Most Inaccurate Historical Movies (Name films with the most glaring lack of historical accuracy)

self | September 24, 2011 | PJ-Comix

[PJ-Comix]

I am a huge history buff so and enjoy watching movies about events in the past. However, many of these movies really irk me because they are incredibly inaccurate as to the historical facts. Here is a sampling of movies that have bugged me due to their historical inaccuracies:

1. Battle of the Bulge: So just how inaccurate was this 1965 movie? So inaccurate that former President Eisenhower who was Supreme Commander of the Allies in Europe denounced this film in a press conference. To watch this movie you would think that some Boston detective was able to predict all the German tactical moves based on such police work as shutting off the engine of a spotter plane in the middle of a fog bank in order to hear sounds of tank treads. Oh, and the German Panzers looked exactly like M47 Patton tanks which is what they were. As to the heavily forested Ardennes forest, at times it looked like a deforested western prairie.

2. Gunfight at the OK Corral: Couldn't Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp have bothered to grow a mustache or at least wear a fake one? The cleanshaven Earp in that movie is a slap at the intelligence of anybody with even a little knowledge about Wyatt Earp. Also the real life gunfight took just a few seconds, not at all like the extended gunfight in the movie which did not take place at the OK Corral but NEXT to it.

3. Huns. Why is it that every movie depicting Huns make them look like white guys? In actuality the Huns were a nomadic tribe from deep inside Asia who looked like ugly Mongolians with scarred faces. And the movie Attila the Hun looks like Jack Palance which is just wrong.

4. Confederate uniforms. This really bugs me. Civil War movies which depict Confederates late in the war wearing immaculate uniforms. Only officers had uniforms at that stage of the war that were in decent shape. The uniforms of the average foot soldiers were either one step up from rags or were stolen Federal uniforms dyed a beechnut color. And even those latter uniforms were usually in bad shape.

5. Pearl Harbor: Did anybody else cringe when Franklin D. Roosevelt rose from his wheel chair and walk a few steps to make a point? Guess what? That never happened.

6. The Alamo: Final Mexican attack took place in the dark before daybreak not in the middle of the day as depicted in the film. Also Col. Travis in the movie spoke with a clipped British accent. Oh, and the character of supposed frontiersman Smitty from Tennessee looked and sounded like he was an urban guy from South Philly.

[robowombat]

Santa Fe Trail, history on LSD with George Custer confronting John Brown in Kansas several years before Custer graduated from the USMA
They Died With Their Boots On, more hallucinogenic Custerology climaxing with the 7th Cavalry executing a saber charge into the massed forces of the Indians
The Charge of the Light Brigade in which history has a time warp and the Sepoy Mutiny and the Crimean War are reversed in historical order among other things.
All three of these films star Errol Flynn.

[warsaw44]

I doubt too many other PT-boat captains were routinely below deck playing cards and getting drunk without a single man on watch.

Straight scoop from a high ranking US Naval officer who was told he'd be on JFK's court martial.

[lurk]

Inherit the Wind, about the Scopes trial.

Revisionist history.

[meyer]

‘Airplane’ was quite accurate - they actually DID have Auto Pilot in the 1970s.

[cuban leaf]

--But don’t give us any damn stories about happy singing slaves.--

"I get no kick from champagne."

You need to watch the historically accurate novies.

[driftless2]

If you're going for historical accuracy concerning westerns, you might as well rip the whole lie about quickdraw gunfights, the staple of a great many tv and movie westerns. There never were any quickdraw killers ala Broderick Crawford in "The Fastest Gun Alive." The whole quickdraw thing was made up by western fabulists and the entertainment industry. There were certainly plenty of killers and other people handy with a six-gun. But if they wanted to kill someone, they didn't challenge them to a fast-draw contest. They usually had their guns out and pointing at the person they were trying to shoot.

Ditto for shooting from the hip. Experts say you couldn't hit anything with the revolvers of that era unless you aimed it. And no one shot the revolver out the hands of the bad guy ala The Lone Ranger and countless other good guys.

[skeeter]

Snort.

I'm glad you joined.

[meyer]

The Bridge on the River Kwai

They kept whistling that song...

Comet! It makes your teeth turn green!
Comet! It tastes like gasoline,
Comet! It makes you vomit!
So get some Comet and vomit today.

[Reily]

All time worst in my opinion is a John Wayne movie, “The Conqueror”. John Wayne was cast as Genghis Khan! Also the mongol warriors was made up of Mexican extras! The love interest was supposedly a north asiAn princess played by Susan Hayward. It is just an awful awful film!

Also supposedly it was filmed to close to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site while above ground testing was going on. And a higher then what was normal for that number of people (i.e., the cast) got cancer latter in life.

[ThomasThomas]

Dances with Wolves

[tlb]

>>> He also despised Hogan’s Heroes, but he thought the set was perfect.

Movie producers agreed the set was very good. They liked the Hogan's Heroes set so much they used it in another WW2 film.

[I still care]

I think “Flyboys” might be the one - yes it has the red baron, but the characters were all composites. But they had him in a black plane, and all the rest of the german planes were red!

I picked these off a war forum and FReepers should have a go (All of them were argued about to some extent, with qualifiers - accurate “except for” type stuff. They all were mentioned as “Parts of this one” or Technologically this one was very accurate”:

Battle of Algiers
The Cruel Sea
Twelve O’Clock High
BattleGround
Master And Commander
The Lost Battalion
Das Boot
All Quiet on the Western Front
Band of Brothers
BlackHawkDown
DownFall

These were all war films, of course.

A lot of great historical films will have great commentary if you buy a version with that added. For instance, the commentary on WTC is done by the original cops and it’s incredible. They also point out all the original participants doing bit parts.

The blu-ray longest day had a TERRIBLE historical female commentator, though. She was obsessed with the film needing to be full of “macho men”.

I will add also my pet peeve (but of course I don’t expect any different). All modern films are made with modern sensibilities; people don’t smoke, they swear too much, and certainly they don’t talk about God, which even fifty years ago they did a lot more. Older films do get inherent racism more correct - for instance, they will call a black person “boy”, without being an evil Nazi hater.

[warsaw44]

An almost unknown history of Poland saving Europe. The Communists were not just after Poland but all of Europe.

Was not aware of a movie but Norman Davies 1972 book ‘ White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish Soviet War 1919-1920 ‘ covers this quite well.

[Figment]

“He also despised Hogan’s Heroes, but he thought the set was perfect”

Knew WWII survivors who despised “Hogans Heroes” too. The cast actually included a death camp survivor. The guy who played the Frenchman was a French Jew

[boatbums]

We watched Apollo 13 recently and I noticed a lot of cigarette smoking IN THE CONTROL CENTER. With all the critical computer terminals dealing in life or death matters, were they REALLY allowed to smoke in there? I noticed that in the movie War Games, too. I worked in the computer room of a data center in the late '70s and early '80s and NO ONE could smoke in there.

[Reily]

Supposedly JFK damaged his boat and the dock numerous times in “parking it”. In Caro's book do it more then once and you move to a desk job.

Also Caro's book implies there was a also dereliction of duty issue. JFK was supposed to be on patrol basically part of a “pack of boats” looking for targets not out “yachting”!

[Erasmus]

Hitler never died in no theater, fer dangsake!

Well he did, in a way. The ETO.

≤)B^)

[boatbums]

Hey, I heard Custer died in an Arrow shirt. ;o)

[Wiser now]

My Naval aviator husband laughed his way through Top Gun.

[InvisibleChurch]

Apollo18 was pretty spot on.