Movies Ain't History, Plutarch!

Just recently I watched Buffalo Girls, which purported to be a biography of Calamity Jane, with Angelica Huston in the title role.  Afterwards, as is my wont, I researched what history was available on the subject.  Here's the thing--when the facts about a person or subject are known, or are easy to look up, you can't credibly revise them to fit your script.  You got that, Oliver?

Calamity Jane indeed had the unrequited hots for Wild Bill Hickok.  The movie shows us that she bore Wild Bill a daughter, whom she gave up to an English couple who had just lost their own.  That would have been one hell of a gestation period.  Jane's real life daughter was born three years after Wild Bill was murdered while playing cards in Deadwood.

Speaking of Deadwood, remember the TV series?  You know, where Seth Bullock was diddling the widow of a murdered prospector until his wife, whom he married out of a sense of responsibility when her husband, his brother, was killed, showed up in town?  In reality, Bullock arrived in town with his wife, to whom he was happily married.  And in case you're interested, Al Swearengen was killed when, while down on his luck, he tried to hop a freight train.

Other movies pretending to be history abound.  Practically nothing, for example, is accurate about Lawrence of Arabia, except that it does glimpse WWI as it played out between the English-supported Arabs and the Turks.  T. E. Lawrence, not even five feet tall, looked nothing like six-foot-plus, blond hair, blue-eyed Peter O'Toole.  I suppose in Hollywood, where image is everything, heroes must look heroic, not like some swarthy, dwarfish everyman.  Auda abu Tuyi, whom Lawrence met in a tent, not while dancing around in Arabic garb, did resemble Anthony Quinn in looks, but was not the semi-literate lummox portrayed in the film.

The Bridge on the River Kwai, which looked nothing like the one in the movie, was blown up by allied bombers, not commandos.  The experiences of Dith Pran as depicted in The Killing Fields were part his and part those of the actor who portrayed him, Haing S. Ngor.

Practically all the movies about Wyatt Earp take liberties with reality.  My Daughter Clementine (Henry Fonda) borders on fantasy.  Gunfight at the OK Corral (Burt Lancaster) has Earp's brother, Jimmy, murdered instead of Morgan.  Tombstone (Kurt Russell) shows Earp visiting Doc Holliday in a Glenwood Springs sanatorium just before Holliday dies from TB.  In fact, Holliday and Earp rarely saw each other in Colorado, and Holliday died alone in a seedy hotel room.  Wyatt Earp (Kevin Costner) is the most historically accurate of all the Earp films.

Movies about the Vietnam War also earn mixed reviews.  Apocalypse Now isn't really a war movie, it just happens to be set in a war environment.  It does offer vignettes of the war--the USO show disintegrating into chaos, the napalming of a village--but the plot could just as easily have involved the hunting down of a rogue cop or spy who had crossed the line.

Platoon was Oliver Stone's anti-military paean.  The Green Berets was blatantly pro-military.  While diametrically opposite, both focused on the military and thus missed the whole point, that five presidents, convinced that a bunch of rice farmers was a threat to the most powerful nation on the planet, dragged the US into a land war in Asia that resulted in millions of wasted lives.

For my money, the best Vietnam War movie is Full Metal Jacket.  It is neither anti- nor pro-military.  It presents the inhumanity of war in very human terms--the false bravado of men secretly soiling their underwear, the outwardly blase reaction to death that masks the relief that it wasn't theirs, the black humor they used in an attempt to make light of the nightmare.

Movies are like pro-wrestling.  They are entertainment.  You want history?  Go to the library.  You want amusement?  Go to the movies.  You want real mayhem in the ring?  Watch mixed martial arts.

Okay, girl?