Posted on 09/24/2011 4:19:32 PM PDT by 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.
After scanning the bulk of this thread (sorry, PJ, didn’t mean to tangent with the Sensurround posts), I’m surprised to not see mentions of “JFK” or any other Oliver Stone celluloid colon ooze. The artistic license he took (golden-painted Clay Shaw nipple-pinching scenes et al) only prove that the most lauded in Hollywood are truly mentally ill. He even made Alexander look fruitier than Boy George.
Not at all. Major passages of "Roots" were plagerized from "The African" written in 1967. Haley's lawsuit settled for $650,000, and he admitted it.
Yeah, I know y’all did. I really liked it when I could go home and not smell like an ashtray. Seeing a house where smokers used to live with the walls and curtains and furniture covered in a sticky, yellowish substance, I knew that their lungs probably looked far worse. I don’t know how any computers could hold up under that kind of residue and function for very long. I was glad nobody smoked in the computer rooms but the offices were another story. I rejoiced when that was forbidden, too.
Either that, or they finally understood why they were getting failures and crashes. I remember coming on to the start of my third shift week on Sunday night - all alone - and the system had crashed. A disk drive had a broken read/write head and it was "dancing" and "skipping" along the surface of the disk pack! Cold boot time! What a fun way to start a week.
The Far Horizons, a pretty good romantic tale about a supposed relationship between Lt. Clark and Sacajawea ... other then that whole never having happened part.
I found it interesting that a biography of Wallace by a sympathetic contemporary didn't survive the years...
Have you noticed a young Tom Selleck in the movie? He plays the Midway garrison commander’s aide.
Yes, guns from the twentieth century. The ones made in the nineteenth had to aimed carefully to hit anything.
Everybody knows about the John Ford westerns made in Monument Valley with the cavalry fighting the nasty Navajos or other Indians and protecting all the settlers. In reality, the Navajos were one of the tribes that didn’t fight the army. And there were few to no settlers, or Indians for that matter, in Monument Valley anyway (I’ve driven through it a number of times), because IT’S A DESERT!!! for crying out loud. No good for farming unless you wanted to grow sagebrush or cactus. Ford loved the backdrops...that’s why he made so many movies there.
Anything by Oliver Stone.
That should read Tsavo. And you got my point exactly... the addition of the Michael Douglas character. Imagine Gunfight at the OK Corral with all of the historical figures, plus Paul Bunyan or some other totally fictional character tossed in for no apparent reason. The real events happened without him, why is he needed in the movie?
Thanks for the background. I know where Superior is, use to travel about Az. quite a bit.
Most of the movie Jeremiah Johnson is taken from the true story of Liver Eating Johnson.The real guy was a vicious SOB.
Kingdom of Heaven.
The actual story would have made a much better movie.
Apocalypto just sucked.
By the end, I didn’t care if everybody on earth died brutally.
Say it ain’t so, Joe!
Redford played him as such a sweet, sensitive MYOB guy who goes “Mad Max” because his “family” got murdered.
[and they say he’s up there, still!]
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