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Mini Movie Reviews: Based on a True Story

Today's theme is films about real people and events (or at least something that vaguely looks like them) featuring the work of Arthur Penn, Ridley Scott, Fred Zinnemann, Peter Glenville, Sergei Eisenstein, Charles Jarrott, Richard Fleischer, Toshio Masuda, and Kinji Fukasaku.

A Man For All Seasons (1966)
Directed by Fred Zinnemann and adapted by Robert Bolt from his own play about the downfall of Sir Thomas More (an Oscar winning Paul Scofield) after he refuses to acknowledge the marriage of Henry VIII (a shouty Robert Shaw) to Anne Boleyn (a cameoing Vanessa Redgrave). It presents a rather sanitised picture of More, portraying him as a honourable man of conviction brought low by scheming social climbers like Thomas Cromwell (Leo McKern) and Richard Rich (John Hurt). Little is said of his own fanaticism and fondness for burning heretics. It's all exceptionally well acted, but can't really hide its theatrical origins.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)
Directed by three different directors, this film chronicles the events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor from both the Japanese and American perspectives. Whole thing is really just a big budget historical re-enactment, doing its best to show exactly what happened in a fair and balanced way, but the Japanese come off better than the Americans, who allow a bad situation to get worse due to a mixture of carelessness, laziness or sheer incompetence. As it's more concerned with events than individuals, the film is often rather dry with barely any room for character, leaving a lot of great actors with little to do but read out reports or issue orders. On the plus side, though, it does spare us the lurid melodrama of Michael Bay's Titanic wannabe.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
As with all of Ridley Scott's historical epics, this is a highly fictionalised account of the Siege of Jerusalem and the life of Balian of Ibelin. Saved by a director's cut after being slashed to pieces by the studio on original release, this is a sumptuous epic, only held back from true greatness by the totally miscast lead. Orlando Bloom just doesn't have the depth, charisma or gravitas to pull off this kind of role. The scene where he gives a big speech to rally the troops before the final battle just falls completely flat, and Scott really does him no favours by surrounding him with much better actors.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Mary, Queen of Scots (1971)
After the death of her husband, Catholic Mary Stewart (Vanessa Redgrave) returns to Scotland to rule as Queen, but soon makes enemies of her Protestant lords and her English cousin, Queen Elizabeth (Glenda Jackson), who sees Mary as a threat to her crown. This is one of those films where you sense that the cast weren't completely on the same page about what type of film they were in. Redgrave and Jackson are operating as if this is some Shakespearian tragedy and giving it their all. Meanwhile Timothy Dalton and Ian Holm seem to think they are in something more camp and silly, probably one of Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, and at times the filmmakers seem to agree with them.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Becket (1964)
Henry II (Peter O'Toole), the Norman king of England, thinks it will be a laugh to appoint his Anglo-Saxon drinking buddy Thomas Becket (Richard Burton) as Archbishop of Canterbury, but Becket soon ruins Henry's fun by taking the job far more seriously than the king would like. The first of two films made in the 1960s based on plays about Henry II and starring O'Toole, the other being 1968's The Lion in Winter. Both are fuzzy with the facts (Thomas Becket was a Norman and Eleanor of Aquitaine would never go crying to her daddy, who was dead then anyway), but Becket is unquestionably the weakest of the two. It's a finely acted, by the numbers historical drama from a declining studio system that really suffers from Becket himself being the film's dullest character. All the real drama is with those dysfunctional Plantagenets, who are poorly served here apart from Henry.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
After she catches him trying to steal her mother's car, Bonnie Parker quickly falls for Clyde Barrow and together they set off on a violent crime spree across Depression era America, robbing banks and dodging the police to the sound of playful banjo music. This is a landmark film that kicked off the New Hollywood era, helped to kill the Hays Code, made household names of stars Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, and sent sales of black berets through the roof. As important as the film is, I've always felt that it was more historically significant than artistically. It isn't bad, just not quite as great as it is often made out to be.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Alexander Nevsky (1938)
This is a film I heard of long before I ever actually saw it since it features a score by none other than Sergei Prokofiev, which is among the great composer's most famous works. Set in the 13th century, the film recounts how Prince Alexander Nevsky united the Russian people to fight back against an invasion by the German Teutonic Knights, climaxing in the famous Battle on the Ice. Sergei Eisenstein was one of the seminal Russian filmmakers of the early 20th century, but he struggled under the oversight and censorship of the Soviet Era. This was the first film he managed to complete in 10 years and remains his most conventional, a straightforward historical epic with some creative and technical innovations that ultimately cannot escape the fact that it's just blatant pre-war propaganda meant to flatter Stalin and motivate the masses to defend the motherland from German invaders.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Mark Greig has been writing for Doux Reviews since 2011 More Mark Greig

6 comments:

  1. I love Tora! Tora! Tora! and have it on DVD. I've watched it at least a dozen times over the years and the documentary/re-enactment style works for me, since I'm an amateur WWI/WWII history buff.

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  2. Yeah Kingdom of Heaven turned out to be VERY good when I finally watched it a few days ago, expecting to enjoy nothing but Saladin and the Baldwin IV scenes. But I actually liked so much more. The Sibylla stuff, and even all the battles. Guy too had me oddly transfixed.

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  3. I don't tend to go for big historical epics so I haven't seen many of these. I just rewatched Bonnie and Clyde a couple of weeks ago, though, and I think it's a still a good flick, even if it isn't all that historically accurate.

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  4. I have some vague memories of watching A Man For All Seasons (and reading the stage script) in high school for an AP Literature class. I liked the script more than the movie, but we also watched it in that post-AP Test haze in May and June where you don't do any work and instead just sit in a very hot, very stuffy classroom waiting for the time to tick away for our next class. I went to a fairly conservative Catholic school, so More's own religious zeal was celebrated.

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  5. It's suddenly surprising to me how many of my favourite films are actually these sorts of historical dramas and epics. I hadn't really thought about it much, but it's true.

    I've seen about half of the films on your list, and really need to watch the rest. I absolutely love A Man for All Seasons; it's just one huge festival of quotable dialogue and brilliant acting. Yes, Thomas More was really a scumbag, but it's a great film nonetheless. I also love Becket; the excommunication scene always gives me chills. And how cool is it that Peter O'Toole gets to play Henry II (who was apparently a much beefier lad than Peter was) in two completely separate films? The Lion in Winter is, like A Man for All Seasons, just so much fun to listen to; Kate Hepburn just kills it.

    And speaking of Warren Beatty, what about Reds? That is an absolutely fantastic film, about a subject hardly touched in American cinema.

    I think the big appeal of historical films is that they inspire me to learn about the actual history behind them. The films themselves are usually of only marginal historical accuracy: Cromwell, Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth, Braveheart, The King, and on and on and on, but it's so much fun to read about what really happened after one has watched the cinematic treatment.

    Oh, and Tora! Tora! Tora! is just great. Stiff as it is, the tension just builds, and the Japanese scenes are so often the best. The slowly dawning realisation amongst the staffers in Washington that something is about to happen, and then all the warnings being completely ignored, is so infuriating.

    Anyway, great stuff. Cheers.

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    Replies
    1. Whoops. Dropped a closing tag there. Apologies!

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