What Do You Mean “It’s Only A Movie”?

Like many of my friends and fellow students of military history/military affairs, I went recently to see the new movie “Midway”.  This community can deliver tough and often detailed criticism and I was interested at the range of reactions and responses to the film from those who had already seen it, especially its use of computer technology to recreate the original ships and planes.  You can find some amazingly detailed knowledge in surprising places.  One such surprise came many years ago when a fellow Foreign Service Officer at the State Department, whom I had not spotted as a part of this community, observed that in the then latest epic (and a personal favorite) film “The Wind and the Lion” the German troops were using a mount for their machine guns that was not actually introduced until some years after the events in the movie allegedly occurred.  Some years earlier, in university, while watching a personal favorite film “Kelly’s Heroes” in the on-campus theater, I gained new respect for one member of the group of ‘frat boys’ sitting behind me when I heard him gasp and call out “that’s a Tiger!” referring to the appearance (in facsimile) of that deadly nemesis of our World War Two Sherman tanks.  On another occasion, a friend and I were shushed by the outraged woman in the row in front of us after we rather loudly complained that Barry Lyndon’s Prussians were opening fire at much farther range than we thought they should have based upon our study of history!

As a boy in the 1950s and early 1960s, I spent a lot of time, especially on Saturdays, watching old Hollywood black and white films on the three or four TV channels available locally.  When I began this habit I didn’t know about ‘pan and scan’, letterbox format, or editing for time and broadcast, among the many tricks used in broadcasting these movies on television – nor did I know anything about “The Hays Code” that was intended to insure that innocents like myself would not be offended or shocked by anything in the movies.  All of that knowledge came later, but not too much later, because these movies inspired me to seek out more information and wanting to confirm that history was accurately presented  in these movies – or not.  I grew up watching model ships recreate great naval battles, American tanks portraying the armored formations of both sides, and Roman legionnaires who fought like gladiators instead of the army they represented. I knew that no one actually died in these movies (a more sophisticated understanding of that reality came later after I discovered ‘stuntmen’).  But I was curious enough about the ‘history’ presented in these movies to head for my local library and dig through their collections. 

   

Movies are made primarily as entertainment which means selling tickets and filling seats in movie theaters – though the introduction of cable channels, videocassettes and dvd/Blu-ray discs has altered that equation slightly.  Moviemakers have always balanced the demands of realistically portraying actual events with putting the story that is the movie they are making on the screen.  Sometimes, it isn’t even left to the moviemaker to get the history wrong when the moneymen (and sometimes) politicians behind the movie want a particular viewpoint about that history to come through.  They make mistakes and sometimes they get it completely wrong (dare I mention “The Patriot” 

or “Braveheart”?).  Could anyone in the film making industry have realized that one of the simplest truths about the original film “Sahara” (1943) with Humphrey Bogart that made it better than the Jim Belushi remake “Sahara” (1995) was that Bogart and the original cast just looked more believable as men who had survived the Great Depression working on ranches in Texas or the South African veldt, or pounded the pavements of London, Paris, or New York looking for work – only to find themselves all together now in the North African desert?

Students of military history who also like movies can fill pages with the names of movies that have made a hash in their depiction of war, warfare, military life, etc. – most movies about the American Civil War or the wars with Native Americans on the Great Plains alone could fill a book.   But we can also note the progress that has been made over the years – one of my favorite moments was watching the brilliant by the book depiction of the charge in the 1968 version of “The Charge of The Light Brigade” which compares very well with the charge made by the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba during the First World War depicted in the movie “The Lighthorsemen”.  The films “Cromwell”, “Waterloo”, and “Kagemusha” showed armies deployed on a battlefield much as they would have actually looked.

It is important for those of us interested in seeing history on screen adding to our understanding and appreciation of film to know a bit about how films or a film come into being.  Some of my favorite books present the stories of how favorite films such as “Horse Soldiers”, “Zulu”, or “Battle of Britain” came to be made.  It has been equally enlightening to learn about the efforts put into translating a very unhistorical novel such as “GoneWith the Wind” into an equally unhistorical though epic film, or how “Enemies at the Gate”, which I enjoyed very much, was very much based upon a 1973 book of the same title that drew almost exclusively on what we now know was the Soviet propaganda version of the history.  Historical films about military events have been and will continue to be inspired by both histories and novels based upon that history.

Drawing on my experience in high school dramatics and college theatre, I developed a more relaxed approach to storytelling whether in person, on stage, or on the screen.  I sit down to watch a movie with a willing suspension of disbelief – I will try to cut the storyteller some slack as they story unwinds on the screen.  The story presenter is required to NOT abuse my willing suspension of disbelief by not putting anything on the screen that catapults me out of my seat screaming (preferably metaphorically) – “What the F… was that?”

“Midway” was an interesting viewing experience.  I really enjoyed seeing the actual ships and planes from the battle portrayed thanks to modern computer generated images.  Much better than the use of models (as in another favorite, “In Harm’s Way” and in “Sink the Bismarck”) or the substitution of other modern ships as was also done in “In Harm’s Way” but also in the British film “Pursuit of the Graf Spee” or “Master and Commander”.  I thought it made better use than the not as good “Pearl Harbor” – while the aviation sequences, sad as I was not to see more coverage of the fighters from both sides, showed that the CGI first seen in the excellent “Dogfights” series is continuing to improve – though a couple of times the “Midway” aircraft were shown doing things I thought of questionable accuracy but not impossible.  I also appreciated seeing the differences in the Imperial Japanese Navy’s carriers and those of the United States Navy – which had both been portrayed in earlier films by U.S. Navy ships.

I have seen complaints about the personal story lines included in “Midway” – but I thought it very interesting that in this account of the naval war in the Pacific then-Commander Edwin Layton was moved up stage while his colleague Rochefort (featured in “In Harm’s Way and the earlier “Midway” film) stepped back a bit.  And this is also where we come back to the “it’s only a movie” – “Midway” is a feature film not a documentary.  Feature films include characters, plot, etc., even as they recount in some form or fashion an historical event.  And for context, “Tora, Tora,Tora” has been criticized for not invoking more personal stories in its almost documentary account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. 

 

For me the important point isn’t that this or that movie includes errors (assuming the whole thing is just made up), but the fact that we have come so far in improving historical details and overall accuracy.  We have come a long way from those 1930s and 1940s films I first watched.  And despite the occasional film that goes wrong (still can’t watch "The Thin Red Line") films like the new “1917” show some promise amidst the one or two quibbles.  So, try and relax reminding yourself it’s only a movie – and in the words of Mel Brooks, “hope for the best, expect the worst” - that makes the good surprises all the more enjoyable.