Five really stupid "historical drama" films
Movies like Lincoln, Gods and Generals and Gettysburg are exceptions. Usually Hollywood trawls out utter dreck when it comes to dramatizing real-life historical events. Here is a rouge's gallery of the worst of the worst.
1. D-Day: The Sixth of June (1956.)
Sounds like a docudrama, right? Wrong! This movie is a love story masquerading under that title. It is so sappy it will leave you needing to “wash your eyes” with The Longest Day. No soap opera bull in that all-star D-Day docu-drama! And if that does not work, the episode "Day of Days" from "Band of Brothers" would wash the last of the soap from your eyes.
2. The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968.)
"Into the valley of boredom went the unaware viewer." Laced with distracting animated cutaway sequences that satirize the British Empire in general, and the Crimean War in particular, even the likes of Trevor Howard and Vanessa Redgrave can’t save this one. Oh, and Gettysburg it sure isn't! Even docu-dramas thin on character development but packed with engrossing set-pieces like Tora! Tora! Tora! and Dien Bien Phu beat the living daylights out of this junk. Lord Tennyson’s famous poem alone is a far better depiction of the doomed charge.
3. JFK (1991.)
It is amazing Oliver Stone did not suffer a heart attack while making this movie. It is so breathless in its accusations you can almost sense Stone’s heart rate was at ludicrous speed as he wrote and directed it. Apparently, the more disturbing theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was a rouge KGB or Cuban agent acting alone did not wash with his twisted, sensationalistic theories. This article about the film refers to Kevin Costner's real-life character Jim Garrison as "Dances with Facts." That's appropriate, given how Garrison did exactly that in real-life. Stone’s paranoid vision of JFK’s assassination may derive from sources such as Mr. Garrison himself. Nevertheless, the conspiracy theory that unspools in JFK is more akin to, say, paranoid thrillers like Marathon Man than actual history. It is that implausible.
Image courtesy Wikimedia.
James Cameron must insert subliminal messages into his movies. Fans of this disaster/chick flick are so fanatical they attack each and every critic of this overpraised “epic.” An “epic” that in reality made a mockery of a disaster that killed over a thousand people. Sure, James Cameron gave much lip-service to “historical accuracy,” especially his much-vaunted replica of the RMS Titanic. However, that replica is scarcely without its flaws as Dr. Paul Lee points out in this article on the film. Another historian slammed the movie's inaccuracies in this article. Cameron also either rehashed old myths or invented new ones in his screenplay. The film is such a travesty of truth, it would be better to call it say, Two Tragic Teen Lovers at Sea. Cameron had a disaster/chick flick in mind and he was going to make it. All his excuses as to why he did what he did are self-serving piffle. He also made a movie whose disaster element looks like a rip-off of The Last Voyage and The Poseidon Adventure; the chick flick elements look worse than even the Blue Lagoon movies.
The film’s impact on the legacy of the Titanic was like a bull in a china shop. Fanatical fans descended on and trashed the grave of Titanic victim Joseph Dawson at Fairview Cemetery, Halifax. They left ticket stubs, flowers, and love offering of panties. Why? When poor Joe’s body was found, he had a piece of paperwork on him that read “J. Dawson.” The cemetery ought to have sued those fans for damages; failing that, Leonardo DiCaprio should have offered to pay for the grave’s repair. Instead, neither has happened. Those Titanic fans got away with trashing a scared place.
And speaking of damage to sacred sites, Cameron led a photography expedition to the wreck in 1995 that inflicted damage on the bow section of the wreck. Apparently this was done on purpose in the name of getting some footage inside parts of the captain’s cabin, Marconi Room, and grand staircase.* In 1996, an expedition mounted by then salvor-in-possession RMS Titanic Inc. discovered this skullduggery. Incredibly, they mounted no direct court actions against Cameron!
Oh, and the claim that this movie "makes men cry?" This author shed not a tear while suffering through it. It did, however, make me want to go shave James Cameron’s beard off with a blowtorch, though.
Another thing about Two Tragic Teen Lovers at Sea: it gave Hollywood a template as to how to screw-up history on-screen. Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay jumped on the band wagon with this dreck better entitled Pathetic Harbor. This blood-drenched, fact-twisting war/chick flick makes D-Day: The Sixth of June seem like The Longest Day by comparison. In its breathless rush to be a sappy chick flick, a docu-drama and a bloody war movie all at once, all it succeeds in doing is becoming a big, anachronism-laden joke. This author found it so bad he only suffered through a few minutes of it. To paraphrase Crocodile Dundee: That is not a historical drama. [Author pulls out Gettysburg DVD.] Now that’s a historical drama! Historians such as Lawrence Suid had a field day (rightly) slamming this awful dreck Disney had the bad taste to release several months before the 60th anniversary of the tragic attack; they even had the world premiere of this turkey aboard an aircraft carrier at Pearl Harbor. If only the ghosts of those who died that day had appeared and ripped the screen to shreds followed by smashing the projector! Odds are the survivors toted by Disney to the premiere as a publicity stunt would have cheered. In fact, practically all the Pearl Harbor survivors still alive when the film came out hated it. "I didn't enjoy it one bit ..." one told me during an interview.** Tora! Tora! Tora! still rules as the best movie ever made about December 7, 1941. Thank you, Elmo Williams and Richard Fleischer!
*The damage was first reported by ocean liner scholar Charles A. Haas, who wrote about it in an article for the Summer 1996 edition of Voyage, the periodical of the Titanic International Society. The damage is also mentioned in this forum post.
**Author interview with Pearl Harbor survivor Richard Garty, USMC (Ret.) December 14th, 2011.
Main article image courtesy Wikimedia.
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