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    Dave Danner

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    Blog Comments posted by Dave Danner

    1. 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. 

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