What dramatic movies have been historically accurate?

[SheilaT]

40. I've long noticed that movies often get things wrong.

Sometimes they're relatively trivial details, but often they are things that matter. If the movie is already intended purely as fiction, it's one thing, but when presented as historical, it's quite another. The trouble is that a lot of people assume if something is in a movie then it must be true. Which is why a lot of people think that the DaVinci Code is real history, when it's not, it's pure fiction, the author made it up.

Someone said history is boring. It's not, it's really quite fascinating, but the history classes you had to take in high school were probably badly taught. Sometimes the history class is taught by the football coach, who is probably a nice person, but probably knows nothing outside what he reads in the text.

I've often thought history could well be taught as a series of biographies, with an emphasis on scandal and gossip, which might hold the students' interest.

Me, I've always loved history and have read a fair amount in that field, both as historical fiction and as straight history. It's one of the reasons I'm made crazy by the Phillipa Gregory books about the Tudors and the Boleyns. She gets certain fundamental facts wrong, but the people who read those books never read anything else, so they haven't a clue.

Actually, my biggest problem overall with historical fiction is that all too often the characters are modern people dressed in funny clothes. People's attitudes and behaviors change significantly over time, which is why reading a novel set in the present of when it was written is usually very interesting, as it gives you insight into what people really thought and how they behaved. One of the reasons the novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is so compelling is that when it was written the author clearly had no expectation that slavery would end in her lifetime. Essentially every novel written since 1865 but set before the Civil War has foreknowledge of the end of slavery, and it makes a difference.