Have you seen The Beast, a film about Soviet Armour in Afghanistan............again factually error strewn but a good watch, again begs the question raised!

Simon

Hi Simon,

Yes I have seen that movie and enjoyed it. I suppose we just have to resign ourselves that movies will never reach the accuracy level we would like to see and just enjoy them for what they are.  But keep looking for errors...it's a great sport.

Regards

Brian

Brian : I am an old searcher of innacuracies or anacronisms in movies .And i had viewed all the War themed movies at my disposition . Well , nearly all movies contains some type of innacuracy . The Blue Max , not only the British rifles and bayonets . The German pilots appears as if all of them were Uhlans . or as if the uniform of the German Luftstreitkraft,was normalized in a Uhlan like one . The more recent Red Baron , contains various innacuracies . Von Richthofen , flies an Albatros thats correct but Lanoe Hawker was not a thick bearded guy and Major Hawker was killed piloting a Dh2 . As Dhs were the majority of the British fighters in service during the Bloody April , Other mistake is the General receiving Richthofen in informal attire or Hindenburg in civilian clothes going to Palace . The cars appearing in the movie were not all contemporaries. Exists some movies with a high degree of Accuracy but not Perfects . Uomini contro , a italian movie about the ww1 in the Italian Front is a good one . The first All quiet in the western front tht of Lewis Milestone , another good movie .also Westfront 1918 , The Dino de Laurentis produced Fraulein Doktor movie is a mixture of Accuracies and mistakes , but generally speaking a good spectacle with the Germans attacking with poison gas , flamethrowers and Cavalry , riders and horses protected against the gas . I think that the complete accuracy is near impossible not ever for budget reasons or lack of skilled advicers . Is another cause , the adecuation of the historic facts to the ideas of the directors and their point of view . To finish : War Horse . With great budget Spielberg constructed a historic falsification  

Hi Bayern,

Thank you for your comments. I often wonder if all of these inaccuracies have any lasting effects on the younger viewers or if they really don't care about such details.  Even period dramas such as Downton Abbey were the interior shots are filled with what could be considered antiques today matter to some of us; but is that important to younger viewers.  Perhaps I should have used the term "normal" viewers?

Thanks again for your response.

Regards

Brian

Brian : My pleasure , I think that the younger viewers are more interested than one could think , in the ambientation and details My daughter 21 y o viewed Downton Abbey with great attention to the details of women vestiment and its variation along the years .

A difficult call..... I would say, at the end of the day there needs to be balance.... if we insist they dont have any errors, then the movie may become too expensive to make.... so as long as I see they have made an effort, and the stuff is "OK" at a glance with no howling errors... I am happy.

Some guys get overly nerdy "Did you see that??? Movie takes place in 1940... those chest eagles were only worn on the M44 jacket!!!"

For any film, not just war movies, but especially in war films and in fantasy and science fiction films where the setting is important, some amount of accuracy or at least verisimilitude (wow! that's hard to spell) is necessary. This is necessary for the so-called "willing suspension of disbelief" - you know you are watching something that is not real so you need a certain attention to detail to accept this fictional world. 

For a war movie, especially one based on actual events such as "Dieppe" and not just a fictional story like "Kelly's Heroes" or "M*A*S*H", I would think a higher level of attention to detail would be necessary. Depending on the conflict, you might have viewers who actually experienced the events in question or a large amount of actual documentation of the events. As Brian noted, "Saving Private Ryan" received a lot of praise from D-Day veterans for its portrayal of the landings, but I can't remember how many posts I read criticizing other aspects of the film on military history and military collector forums. As I recall, many WAF posters were especially critical of the movie using SS soldiers at a time when Waffen SS units had yet to arrive in Normandy. Even a relatively minor detail such as the haircuts was criticized - Spielberg's Germans had buzz-cuts more like modern neo-Nazis rather than the longer hair far more common among 1940s German young men. Compare the 1993 German film "Stalingrad" which got that detail, as well as many others, correct. 

Many people simply have a higher or different threshold for the "willing suspension of disbelief", so their expectations might probably never be satisfied, even in a documentary (and plenty of documentaries are quite bad themselves in their attention to detail, and often worse, since they do not have the budget of a major film). One man's "howling error" might be another's "eh, who cares".  

For example, just noting what I mentioned above, I was not bothered by the use of the Waffen-SS in SPR, because I've become used to Hollywood's portrayals of German soldiers. But the haircut thing bothered me, because it took me out of the film and made me think of the many caricatures of Germans in Spielberg films.  For that matter, many the Americans in SPR were typical war-movie caricatures (e.g., tough-talking Brooklynite, quiet crack-shot farmboy).  "Band of Brothers" had some problems, but it was definitely a huge improvement and the benchmark against which many war movies are now measured.

The thresholds in many cases are simply different, not "higher" or "lower". As Chris notes, one person might note uniform details that would mean nothing to me, much less to the average viewer. Others might note equipment details and be indifferent to uniforms, because weapons or gear is their thing. There was a TV-movie about the WW1 Lost Battalion that as I recall received praise for the accuracy of the weapons for the unit and time period, showing the US soldiers with Enfields, Chauchats and M1911s (rather than M1911A1s). I couldn't tell you the difference between an M1911 and an M1911A1, but I did notice that a German officer was wearing his EK1 closer to man-boob level rather than on the lower chest. 

With regard to another movie Brian mentions, "55 Days at Peking", it was at the time rather notorious for its budget, which went overboard in recreating downtown Peking in giant sets which still exist as a housing development near Madrid. Bad acting notwithstanding (and I think Ava Gardner was much worse than Heston), it still gets some credit from me for being pretty much the only Western movie ever made about the Boxer Rebellion and the Western response.  Today, the movie is probably more notorious for its stereotypical Chinese characters (especially the British actors playing Chinese characters). 

I will conclude with a shout-out to "Kelly's Heroes". Here was a 1970 anti-war comedy, yet in many areas the attention to detail was far ahead of even serious films of the period such as 1970's "Patton". The Tiger tanks were visually modified Yugoslav T-34/85s, so the dimensions were off, but there was not a lot more you could have done there with the budgets of the time. But the detail that always sticks in my head was a comment by the hippy tank commander played by Donald Sutherland, noting that his men had placed pipes over the barrels of their Sherman tanks so the Germans would think they had a larger gun than the normal Sherman. This line of dialog had no relevance to the plot of the movie. It was apparently only included to appease nit-pickers, since the Shermans in the movie were actually M36 tank destroyers, Shermans upgraded with 90mm guns, provided by the US to Yugoslavia in the late-1940s.  For its battle scenes, the big-budget "Patton" did little more than slap a black cross on Spanish Army M-47s, which seems pretty sad compared to the efforts made by the lower budget comedy. 

Thanks for your comments Chris and Dave, It is comments such as were posted here and on other blogs I've submissed that makes the effort worth while and dare I say add greatly to my knowledge and help shape my often slanted point of view.

This was so much fun it is hard to stop.

Having said that and in keeping with the movie theme, watch for the next sibmission,

"Accuracy in Movies: The Sequel" insert movie theme music here)

Regards

Brian