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Accuracy in movies

Steve McQueen in The Great Escape
  • Posted at 1:06pm
  • 18 July 2008
  • by AndrewCollins-RT
  • 2 comments

In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it was James Stewart who asks the newspaper editor if he is going to print his confession about the shooting in question, and is told: "No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

This has been a constant refrain in Hollywood, where real events have always been plundered for material, often with little regard for journalistic or historical accuracy. The question is: does it matter? Is it really cinema's job to provide a history lesson?

Take that wartime crowd-pleaser The Great Escape. It's based on the autobiographical book of the same name by Paul Brickhill, which details a mass escape from Stalag Luft III in 1944.

But you'll find no mention of Steve McQueen's iconic motorbike jump, or the theft of a plane by James Garner and Donald Pleasence – those characters were composites of a number of PoWs and the incidents were included for dramatic effect only.

But we might not even be talking about it 45 years later had they stuck to the gospel truth. Sometimes fact is less interesting than fiction.

You can't blame writers for wanting to dramatise actual events, but I'm getting a bit tired of all those TV dramas based on the lives of real people like Frankie Howerd, Mary Whitehouse and Margaret Thatcher, where biographical accuracy becomes a distraction.

("Ooh, look, there's that actor and he's supposed to be Ted Heath!") Still, they keep Michael Sheen in work, so it's not all bad.

What works for me is a true story about someone who's not famous. A good example is Shine, in which Geoffrey Rush brought the story of David Helfgott to a wider public.

The gifted Aussie pianist, who was institutionalised in the 1970s after a breakdown, was actually made world famous by the film. Rush gave a convincing portrayal of the man, but since nobody outside of Australia had really heard of Helfgott, there was no chance of his fame getting in the way of a good story. (The same could not be said when Rush played Peter Sellers in the 2003 film of his life.)

One of the most audacious recent examples of the "based on a true story" genre is United 93. In the film, the fate of the fourth hijacked plane on 9/11 – which crashed in Pennsylvania, killing all on board – was pieced together without any documentary evidence about what occurred, beyond the messages sent to loved ones and air-traffic control records.

It's a terrific film, perhaps because it prints the fact and the legend.

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Comments

  • Posted on 24 July 2008
  • at 4:15pm
  • by Roy

Mostly the facts are far more interesting than the fiction.I long to see historically accurate films. What we get is Mel Gibson.

  • Posted on 21 July 2008
  • at 8:49pm
  • by Paul

Reminds me of that great line from Porterhouse Blue by Tom Sharpe. 'He's an investigative journalist. Give him a sentence and off it goes.' Not quite the same thing, I know, but worth hearing again.

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