Gone with the wind
Eric Christiansen
PAST IMPERFECT: HISTORY ACCORDING TO THE MOVIES edited by Mark C. Carnes Cassell, £20, pp. 304 Mr Carnes has the less than self- explanatory job of 'executive secretary of the Society of American Historians'. He has persuaded some 60 intellectual swells to write about 60-odd films concerning either historical events or non-events (Tea and Sympathy is history now) in the light of what those swells think about the events or the films or both.
As with many books of this kind, the eco- nomics are as interesting as the contents. Those swells don't come cheap. I dare sug- gest that Stephen Jay Gould, Michael Grant, Antonia Fraser, Robert Darnton, David Cannadine, Peter Gay, William Manchester, Gore Vidal, Paul Fussell and Simon Schama, to mention only the ones I have heard of, would not be advised by their accountants to go into print for four to five pages at less than £1000 a go. Add a bit more for intellectual effort and expens- es, and you start with a bill of some £100,000 merely for writers, before you start buying the film-stills. Warner Bros. refused to supply any, even for ready money, and it would be interesting to know why. If they scented disrespect, they need not have worried. Most of the contributors affirm their belief in the importance even of historical films: 'We acknowledge from the outset movies' unique capacity for stim- ulating dialogue about the past.'
Amen. It is not easy to disagree. The past was full of people who lived in it, said their lines, and vanished, and are mostly forgotten: the ones that got themselves recorded and remembered were mostly so crooked or vain that Hollywood is the heaven they deserve.
Schama ends this book with a conversa- tion between Napoleon and someone else about Gance's Napoleon, in which the wee man fails to appreciate the honour done him by the 20th century:
— you could have been a real contender, a star.
— Star, star? But imbecile, don't you under- stand, I was the SUN.
He cannot abide the over-acting, since it is merely for entertainment; his was for real. He cannot abide the music squirted into the once-silent film. 'Was it for that I conquered Italy, to be strangled in musical macaroni? Better the silence of Ste-Hdlene.'
Other contributors take the more stodgy view of John Sayles (maker of Matewan and Glory), that the gap between the 'his- torical movie' and 'history' is too wide, and ought to be bridged, because 'history is a better story'. He tried this in the mining- town melodrama, Matewan, which, to an insider, is apparently anti-Hollywood: no sex or nudity, low budget (three-and-a-half million dollars), slow-moving, serious, and the big black actor, James Earl Jones, was made to speak unassertively as he might have spoken in 1920. To an outsider, it seemed pure Hollywood: stereotyped char- acters, chic morality, and operatic action culminating in a re-run of the gun-fight at the OK Corral. But no doubt it comes nearer to what actually might have hap- pened than John Wayne got in The Alamo to an earlier bloodbath. And it could not be said of Sayles's film, as of Wayne's, that it is 'harmless, because you cannot die of laughter in your sleep'.
But does it matter? Getting a bit nearer what may have happened seems pointless if, as Eric Foner believes, 'most movie- goers think JFK is true; they basically think that whatever they see is true, even if it's only "while the movie is happening". Peo- ple who bother about truth presumably don't like disseminating it as just another brand of illusion. A film is such a compli- cated artefact, that historical accuracy can only be a minor component; something you can buy, when the academic says Yes or No to the script. It is only surprising that so many directors make use of historically ver- ifiable names and incidents, when most of their audience will not have heard of them, and when fictions would do just as well; they are only labelling self-sufficient dra- matic stereotypes, after all.
The stars have no need to pretend to be the characters they adopt. John Wayne is John Wayne, not Colonel Trousers of the Minnesota Light Infantry; whether Trousers lived or not is beside the point.
However, the history of the US has been deliberately conducted in such overblown, rhetorical and propagandist terms that a strong case can be made for Hollywood as its best exponent. A film that tried to get behind the scenes would not be more accu- rate than one that didn't. Even Lincoln's small-talk and gaucherie were infused with political significance at the time, as with Henry Fonda's and Raymond Massey's Lincolns in 1939 and '40. And the strength of Mr Sayles's Civil War epic, Glory (the one about the negro regiment), is the way it shows most of the characters attitudinis- ing to the point of self-destruction; self- consciously serving ideals by gesture and word, as did the assassin Booth. The bystanders, who get on with the mundane business of cheating soldiers out of their boots, or amuse themselves by strumming the harpsichord (such decadence, such turpitude) are the bad guys; the real crime is not slavery or secession, but detachment. And some Yankee puritans seem in fact to have thought like that. It was not Mr Sayles's duty to point out that they were a small minority.
Film-makers have ideas about films, and historians about history; when they conflict, to judge from this compilation, it is not to the advantage of the historians. Wajda's Danton infuriated the French Left in 1983 by belittling the more grisly Jacobins, and it was full of bloomers. But it was not half as cockeyed as the version of the Revolution accepted by most salaried French historians at the time. Fortunately, they were not consulted: Wajda was more interested in contemporary Poland than 18th-century France, and relied on a skewed version of a pre-war Polish play, with Depardieu's nose to see it through. And buckets of blood at the guillotine. By contrast, Richard Attenborough's Young Winston was an 'entertaining, relaxing and inoffensive' production, which, according to the long-winded chronicler William Manchester ('his 18 books have been trans- lated into 19 languages and Braille') 'rolls along like a well-made Pinero play'. This wild over-estimate of the film's merit is meant as an unfavourable criticism, because 'one had hoped for more'. What one had hoped for was apparently more verisimilitude than you find in the book on which it is based, Winston's own My Early Life. To which Sir Richard might well reply: You do your job, I'll do mine.
Some of these critics tend to 'mark down' for inaccuracy, or omission, as if films were undergraduate essays. 'Unfortu- nately', drones Antonia Fraser, the William Manchester of the Tudors-and-Stuarts, 'the prominence given to the central love-story means that any real political element is entirely missing from the film'; as if anyone would go to something called Anne of a Thousand Days for a rehash of Elton. There is no pleasing these people. When Margarethe von Trotta makes Rosa Luxem- burg in 1986, and brings a socialist back to life in a way that shames Warren Beatty's idiotic Reds, along comes Professor Diggins to warn us that it neglects her unique contribution to radical political thought. Specifically, her devastating critique of Lenin's theory of party dictator- ship goes unmentioned.
However, these wiseacre words are not characteristic of the book, which holds many lively injections of wit and film lore. It was a good idea to get Gore Vidal, who always writes about himself, to deal with Sullivan's Travels. It was about hoboes in 1932, whom he saw for himself; he not only remembers them, but remembers seeing the film when it came out, and how he reacted to it, and how his grandfather the senator voted against the bonus for ex- servicemen. Living history, in fact.
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