the near-monopoly of trade and land grants being exercised by army officers of the New South Wales Corps and their associates amongst the leading landowners, he was arrested by the army in 1808. This was in Australia’s only military coup and for the next two years, until the arrival of a new Governor, officers of the Corps took the role of Governor upon themselves. The arrival of Governor Lachlan Macquarie with his own regiment in 1810 restored the power of the Governor and saw the NSW Corps disbanded.

[BrainGlutton]

@RealityChuck

Yes, Salieri claims he killed Mozart. But the movie makes clear that he did nothing of the sort.

But he does. He masquerades as Mozart’s father’s ghost, driving Mozart into his near-suicidal depression and guilt-trip, drinking even more than usual, and final decline. There’s no indication (in the movie) that Mozart is suffering from any conventional illness.

[Tenebras]

No worries commasense, you’re probably right on the compass/sextant thing. I was pretty sure it was one of the two, I was mostly objecting to the imagined (on closer reading) assertion that he was given no navigational aids (rather than charts). Honestly, I feel as though having a sextant and a watch would be far more useful than a compass. If you have the time, you can use the watch to tell you which direction north is (although perhaps not very reliably in a pitching boat so close to the equator).

Regardless, no offense meant.

@Rodd Hill

I think Bligh’s second mutiny is generally held to be during his tenure as Governor of New South Wales.

Rodd Hill, that may well be. I’ve always heard the Nore mutiny named as Bligh’s second mutiny. And I think your quote pretty much says that Bligh got a bum rap, fighting on the side of God and Truth and Right and all that jazz.

I’ve read that by the time the NSW incident happened, the Aussies were banking on Bligh’s reputation as a captain under whom people mutinied (Bounty and Nore) to justify the revolt. Poor guy…

Tenebras

[Antonius_Block]

@F.U Shakespeare

I once was asked by two Jewish friends who were planning their wedding whether it was true that “Here Comes the Bride” was written by a Nazi. I said it technically was not, but suggested they might consider switching to the familiar “Wedding March”, which was written by… Mendelsohn.

@Anne Neville

Something from the classical repertory is often played for wedding processionals, but many rabbis explicitly request that couples avoid the two most conventional selections- from Wagner’s Lohengrin [Here Comes The Bride] and Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream [Wedding March]- pieces written by, respectively, a notorious anti-Semite and a Jew who converted to Christianity.

I knew an Episcopalian priest who would try to convince couples to choose neither the Wagner nor the Mendelssohn; not because of the composers, but because of the backstory of the weddings that the music was written to accompany:
[ul]
[li]Wagner’s Bridal Chorus (“Here Comes the Bride”) from Lohengrin involves a lack of honesty and openness. The bride, Elsa of Brabant, agrees to marry on the condition that she never asks her husband’s name or origin. Once they are married, she asks him the forbidden question, he abandons her (before the marriage is consummated), and she dies. Scarcely a marriage that one would wish to emulate![/li].
[li]Mendelssohn’s Wedding March from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was written to accompany weddings that, in Shakespeare’s play, involve abduction, drugging, deception, and sorcery to bring the marrying couples together.[/li][/ul]
His view was that if you wanted him to officiate, try not to choose music with such negative baggage!

[bonzer]

@Tenebras

No worries commasense, you’re probably right on the compass/sextant thing. I was pretty sure it was one of the two, I was mostly objecting to the imagined (on closer reading) assertion that he was given no navigational aids (rather than charts). Honestly, I feel as though having a sextant and a watch would be far more useful than a compass. If you have the time, you can use the watch to tell you which direction north is (although perhaps not very reliably in a pitching boat so close to the equator).

Regardless, no offense meant.

I’ll muddy the waters here by noting that by Bligh’s own account he only had a quadrant and a compass. From Chapter XIII of his A Voyage to the South Sea … including an Account of the Mutiny … (1792), describing how the launch was prepared:

The boatswain and seamen who were to go in the boat were allowed to collect twine, canvas, lines, sails, cordage, an eight and twenty gallon cask of water, and Mr Samuel got a hundred and fifty pounds of bread, with a small quantity of rum and wine, also a quadrant and compass; but he was forbidden on pain of death to touch either map, ephemeris, book of astronomical observations, sextant, time-keeper, or any of my surveys or drawings.

A few paragraphs on, he says that Samuel specifically tried to take the time-keeper, but was hussled away by the mutineers who were guarding him. Of course, this all refers to the official chronometer and it’s possible that someone had their own pocketwatch. In his account of the subsequent voyage in the launch he repeatedly refers to observed latitudes (presumably with the quadrant) and frequently mentions times of day, though I’d tentatively expect Bligh to have been able to estimate the latter with compass and quadrant.

There are multiple editions of Bligh’s Account of the Mutiny, including several online; for the quote above I used the text in the nicely done A Book of the ‘Bounty’ (Everyman, 1936, ed. by George MacKaness).

[APB]

@RealityChuck

Yes, Salieri claims he killed Mozart. But the movie makes clear that he did nothing of the sort. He made the claim because Mozart died after agreeing to collaborate with Salieri. Salieri’s point was that he was such a mediocrity that God killed Mozart to prevent Salieri from sharing in Mozart’s genius. Their potential collaboration was what did Mozart in, not anything Salieri did to him.

Salieri is portrayed with the utmost sympathy: someone with talent confronted by the presence of genius and realizing how lacking he is. The claim is based on his deep depression and it not meant to be taken literally.

And that’s not all, for there are further levels of irony made explicit in the original play but which are mostly missing from the film. The reason Salieri claims to have killed Mozart (or rather, the reason he gives for having claimed to have killed him) is because, having failed to gain justified immortality as a composer, he wishes to gain unjustified immortality as Mozart’s supposed murderer. But this also backfires as no one believes him. It is therefore all part of Shaffer’s point that no one now seriously thinks that Salieri killed Mozart.

Which makes it an unintended irony that, thanks entirely to the play and the film, more people than ever before do now know who Salieri was and that they remember him not for his music but because they think that Shaffer claimed that he killed Mozart.

[bump]

@OtakuLoki

Bligh’s own reputation is not enhanced by the fact that he’s one of the very few Royal Navy commanders I can think of who was mutinied against twice.

Three, actually. The first one was the 1789 mutiny on the HMS Bounty that we’re all familiar with.

The second was during the mutinies at Spithead and The Nore in 1797, where it wasn’t so much a personal thing- the entire fleet mutinied at once.

The third was when he was appointed Governor of New South Wales in 1808 and stifled the colony’s rum trade, and was deposed by the rum merchants and military.

Somewhere in the middle, in 1804, he was also court-martialled and reprimanded for “Tyrranical behavior”, which I’m sure did him no good reputation-wise.

http://www.thehistorynet.com/bh/blwilliambligh/index1.html

[vibrotronica]

@don Jaime

Also Danny DeVito’s loathsome movie Hoffa. Robert Kennedy was no saint, but his great achievment in life was taking on the Mob and their lackeys, including Hoffa. DeVito made him out to be a troll out to destroy holy Saint Jimmy. I’ve hated DeVito ever since.

Hoffa’s portrayal of Bobby is the LEAST of its sins against good filmmaking. It’s one of the worst movies ever made.

[Tracy_Lord]

@Antonius Block

Mendelssohn’s Wedding March from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was written to accompany weddings that, in Shakespeare’s play, involve abduction, drugging, deception, and sorcery to bring the marrying couples together.

Hey, that’s only two out of three! (or one, depending on your take on Theseus and Hippolyta’s relationship). Hermia and Lysander were all set to get hitched waaaay before the action of the play.

[Scissorjack]

Of course, there’s also the implied bestiality when a bewitched Titania falls for the transformed Bottom.

[OtakuLoki]

@commasense

As far as Bligh vs. Shackleton, both men’s accomplishments were amazing, and perhaps it serves no purpose to declare one superior to the other. But all in all, I thing Bligh’s voyage was the more difficult because he did it with no charts, only a sextant and watch. Shackleton may have been a greater leader, but I think Bligh was the greater seaman.

Oh, I don’t disagree that both were astounding feats. I’ve been impressed and amused by Shackleton ever since I read his quote to his wife after the 1909 expedition failed to reach the South Pole: “Better a live donkey than a dead lion.”

And I didn’t mean to distract from your point about Bligh’s reputation being smeared beyond the reality - just that he had luck almost as bad as William Kidd. (Another Royal Navy officer who got caught up in the cogs.)