Joseph H. Roquemore

There are many other books about depictions of history on film, but nothing like the book that this wants -- and tries hard -- to be: A guidebook for the casual viewer who wants a good historical drama to watch. It's all the more frustrating, therefore, that History Goes to Hollywood is a shallow, uneven, misconceived failure.

Rocquemore approaches each of the films he writes about the same way: He gives 1-3 pages of historical background on the events or the period it depicts, followed by 1-2 paragraphs of summary judgment on the film. The background sections are engagingly written, but the judgments of the films lack depth, detail, or any sense that the author has engaged -- at a more than casual level -- with what others have written about the films or the periods and events they depict. To recommend General Leslie Groves' self-serving mid-50's memoir Now It Can Be Told as the source on the making of the first atomic bomb (rather than, say, Richard Rhodes' prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb) is ludicrous. To argue that Citizen Kane is an inaccurate biography of William Randolph Hearst -- and stop -- is akin to criticizing Lady Chatterly's Lover for misrepresenting the duties of gamekeepers: true, but missing the larger point. To say that Birth of a Nation "remains popular among film buffs willing to ignore its tasteless bigotry" is to trivialize seventy years of intense debate over whether its status as the first great American feature film is diminished by its blatant, pervasive racism.

The standards that Roquemore applies in both choosing films are largely unstated and consistently baffling. Scores of routine Hollywood films set in the past but unconnected to specific events are included: A Tale of Two Cities, The Front Page, Strategic Air Command, Easy Rider. Dozens of seemingly obvious choices -- acknowledged classics about real people and real events -- are not. Readers will look in vain for Little Big Man, The Great Locomotive Chase, The Return of Martin Guerre, Madame Curie, or Inherit the Wind. His standards for judging films are equally baffling. Roquemore savages films ranging from Charge of the Light Brigade to JFK and Dances with Wolves for their historical inaccuracy, but gives a free pass to the equally fanciful Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) because they're so entertaining (which, indeed, they are). He meticulously points out that the Zulu warriors in Zulu use the wrong type of firearms, but charitably ignores the American AT-6 trainers "playing" Japanese "Zero" fighters in Tora! Tora! Tora!, and Tony Curtis's ludicrous Brooklyn accent ("Yonda lies da castle of my faddah!") in The Vikings

History Goes to the Movies is also marred by careless errors that, in a book that takes others' work to task for inaccuracy, should have been stamped out. The Richard Gere epic King David was released in 1985, not 1955; the Confederate ironclad Virginia had an iron "beak" below the waterline for ramming, not an iron "spear" on her upperworks, and set the frigate Congress afire rather than "blowing her to splinters"; and the leader of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I was named John, not (despite multiple repetitions) George, Pershing.

The movie-watching world could use a comprehensive guidebook to history-on-film. This, unfortunately, is nowhere close to being that book.… (mer)