Period Films and Inaccuraces

[Maj.Nick Danger]

Something that absolutely ruins a period re-enactment film for me, and that I notice so often I barely mention it anymore, is the use of psychobabble terminology: phrases such as "something to share" (instead of "tell"), "reach out" (call or talk), or describing something as a "challenge" intead of a "problem." People used to say what they meant.

Reminds me of George Orwell's "Doublespeak" and "Duckspeak".

 

[2jakes]

Nice catch, there! Only a true historical gun enthusiast could catch that. But that makes it no less an unecessary mistake.


(ETA Oh, I just noticed that this has been mentioned already- )
But my biggest peeve is how almost every movie made in the late 50s and the 60s about the 40s has women all in 40s clothing and shoes but their hair is ALWAYS still a 60s style. Makes no sense. NONE. Considering how much curling, pouffing, spraying and ratting that those 60s dos involve, it would have been more sensible to go period, and even moreso to keep it period and job-accurate. Nurses stranded and then picked up by a sub would not exactly be doing their hair a lot. And I don't care if your movie is supposed to be high quality or silly fun, care should go into every aspect.

Operation Petticoat, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Flight of the White Stallions (aka Miracle of the White Stallions), are just a few which come to mind, but it happens often. It's annoying as heck because I let it annoy me but... I don't know how not to. lol

I still enjoy " Dr. Zhivago " but the the hairstyle of the women will forever lock this movie to mid 1960s.

also
Bonnie Parker 1930s

Bonnie Parker 1960s

Even for a women on the wrong side of the tracks...
a low cut top & high ankle skirt was not the style !

 

[Simons]

An interesting thread. I too, always look at the IMDB 'goofs' before anything else!

 

[Simons]

And when I saw Buck Barrow, that was the first time I hankered after a brown leather flight jacket!

 

[2jakes]

And when I saw Buck Barrow, that was the first time I hankered after a brown leather flight jacket!

Me too...then when I saw "Only Angels Have Wings" with Cary Grant...that cinched it !

 

[Effingham]

Touching on "language" in film -- nothing throws me out of a historical film (like pre-Civil War, historical drama, etc., or even a high fantasy culture film) where someone says "okay."

 

[2jakes]

According to wikipedia:
"The historical record shows in a letter dated July 7, 1820 from Thomas
Jefferson to Peter S. DuPonceau, Esq. Jefferson shared vocabulary he
obtained of the Nottoway (Cheroenhaka) Indian tribe native to (now)
Southampton County Virginia (originally Nottoway and Sussex Counties).
The word for "yes" is "Ho-Keh". Because the origin of this phonetic "okay"
is primarily American, it can be concluded that early Virginia settlers used
this simple response in common communication of the 1600's with their
Nottoway (Cheroenhaka) indian neighbors in the 17th and 18th centuries
leading to it's common use in Colonial Virginia and expanding from there
to the world. These vocabulary words sent by Jefferson were analyzed by
Esquire DuPonceau in his reply letter to Jefferson of July 12,1820, as a
branch of the general language of the Powhatan's similar to the Iroquoian
dialect language. A Petersburg Virginia newspaper article (The Nottoway
Indians) of March 17, 1820 mentions Queen Edie Turner as the keeper of
this early American language, saved by Jefferson for posterity.

The historical record shows that O.K. appeared as an abbreviation for "oll
korrect" (a conscious misspelling of "all correct" in Boston newspapers in
1839, and was reinstated as "Old Kinderhook" in the 1840 United States
presidential election. Because it is a recent word born of word play, and
because it is widely used, O.K. has also invited many folk etymologies.
These competing theories are not supported by the historical written
record, except in that folk and joke etymologies influenced the true history
of the word. Since the 19th century, the word has spread around the
world, the okay spelling of it first appearing in British writing in the 1860s.
Spelled out in full in the 20th century, "okay" has come to be in everyday
use among English speakers, and borrowed by non-English speakers. "

 

[DavidJones]

I was watching the 1939 "Beau Geste" with Gary Cooper the other day and noticed, that only the principle cast had true French Berthier rifles. The extras manning the wall for Sergeant Markoff had Infantry model 30-40 Krag rifles.

 

[Effingham]

OK (ahem) I didn't want to out myself as a geek. I'm talking primarily about fantasy and medieval ones (Xena, I'm looking at you!), where they have no excuse.

 

[2jakes]

OK (ahem) I didn't want to out myself as a geek. I'm talking primarily about fantasy and medieval ones (Xena, I'm looking at you!), where they have no excuse.

..


...tis quite known throughout the countryside my bouts with solipsism...
...

​...my better half calls it...mindless banter of the highest order !

 

[W-D Forties]

Mentioning British accents for Romans or Africans reminded me of another movie language problem - WWII movies in which the Germans and Japanese *speak English to each other*. I used to watch those when I was a kid but can't tolerate them at all now.

The best example of that is Where Eagles Dare when Clint Eastwood (quiff!) and Richard Burton are dressed as German officers and are passing the checkpoint talking in English when they are supposed to be talking German - they don't even attempt a cod-Gernam accent.

The rest of the film, although I'm very fond if it is equally ludicrous. Helicopters? Big 60's hair,make up and clothes on the ladies? I could go on...

Ditto:Battle of Britain. The worst hair and make-up of any 40's period film. And 60's aluminium doors too! Grrrr!

 

[David Conwill]

I always thought the helicopters were an almost Dieselpunk aspect of that film. The whole thing is trippy and weird (that's Alistair MacLean for you), but enjoyable nonetheless.

It would be interesting to see a remake emphasizing and adding to the creatively anachronistic aspects of the film.

 

[W-D Forties]

It's a romp, pure and simple so I can forgive WED pretty much anything. But Battle of Britain could have been a great film but is let down by these distractions. There was another WW2 set film on TV the other day with Christopher Plummer as a double agent (didn't catch the name) and there was a nightclub scene where all of the women had massive hair and sequinned floor length dresses split upt the the thigh! Madness!

 

[dhermann1]

Yes, the women's hair always tends to wreck WW II movies for me, too. I think it was just a backlash for about 20 years after the 40s. Women's styles, and especially the hair styles were looked on as HIDEOUS for a long time. For people seeing the films when they came out, in the 50s and 60s, period correct styles would have been a distraction. Weird, but I think true.

 

[Locrian]

One very famous examples of anachronism in women's hair styles was in Dr Zhivago. Lara was very very 60's in that film.

Still — who could complain about Julie Christie.

 

[Fading Fast]

One very famous examples of anachronism in women's hair styles was in Dr Zhivago. Lara was very very 60's in that film.

Still — who could complain about Julie Christie.

Dr Zhivago has a lot of historical / style inaccuracies - which seemed quite normal for TV / movie production in the 1960s ("The Big Valley" TV show has 1960s-inspired western clothes, full-on 1960s hair styles and eye shadow, for example, and 1960s socially conscious themes) - but it doesn't matter as the humanity of the story is so strong, the characters so well developed (most women I know are attracted to Omar Sharif in the Zhivago role despite his serial and aggressive cheating because one understands that he is a good, but flawed, man in extraordinary circumstances - not an easy nuance to pull off) and the cinematography so beautiful that you just go along for the ride, absorbed in the story while letting the mishmash of styles, periods and details pass by. And, as you said, you can always just look at Julie Christie who never looked better in any other movie she did.

 

[Edward]

Back in the 1930s the British liked to make low-budget films about the British Empire. This obviously called for 'native types'. The problem was that if they needed someone to play a child in an African village, but were using the River Thames as a stand in for the river Niger, it was difficult to find an African child.

In 'Old Bones of the River' (a comedy based on the Edgar Wallace book 'Sanders of the River') there is a classroom scene. The children are black, and dressed in tribal costumes, but as soon as they start talking they reveal themselves to have strong London accents.

Similarly in 'Sanders of the River' (the version with Paul Robeson) some of the actors playing tribal chiefs struggle to conceal their British accents. And curiously the African-American actress Nina Mae McKinney appeared to put on a British accent rather than attempt an African one.

I knew a girl at university who grew up in Africa. Missionary parents, one African, one English. People in Northern Ireland in those days really used to notice her a lot (largely due to her not being white - very rare in Belfast, even in the mid-late nineties, at least aside from the large ethnically Chinese community). They all picked up on her accent, though. She sounded very English. Not RP, but not regional either - a very neutral, non-specific English accent. In the end, a lot of the time she used to just tell folks she was English because it was easier... lol

While not a mistake, but a conscious choice of the director, the inclusion of modern urban music in Quentin Tarantino's 'Inglourious Basterds' completely takes me out of the film. Tarantino is one of my favorite directors, but I wish he would stick to period correct music (or at least something close) for period films.

I think in this case it was a deliberate anachronism. As The Good has noted already, he was applying the spaghetti western tropes to the WW2 setting, very consciously. I also speculate that he was having some fun with the classic WW2 genre films of the Sixties and how they played so fast and loose with accuracy. You can bet your bottom dollar that the coiled phone cord (in the sequence where Christoph Waltz speaks to an off-camera, and uncredited, Harvey Keitel on the telephone, towards the end) was a deliberate "mistake" - QT is such a one for the details. Then there was the enormous liberty taken with history, killing Hitler like that... My reading of it is that this is a direct pastiche of the way cinema has warped WW" (and the public consciousness thereof, often as not). The invention of Hilts, for example, because the studio feared that an American audience would not turn out to see The Great Escape without an American name actor in a lead role. Or more recently, that dreadful tripe U-57whatever, in which Americans led by Jon Bon Jovi steal the Enigma machine. Doing what he did, QT really just takes this to the logical conclusion.

Quite honestly, though, even if I hate the film, I'd watch it repeatedly for Ilsa Schneider alone. Grr.

 

[esteban68]

Actually there were helicopters in use during ww2 though the one in the film was I believe a just post war American Bell?....certainly though I don't think that even the Germans had long range ones like the film suggests....I llove the film too, the fight sequence on top of the cable car always makes me feel cold!

The best example of that is Where Eagles Dare when Clint Eastwood (quiff!) and Richard Burton are dressed as German officers and are passing the checkpoint talking in English when they are supposed to be talking German - they don't even attempt a cod-Gernam accent.

The rest of the film, although I'm very fond if it is equally ludicrous. Helicopters? Big 60's hair,make up and clothes on the ladies? I could go on...

Ditto:Battle of Britain. The worst hair and make-up of any 40's period film. And 60's aluminium doors too! Grrrr!

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

The continuity errors in Saving Private Ryan are now practically classics in of themselves but there is one in the film that seems to stick in my head. It's the final battle scene where Mellish gets killed. Mellish and another soldier are in an upstairs room, they hear footsteps outside, open fire and a pool of blood seeps in under the door. But later at the end of the melee when the German soldier who kills Mellish stumbles down the stairs past Upham it's empty when it should have been strewn with bodies.

 

[hatguy1]

Mentioning British accents for Romans or Africans reminded me of another movie language problem - WWII movies in which the Germans and Japanese *speak English to each other*. I used to watch those when I was a kid but can't tolerate them at all now.

I can tolerate that far better (though I know it's historically inaccurate) than trying to read a bunch of English subtitles all the time.