Thanks for that asherman... i being film student compleltey agree with the term show bussiness as it's all about the money not about teaching the audience and besides 'Braveheart" did have a message although maybe not historically correct, it said: some things are worth dying for.
tagged, what I tell you three times is true.
I have been all over google looking for movies: I cannot find the one about the life of Rudolph Valentino that I saw when I was a kid. How can I possibly comment if I can't recall it? I think the actor was Anthony Curtis, but I'm not certain. I know that the musical theme was The Blue Tango...
Fantastic responses here...
WOW!
yeah sometimes people forget that sometimes (not always) movie makers make descions based on what gets their idea across most strongly. Sometimes historical facts, if the film's basis lies in history, don't help or cloud the overall intetnion of the director's vision henceforth choices are made not based on the truthfulness of the film but rather on the themes and over all impact of the film. Sometimes the directors choices work and sometimes they don't. More often then not a historical film gets made for it's universal themes (such as The Last Sumuari and it's themes of honour,shame and pride) the facts may sometimes cloud these themes which does not help for the layerd cinematic exprience.
Often reality is too complicated, to open for interpretation, that a director will chose to simplify the reality of his characters to help the audience see things the way he or she intends (their vision) it's poetic licsence.
Another thing, I am sure that a sword fight would be nothing like the Hollywood version. A real sword would be too heavy to let the user just swing it around like a reed, let alone stop it in the middle of a swing to expertly meet another blade being swung around just as madly. They also seem to be able to cut through armour and in spite of the fierceness of the battle it ALWAYS pierces the villain's chest and they fall down dead straight away.
Setanta,
Yeah, S.L.A. Marshall was a fine military historian. Keegan is another with wonderful insights, and he never served a day. I'm mostly 19th century American History, but Military History is a strong second. In graduate school I was primarily interested in the development of Buddho-Taoism in 5th century (CE) China, but have since lost a lot of my interest in the period. Anglo-American History is nice because we have a bit less problem with language differences, and the amount of primary and premium secondary sources is marvelous. My Latin stinks, and my Greek is almost non-existent, so a lot of the interesting ancient stuff has to be read in translations.
There is what appears to be a natural inclination to regard the past as somehow Golden. Once we reach a certain age, we find ourselves muttering under our breath, "The modern world is going to hell. What degenerate lives these young people lead." So it seems always to have been. The Chinese have practically made the Golden Age a cornerstone of their entire culture.
What we forget is all the problems, suffering and pain that we lived through as children. We forget that only fancy doctors, lawyers and successful business men earned over $10K/year. What we remember is ten cent gasoline. We forget that there was no national highway system that tied the country together with good, paved roads and bridges until the end of the1950s, and even then it was more an idea than an actuality. We forget the high infant mortality rate and low life expectancy of less than 100 years ago. People watched less television, but that didn't mean they actively engaged in "worthwhile" activities, or intellectual pursuits. Small town America was also an America of close-minded gossips who accepted an amazing amount of violence ... so long as it was kept "private". That vanished world had many problems, and much of the progress since has made those problems go away. In their place we have generated new problems. We thought that by eliminating Jim Crow and promoting integrated schools we would finally eliminate the countries worst failing. Did we? We didn't foresee the hopeless young men whose gang activity has made the urban center a battleground. The War on Poverty was intended to correct the inequalities between rich and poor. Has it, or has the growth of entitlement programs made the situation even worse than it was in 1965?
History tells us to take it all with a grain of salt. Outcomes are seldom clear in less than a 100 years. What is accepted as important today will later be judged as inconsequential. We will miss the important trends and misinterpret the data on just about everything. That's alright. A hundred years from now our counterparts (history students) will sort it all out ... maybe.
Ash, one thing i have always enjoyed is tracking down reliable descriptions of "ordinary life"--which often can only be found inferentially. For example, manor court records, such as the English and French have exhaustively examined, tell us about the things which mattered to the "peasants on the land." Polybius is invaluable for Roman history and society, because he was explaining the Romans to other Greeks, and so included a great deal of detail which Livius, Tertullian, Tacitus, etc. did not include, as their reading audience knew those things.
As a child, i was raised by my grandparents, both born in the 19th century. We had "city water," but drank the water from our artesian well, because it tasted better. We got milk from the milk train, and for special occassions, my grandmother would make butter. We raised the vegetables we ate, and raised or gathered in the wild the fruit we ate. We listened to the radio and read books for entertainment. When television came to our remote setting, it was a novelty, but with only ten hours a day, six days of the week broadcasting, it did not replace our normal entertainments. The world of Eisenhower America was radically changed in the 1960's, and the technology which grew from Kennedy's heavy investments in the space program radically altered our lives in different directions. I've always had a very keen sense of change in human affairs, which i might not have gotten had i been raised in one of the post-WW II "Levitowns."
As for Hollywood, i've been laughing at their lame attempts at history since i was just a boy.
I'm just grateful we have a man like Mel Brooks to give us true history in at least one film (The History of the World, Part One).
Letty: The Internet Movie Database (
www.imdb.com) lists
seven movies with Rudolph Valentino as a character, none of them played by Tony Curtis. You say that you saw the movie as a kid: not knowing how old you are, I'd assume it was either
"Valentino" (1951) or
"Valentino" (1977) (somebody must have worked really hard coming up with those imaginative titles).
