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.
Serling was never a POW. He was a paratrooper who fought in the Philippines, including in the block-to-block fighting for Manila. He was wounded three times, including one that wrecked his knee, and suffered some form of PTSD the rest of his life, but he was never a prisoner of the Japanese.
I guess I heard wrong. Donald Pleasance who played the Forger in the The Great Escape was a POW. Or so I heard.
That one’s true. Pleasance was shot down over Germany in August, 1944 and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp. He was something of an adjunct technical advisor on “The Great Escape,” helping make things as accurate as possible.
It was a animated movie, but I had major bones to pick with “Anastasia”...First of all, obviously Anastasia did not survive the liquidation of the Romanovs....second, they had Rasputin as her arch enemy....no mention of what the Bolsheviks did.
Now I am racking my brain over who it was that was a POW, some kind of celebrity, and hated Hogan’s Heroes. I could have sworn it was Serling.
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“Gentlemen, prepare to defend yourselves” =
RANDALL WALLACE, personified...
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Randall Wallace, not Ernie Savage?
Not Ernie Savage - I meant Basil Plumley...
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Actually, “WE WERE SOLDIERS” Screenwriter/Producer/Director RANDALL WALLACE wrote these words for the Motion Picture
S/Major BASIL PLUMLEY after evacuation from the Battle of IA DRANG-1965 = See 1st Photo:
http://www.lzxray.com/guyer_set3.htm
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