Based on a true story: We should expect too much from our historical action films

The military historian Sir Antony Beevor on Desert Island Discs recently admitted he couldn’t watch war films as they were all such factual rubbish.

But films “based on a true story” are a great Hollywood tradition. 

PEARL HARBOR 

Heartthrob Josh Hartnett, an American pilot, is on the phone while Japanese bombs rain down on the fatal day of December 7, 1941. “I think World War II just started,” he says down the line with a straight face. 

One of America’s most expensive, crass and insensitive war films, it cost $ 150million but had zero budget to spare for a historian. Love and death are everywhere. 

Hartnett and Ben Affleck are after with the same nurse, played by Kate Beckinsale, who in triage uses her lipstick to mark the dead casualties from the wounded. 

The 2001 film – with its American tunnel vision – is every bit as daft as Objective, Burma! (1945) which saw Errol Flynn as an American soldier parachuting into Burma and single-handedly winning the war – a very big surprise to the thousands of British Empire troops who thought they had a hand in it. 

Pearl Harbor includes Japanese torpedo bombers attacking American airfields. The director seems unaware that torpedoes don’t run so well on dry land. 

The film gets almost everything wrong, ignores the Asian perspective and goes on for three hours. War is hell – but it’s seldom this boring. 

RICHARD III

The 1955 film is squarely based on the Shakespeare play – and factually both are bunk. The film gives us to understand that the royal corpse (Richard is played by Laurence Olivier) is left rotting on the battlefield at Bosworth. 

In fact the dead Richard was dragged around Leicester and was recently discovered buried under a car park. The fi lm shows him responsible for the killing of the princes in the Tower for which there is no evidence. 

He might have had a dodgy shoulder but the withered arm, the limp and the idea that he was born with teeth are made up. Shakespeare ( spin doctor to Elizabeth I) relentlessly smears the reputation of the king in order to shore up the shaky Tudor claim to the throne. 

The film is superb at glamourising Richard’s villainy and the dialogue is great unlike another film, King Richard And The Crusaders, in which Virginia Mayo as Lady Edith says, “War, war! That’s all you ever think about, Dick Plantagenet! You burner, you pillager!”

300

Director Jack Snyder’s 2006 film tells the story of the battle of Thermopolyae (480BC). Truth is the first casualty. Even the title is wrong. 

The “300” is a fraction of the hundreds of other Greek troops who stayed to fight alongside the small band of warriors who took on the Persian King Xerxes. 

And how odd they look. There is no evidence that the Spartans wore Speedo trunks or bronzing cream – but they do in the film. The portrayal of the Persians (modern day Iranians) is even more bizarre. 

Xerxes is turned into a preening, black, bald, gay weirdo with a god complex, surrounded by grovelling slaves. The Persians didn’t go in for slaves ( against their religion) whereas the “democratic” Spartans did. 

Another anachronism is that every time the Spartan king Leonidas (played by Gerard Butler) makes a rousing speech his warriors yell “Hoo-ah!” like American marines. 

The Persian court is depicted as a riot of sexual hedonism while the Spartans have loving wives back home. This is laughable as the pederastic male Spartans were famous for molesting boys.

BRAVEHEART 

Scotland’s famous hero William Wallace was a rebel who raised a homegrown army to challenge the tyrannical English crown and sacrificed everything he loved in the name of freedom. That’s the blurb. But Wallace is embodied by the English-hating bad-boy Mel Gibson wearing blue face dye (a Celtic practice from 1,000 years earlier) and sporting a kilt (300 years before Scots wore kilts). 

One or two things in this film, presumably by mistake, happen to be correct. William Wallace did indeed lead a rebellion against the English in 1296. 

He won a surprising victory at Stirling Bridge and lost at Falkirk. After his capture he was tried and executed. The rest is made up – including Wallace’s love affair with Princess Isabella (who was three years old at the time) and some shady business involving a shifty -looking Robert the Bruce. 

Also the “freeeeedom” Wallace keeps yelling about was not Nelson Mandela-style freedom. It was just the freedom for the average peasant to be persecuted by Scottish nobles rather than English nobles. 

Despite being utter nonsense, it went on to win five Oscars (including Best Picture) and helped the SNP to victory.

U-571 

This shocker of a submarine film looks something like Mel Brooks’s version of Das Boot – but without any songs. Made in 2000 it is the story of how a bunch of Americans commandeered a German submarine (or as the film puts it, “a goddam Nazi sub”) in order to capture an enigma cypher machine. 

On boarding the U-boat an American sailor says with a look of surprise about the signs in the boat – “It’s all in German!” The Americans had nothing to do with the codes being broken, which was a joint effort between Polish Intelligence and British cryptologists. 

Besides when this fi lm was set – in early 1942 – the British had already captured several enigma machines. The fi lm is so shameless that prime minister Tony Blair rightly complained about it as “an affront to real sailors” of the British navy. 

The film features Harvey Keitel in a woolly hat and just when you think things can’t get any more ridiculous, rock star Jon Bon Jovi as the chief engineer who in an act of mercy to the audience, is killed. 

GLADIATOR

“We – historical details who are about to die – salute you.” Terrific film, shame about the facts. Disappointingly Russell Crowe’s character Maximus – the general who became a fighting slave – never existed.

Commodus reigned for 13 years, not the brief period in the film and was a teenager when he took the throne. He also had a wife. Marcus Aurelius was not smothered by Commodus but died of a virus in what is now Vienna. 

It is true Commodus was fond of fighting in the arena. He is said to have killed five hippos in just one fight but he didn’t meet his end by being kebabed by Russell Crowe in the Colosseum. 

He was actually strangled in his bath by a wrestler in a plot laid by his enemies. The film’s amazing gladiator battles are shown as a chaotic mass slaughter but the reality included rules and referees and most combats were individual duels. 

Historians went into fury over Derek Jacobi’s character, Gracchus, who refers to the Senate as “the representatives of the people, elected by them ”. 

The Roman Senate was actually similar to the British House of Lords before they got rid of the hereditary lords. But who cares? Gladiator, made in 2000, is proof that a story made with care, skill and passion can triumph over boring history books.