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Hollywood Lies!
Lights, camera, bullsh*t
Braveheart
(Mel Gibson, 1995)
Staring: Mel Gibson
William Wallace has long been a rallying figure for angry, drunken Scots. But ruddy-faced nationalists who base their rants on whooping Mel Gibson’s $US53m epic are on ground as wobbly as Mel’s bum cheeks.
For starters, rather than being a poor man-of-the-people whose aim was to lead a rag-taggle brigade of proud Scots to freedom, Wallace was actually an educated landowner, whose primary motive for fighting the Brits was to protect his own property. The film also shows Wallace bequeathing a son to the English Princess Isabella, much to the chagrin of her Scot-hating husband Edward I. In reality, Wallace and Isabella never met, she didn’t marry until after 1308 – three years after his execution – and her son wasn’t born until 1312.
Almost every detail of the battle is incorrect in Gibson’s tale, with Robert the Bruce siding with the English king, despite no historical records placing Bruce at the battle. Similarly fantastical are the scenes in which the Scottish nobles desert Wallace, and the Irish troops turn against the English. To Cap it all off, the blue face paint which became the enduring image of the film had actually had gone out of style thousands of years earlier.
Saving Private Ryan
(Steven Spielberg, 1998)
Staring: Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Ted Danson
American, British, Canadian, free French and Polish forces took part in the bloody assault on the beaches of Normandy in June 1944 – not that you’d know it from Steven Spielberg’s D-Day epic. Predictably, the bewhiskered millionaire gave all the glory to American soldiers, almost completely ignoring the fact that WWII was largely fought by Hitler’s forces and the ALLIES. Even when Captain Tom Hanks’s army unit moves inland to search for trooper Matt Damon – who has to be removed from danger because his three brothers have been killed in combat – it’s as if the other Allies didn’t exist. In reality, the British and Canadian forces took on the elite of the German Army – Including SS Panzer divisions – as the assault edged inland. It took a full month after the invasion before the Americans had more manpower at the Normandy beachhead than the British and Canadians. And while it’s true that US forces were given the tough job of taking Omaha Beach, there is no sign of the Brits who drove the landing craft, and no mention of the American stuff-ups that contributed to their slaughter at the hands of the Kraut machine-gunners. One of the most spectacular errors of judgment – and one that cost countless American lives at Omaha – was the American’s refusal to use British “funnies”, specialized armoured fighting vehicles, some of which had amphibious capability. These machines, equipped with flamethrowers and especially designed to take out fortifications, were rejected by the Americans because they didn’t invent them. The Brits also offered the Americans a 17-punder gun to fit to their Sherman tanks. Again, the arrogant Americans said no. Not surprisingly, the film skips these dismal decisions, just as it fails to include the fact that US planes were sent to soften up the German positions at Omaha… but completely missed their targets. Criminally, the film’s single reference to the Allies is a swipe at respected Brit leader General Montgomery, described by US Army ranger Ted Danson as “overrated”.
To Spielberg’s credit, the Private Ryan story was inspired by a real incident – albeit on that actually happened at sea! The US military became conscious of the need to prevent any one family paying too great a price in the war after the death of the Sullivan brothers in 1942: all five of them were aboard a cruiser that as sunk during that South Pacific campaign.
U-571
(Jonathan Mostow, 2000)
Staring: Harvey Keitel, Matthew McConaughey, Jon Bon Jovi
”We’re storytellers, ther’re yarns,” protested Matthew McConaughey in response to British outrage over the distorting of this wartime tale of ocean derring-do. The film tells the story of a heroic American sub crew who waged a battle on the German U-boat U-571, capturing the machine which would crack the Enigma codes and cripple the German war effort. But, somewhat crucially, U-571 WAS NEVER ACTUALLY CAPTURED – on the contrary, the boat continued to serve the Nazi cause with distinction throughout the war.
However the submarines U-570 and U-110, which carried portions of the codebooks, were in fact captured – but by the British rather than the American Navy. In fact the first of these triumphs occurred in August 1941, a good four months before the Americans even entered the war.
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