Tonight:
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Tom Cruise's Count von Stauffenberg and Frank Langella's Richard Nixon are set to rule the box office this weekend. Milk, the story of the radical gay rights activist Harvey Milk, and Frost/Nixon lead the pack at the Oscar nominations. Kate Winslet, who has her pick of roles, contends for best actress, playing the unglamorous part of an illiterate concentration camp guard forced to confront her responsibility in post-war Germany.
The relationship between Hollywood and history has rarely been closer, or more productive.
But are these stories, as told on screen, at all accurate — and does it matter whether they are? Some historians complain that films distort the record of the recent past, and add to confusion and false beliefs about history.
As a historian myself, I beg to differ. After all, Hollywood and history have been conducting a long, if uneasy love affair since well before Claus von Stauffenberg's failed plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. One of the biggest blockbusters of the 1930s was Alexander Korda's wildly sensationalised The Private Life of Henry VIII, with a wonderfully scenery-chewing performance from Charles Laughton as the royal ladykiller.
But although audiences have always loved history films, the air is thick with the whingeing on the part of those who write about it themselves.
If the Roman soldiers' sandals are not the wrong colour, then the Nazi officers' trousers are too baggy. “We play with facts at our peril,” one distinguished chronicler of the 20th century, Antony Beevor, says of the current crop of movies. He warns that we face an age of “intellectual and scientific chaos” if we consume such fodder without a historical health warning.
In fact, there is something rather heartening about Hollywood's eagerness to embrace the recent past. In an age when thousands of children leave school with only the barest idea of our national story, and when politicians seem obsessed with novelty and dismissive of anything old-fashioned, any engagement with history should be welcomed, even when it comes from Tom Cruise.
And can anyone really be surprised that, from time to time, films deviate from the historical record? These are commercial products, after all, designed to entertain as well as instruct. At just two hours long, Cruise's new thriller Valkyrie can hardly pay attention to every nuance of Nazi politics in the summer of 1944, and it would probably be an extremely dull experience if it did.
No doubt the Duchess of Devonshire, as portrayed by Keira Knightley in The Duchess, was not quite so very like Princess Diana in her tone and manner as she is seen to be in this Oscar-nominated production. But really, it's not the end of the world.
Fiddling with the historical record, of course, has been part of the writer's craft since Homer told the story of the fall of Troy and Shakespeare had Richard III offering his kingdom for a horse. Nobody goes to the National Theatre expecting to see plain, unvarnished historical truth. So why kick up a fuss when Hollywood film-makers make similar alterations?
The answer, of course, is cultural snobbery. It's fine for high art to distort history, the critics argue, but a disgrace when tawdry American movies do it, because the poor benighted souls who pay to see these films won't realise that what they're watching is fantasy, not fact.
This is patronising nonsense. Ordinary moviegoers are just as capable of distinguishing fact from fiction as any scholar. And even cinemagoers who know nothing about Stauffenberg's plot are intelligent enough to know that they are watching a Hollywood entertainment, not some perfectly accurate record of distant events.
In any case, most of the current crop are surprisingly faithful to the historical truth. Valkyrie, for example, sticks pretty closely to the story of the failed conspiracy to topple the Nazi regime. True, it implies that the plot came closer to success than it really did. But the basic facts are all present and correct — and Cruise even does a good job of impersonating the aristocratic assassin.
Frost/Nixon, too, is firmly anchored in fact. Quite apart from Michael Sheen and Frank Langella's eerily accurate performances, the dialogue is closely based on the transcripts of the famous interviews. Nobody is in danger of being misled here.
Even if audiences are misled, so what? Historians often complain that Hollywood takes over, with invented “facts” crowding out the real ones. But of course the reverse is true, for the fiction ends up exciting interest in the facts.
Thanks to Valkyrie, several rival books on the Stauffenberg plot are currently jostling for position in the bookshops, while there are any number of best-selling biographies of other recent subjects from Nixon to Che Guevara.
Even if only a few cinemagoers are intrigued enough to ferret out the “real” stories, then Hollywood deserves a pat on the back. Indeed, even the shoddiest and most distorted film can do some good. It was after seeing Oliver Stone's wildly paranoid thriller JFK, for example, that I first fell in love with American history — and while I now admit that it's a terrible film, I owe it my career as a historian.
The other complaint is that film-makers should be telling new, completely original stories rather than dredging up inspiration from the past. But telling ourselves stories about the past has been part of the human experience since Herodotus, the first recognised historian, wrote down his tales of the Persian wars in the fifth century BC. Shakespeare, Dickens and Tolstoy all did it. Given that we live in an increasingly rootless world, the search for historical antecedents seems all the more pressing.
It won't stop here. Against all the odds, and against a backdrop of two wars and an unprecedented financial crisis, America has its first black president. There has surely never been a better subject for a Hollywood biopic — Will Smith is probably reading scripts already.
What all these films illustrate is history's limitless capacity to give us compelling, extraordinary narratives. Herodotus would surely have appreciated the sheer human drama that turns history into pure, thrilling entertainment.
Critics should stop complaining. Nothing but good can come of a cinema that commemorates the past.
Reader views (2)
The problem with films that may distort history is that people actually believe them to be true. Like the deluded people who send flowers to people getting married on some TV soap.
Oliver Stone's portrayal of Bush in W was an excruciating caracature of a man he clearly hates, and even his harshest critics accept he is a courteous man with a self-deprecating sense of humour, extremely well read and graduated with high marks from a distinguished US University. Yet Stone wanted to and succeeded in making him look vacuous and ill mannered.
Films like Enigma made it seem that the US broke the Enigma Code and etc. etc. So impressions on historical events by biased or jingoistic directors can distort and belie the truth to the extent that people become wholly misinformed.
- Stephen Rothbart, Prague Czech Republic
"It was after seeing Oliver Stone's wildly paranoid thriller JFK, for example, that I first fell in love with American history — and while I now admit that it's a terrible film, I owe it my career as a historian."
Don't you think by your OWN admission you should show Oliver Stone more respect? Thereby not discouraging other people from experiencing the same inspiration?
My dormant interest in history was reignited by Alexander and I AM grateful.
- Lola Lloyd, long beach ca
