Reel History

Class: Back to 1950, when young Margaret (née Roberts) is being interviewed as a prospective Conservative candidate for Dartford. In the film, this takes place at an intimidating formal dinner. One of the guests is businessman Denis Thatcher. Grocer’s daughter Margaret is daunted by the cutlery. Denis whispers: ‘Start on the outside and work your way in.’ This did not happen to Margaret Roberts. Instead, it has been lifted from the 1990 film Pretty Woman, starring Julia Roberts (no relation) as a Los Angeles prostitute. During the real Dartford selection meeting, Margaret Roberts sat on a podium next to her father and discussed the welfare state. Instead of attacking it, she claimed some credit for the Conservatives for setting up the Beveridge Commission – the inquiry that led to its foundation. It is true, though, that Denis was in the audience.

s the 1980s began, the Cold War still had a hold across the globe. The state of mutual antagonism between the United States and the USSR was now heavily backed by nuclear weapons and space technology. To handle this massive responsibility, the American people elected their first Hollywood president: former movie star Ronald Reagan. Reagan, who had appeared in notable movies like Dark Victory (1939) as well as less lauded productions like chimp comedy Bedtime for Bonzo (1951), never entirely stopped acting. Threatening to veto tax increases, he quoted Clint Eastwood from one of the Dirty Harry movies: ‘Go ahead… make my day.’
Reagan was a big fan of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo films, which he quoted with regard to policy, and of George Lucas’s sci-fi movie Star Wars (1977). From the latter, he appropriated the term ‘evil empire’ to describe the Soviet Union, and the subtitle ‘a new hope’ to describe his own policies. When his government set up the Strategic Defense Initiative, a massive ground- and space-based programme designed to protect the United States from nuclear attack, the media christened it Star Wars. As Reagan’s biographer Michael Rogin points out, it may have had more to do with Murder in the Air (1940), in which Reagan himself played Secret Service man Brass Bancroft. It is Bancroft’s job to protect a new defensive weapon designed to destroy any attacking missile – just like the SDI.

John Wayne’s The Green Berets, which is such a travesty of history that it fired up real Vietnam veteran Oliver Stone to make his ferociously anti-war film Platoon (1986) in response – followed by one of the best:
1964
The Green Berets (1968)
Director: John Wayne & Ray Kellogg • Entertainment grade: E+ • History grade: Fail
Production: During the early 1960s, criticisms began to grow of US involvement in Vietnam – to the consternation of big-screen cowboy and deep-dyed patriot John Wayne. Wayne believed in the righteousness of the American cause, and wanted to make a film about it. His source material (largely discarded for the final screenplay) was a gung-ho novel by Robin Moore, The Green Berets, based on Moore’s experiences with Special Forces in Vietnam in 1963. Wayne wrote to President Lyndon B. Johnson to secure government approval. ‘If he made the picture he would be saying the things we want said,’ presidential adviser Jack Valenti assured Johnson. The Pentagon allowed Wayne lavish use of props and military bases for filming; it also retained script approval, and insisted on extensive and detailed changes to plot and dialogue.

Several incidents in Lawrence’s life are represented with major dramatic licence – including the fate of Gasim (I. S. Johar), who Lawrence first rescues from the desert and afterwards is forced to execute. The first of these things happened; the second sort of did, though Lawrence did not have to shoot the same man he rescued. In real life, he shot one called Hamed, in a separate and earlier dispute between Syrians and Moroccans. What the film does, though, is use these incidents to build an idiosyncratic but insightful picture of Lawrence, played indelibly by Peter O’Toole: a complicated, egomaniacal and physically masochistic man, at once godlike and all too flawed, with a tenuous grip both on reality and on sanity. It’s so well done that a historian might even forgive stuff like the filmmakers getting the date of the United States joining World War I wrong. (In real life that happened before, not after, the capture of Aqaba.)

Reputations: From a historian’s point of view, the transformation in Hollywood’s attitude to Thaddeus Stevens over the last century is striking. Back in 1915, he was ridiculed as the villainous race-traitor Austin Stoneman in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. In 2013, he was revered in Spielberg’s Lincoln as a great liberator and a man far ahead of his time. It is he, even more than the 16th president, who emerges as this film’s hero.

It was also an age of culture. Milos Forman’s extraordinarily successful Amadeus (1984) was based on the idea that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce) was killed or hounded to death by fellow composer Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham). In real life, though Mozart and Salieri were in competition for some of the same work, there is little evidence they were rivals. They seem to have been supportive friends. The idea that Salieri had murdered Mozart was based on a piece of gossip (which cannot be traced or verified) that Salieri once confessed to killing his friend in the course of a nervous breakdown. The rumour was whipped up into drama by the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin, whose short play Mozart and Salieri (1830) depicted the latter murdering the former onstage. Peter Shaffer, who originally wrote Amadeus as a stageplay, took the story from that.
As far as historians are concerned, there is no truth in the story at all – though this didn’t stop Amadeus from winning eight Oscars. Even thirty years after the movie’s release, so widely believed was the myth about Salieri killing Mozart that the Mozarthaus museum in Vienna held an exhibition specifically to try to rehabilitate his reputation. ‘We wanted simply to enlighten people and show the authentic Salieri, getting away from a very strongly fictionalized version,’ the museum’s director told the press.
Mozart and Salieri aren’t the only two great composers poorly served by cinema…

come,’ says Welles, clambering into a gilded carriage. Meanwhile, in the south, Napoleon strides out alone in front of the bayonets of the 5th regiment, crying: ‘If you want to kill your emperor, here I am!’ They defect to him immediately. Save a certain dramatic flourish and the amalgamation of a couple of different events, this is accurate.
Society: Soon afterwards, the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels is interrupted by news that Napoleon is on his way. Fighting would begin the next day at Quatre Bras. Some of the officers at the party had no time to change, and were obliged to go to war in evening dress. The film does a superb job of recreating that night, right down to the Duchess’s daughter finding herself ‘quite provoked’ by handsome young ADC Lord Hay dashing off to his death (which he is supposed to meet at Quatre Bras, though the film lets him live till Waterloo). Watching her daughter and Hay dance, the Duchess remarks to the Duke of Wellington that ‘I don’t want her to wear black before she wears white.’ She’s getting ahead of herself: it’s 1815, and white only became a popular colour for wedding dresses after Queen Victoria wore it to marry Prince Albert in 1840. Still, overall, this is good stuff.
War: Bondarchuk made the film with 15,000 infantrymen and 2,000 cavalry on loan from the Soviet army. Trained up to fight in nineteenth-century style, and given time to grow proper moustaches, these men do an outstanding job as French, British and Prussian soldiers. It was said at the time that this put Bondarchuk in command of the seventh largest army in the world. As a result, the scenes of battle at Waterloo are visually and technically sublime, and must be seen to be believed. Moreover, the mostly hokey screenplay has its finest hour when the immutably deadpan Lord Uxbridge falls foul of a grapeshot. Uxbridge: ‘By God, Sir, I’ve lost my leg.’ Wellington: ‘By God, Sir, so you have.’ It is a joy to confirm that those lines are accurate. The leg was buried in a nearby garden, and became a tourist attraction.

The Battle of Waterloo in 1815 was a crucial event in European history, but is crazily expensive to stage – which is perhaps why it hasn’t been filmed all that often. Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon, exhaustively planned during the 1970s but never made, was expected to run at ten or twelve hours, though it was scripted at a modest three and a half. We can only imagine it would have cost an absolute fortune. A rare attempt at capturing the scale of Waterloo was made in 1970 – with a little help from the Red Army.
1815
Waterloo (1970)
Director: Sergei Bondarchuk • Entertainment grade: C– • History grade: A–
With his catastrophic attempt to invade Russia in 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte began to fall from glory. In 1814, he was forced into exile on the Mediterranean isle of Elba. He escaped, and returned to France in triumph. But his second reign, known as the Hundred Days, was nipped in the bud by defeat at Waterloo.
Casting: Napoleon (Rod Steiger) must abdicate. Cue a massive tantrum from the little lad. ‘I will not, I will not, I will not, not, not!’ he bellows, though two minutes later he has calmed down and done it. Steiger is inescapably dreadful in the role, serving up high camp in place of charisma. He does at least look approximately like Napoleon, though much more like Ricky Gervais. Director Sergei Bondarchuk goes in for long scenes of nothing happening, so there’s plenty of time to imagine your way through a prequel in which David Brent conquers Europe but overreaches himself and has to eat Gareth on the road back from Moscow. Napoleon is replaced on the throne by King Louis XVIII, played by Orson Welles. Welles looks like Jabba the Hutt, but so did Louis XVIII, so that’s fine.
Power: Napoleon escapes from exile on Elba and is on his way back to Paris. The king does a bunk. ‘Perhaps the people will let me go as they let him

Evidently, not all audiences can tell the difference between fact and fiction. And this doesn’t necessarily make them stupid: perhaps they could have done with a better education, but unfortunately many educational systems don’t encourage people to challenge what they’re being told. Film is an incredibly persuasive medium, which is why governments across the world, led by figures as politically diverse as Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Richard Nixon, Kim Jong-un and Sayyid Ali Khamenei, have expended substantial amounts of time, money and effort making films, or interfering with other people’s films. ‘Filmmakers have a great responsibility,’ says Kate Williams. ‘How they present the past is how it gets remembered.’
As the historian Professor Richard Evans wrote in 2013: ‘History isn’t a myth-making discipline, it’s a myth-busting discipline, and it needs to be taught as such in our schools.’ The most essential principle of historical analysis is to question everything you are told and shown. That’s what Reel History wants you to do. Engage with what you’re watching. Ask questions and seek answers. There is nothing wrong with fictionalizing historical figures and events. It’s a fine literary tradition, from William Shakespeare to War and Peace to Wolf Hall: it can be creative and it can be fun. Also, everyone makes mistakes. My most embarrassing was in reviewing Elizabeth (1998). I stated that Elizabeth’s mother Anne Boleyn had been beheaded with an axe. Commenters rightly leapt on my blunder. Anne was beheaded by a French swordsman. Everyone knows that. I know that, too. Yet somehow, when I wrote it down, I messed it up. All the other historians pointed and laughed, and made me move my seat in the British Library next to the strange man who researches UFO conspiracies and smells of eels.

Every week, somebody says to me: ‘It’s a fictional movie, not a documentary.’ Well, yes, of course it is – but some films deliberately blur the line. Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006) and Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) both use a documentary style to present heavily fictionalized – and heavily politicized – historical cases. Even in less overtly political films, the versions of history shown often have a substantial and long-lasting impact. The iconic cultural images of such figures as Henry VIII, Robin Hood and Richard III were set by The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Laurence Olivier’s production of Richard III (1955) respectively. The myth that Jewish slaves built Egypt’s pyramids – controversially repeated by Israeli politician Menachem Begin in the twentieth century – does not appear in the Bible and is a historical impossibility: the great pyramids were built before Judaism existed. Yet it has been cemented in many people’s minds by generations of fanciful Hollywood movies about Moses. The myth that galley slaves were the norm in the Roman Empire can largely be traced to Ben-Hur (1959). The myth that Vikings wore helmets with two horns stems from the costume designs for the 1876 Bayreuth opera festival performance of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, but has been kept alive by films like The Norsemen (1978). The words ‘Follow the money’ were never said by Deep Throat (Mark Felt), the key source in the Watergate scandal, though they are often attributed to him by journalists and even historians; they were written by screenwriter William Goldman for the movie All the President’s Men (1976). Hollywood history can itself become the commonly accepted definition of history: the one most people know. ‘What is history but a fable agreed upon?’ asked Napoleon (paraphrasing Voltaire), and he hadn’t even seen Braveheart (1995).