Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies – Books

Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies
FFC rating: 9/10
edited by Mark C. Carnes

by Bill Chambers Steven Spielberg’s nineteenth-century set Amistad was criticized in the pages of Roger Ebert’s “Movie Answer Man” for its characters’ use of the greeting “Hello,” an uncommon conversation-starter until well after the introduction of the telephone. Experts are wont to nitpick such details, and the collection Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies has provided a panel of experts a forum for their criticisms of so-called fact-based motion pictures. For trivia buffs like myself, who learn as much from what a movie gets wrong as from what it gets right, the book is page after fascinating page of Hollywood getting caught taking liberties great and small.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Past Imperfect also functions as a history book, and will likely strike a loud chord with disengaged high-school students because it places famous events and movements of the past in the user-friendly context of movies. Plus, it delivers its lessons in compelling but bite-size morsels that probably won’t tax the attention span of the average teenager–or film freak.

Each chapter highlights a specific title; the chapters are organized chronologically by era, not by the films’ release dates. (Past Imperfect begins with paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s summation of Jurassic Park and ends with a look at Nixon by Watergate whistleblower Bob Woodward.) Seventy-seven motion pictures in all are discussed, and not every one of the works under examination purports to be derived from a true story. In the case of a definite fiction like Apocalypse Now, for instance, Frances Fitzgerald examines what aspects of its depiction of the Vietnam War are realistic or rooted in truth. (He dismisses the picture’s third act as a load of hooey, natch.) Jurassic Park is considered in terms of its plausibility; much of the scientific dialogue spouted by John Hammond and his team apparently contradicts basic genetic precepts.

My favourite thing in Past Imperfect is John F. Kasson’s take on Houdini. The biopic, produced with the assistance of Houdini’s widow, actually alters the circumstances of the escape artist’s death! Houdini died of peritonitis, an inflammation of the abdomen caused by a blow to the stomach–which isn’t, admittedly, very cinematic. Tony Curtis’s Houdini dies trying to break out of the famed Chinese Water Torture Cell, a contraption the real-life Houdini had successfully escaped hundreds of times without fail. Kasson cites other changes that are equally contrived, like how Houdini’s famed 16-minute escape from an Alcatraz jail cell takes hours in the adaptation. It’s as if the filmmakers found Houdini’s well-documented physical (and mental) prowess too implausible to depict honestly.

The layout of Past Imperfect‘s essays consists of a few paragraphs about a given film as well as numerous sidebars filled with anecdotal information related to the historical subject at hand. In the section on 1992’s duelling Christopher Columbus epics (Carla Rahn Phillips and William D. Phillips, Jr. surprisingly come down more heavily on Ridley Scott’s 1492), the authors use one of the margins to question the authenticity of a portrait traditionally thought to be that of the explorer. In another, they side against Columbus on his geographical estimations. Meanwhile, if a chapter pertains to a docudrama, a physical comparison between the main subject and his or her on-screen counterpart is usually supplied. The cranial disparity between Richard Nixon and Anthony Hopkins is legend, but it’s fun to see them side by side.

The book’s 1996 softcover edition is bookended by two interview transcripts. In the prologue, Eric Foner quizzes John Sayles, who wrote the docudramas Eight Men Out and Apollo 13 and is known for his attention to detail. Foner mostly grills him on the importance of historical accuracy in motion pictures. More to the point, Foner asks Sayles if directors and screenwriters of non-fictional tales have a responsibility to what is known if it compromises the entertainment value or director’s vision of the piece. This is invaluable, and forgives a lot of the misunderstanding that occurs elsewhere: Not being filmmakers themselves, a great many of the contributors neglect how fictionalizing something often conveys the truth of the matter better than a straight presentation of facts can. Past Imperfect‘s own editor Mark C. Carnes interrogates Oliver Stone for the closer, with Stone holding his own quite well; he has surely grown accustomed to defending himself. (I once attended a lecture that Oliver Stone gave at Toronto’s Massey Hall, and in the Q&A that followed, a number of insults were hurled his way. The director maintained a Zen cool throughout.)

Past Imperfect has sharpened my “Jeopardy!” skills; it’s an addictive, informative, unconventional reference book. It’s also, as you might imagine, a tad snooty. Further to my point above, many of its essayists–including the renowned historian Stephen Ambrose–cannot come to terms with artwork as representation rather than document, fearing (perhaps justifiably so) that a wrongheaded retelling of an important true story will forever colour the public’s perception of it. Gould states in the middle of his Jurassic Park rant that he doesn’t wish to “set our collective effort on a wrong course with carping criticism and cheap shots in the ‘nyah-nyah’ mode,” but, of course, that’s just what he does.

352 pages; March, 2022; ISBN: 0805037608; Owl Books