Rating: 
Summary: A "Reel" History Book: Use It to Provoke Your Students!
Review: This is the book for everyone who stayed awake in their high school history class and found themselves watching a movie about a "historical event" only to suddenly find themselves jumping up and yelling, "Hey! That's not the way it happened!" We all know that Hollywood has only a little more reverence for great history than it does for great literature; think of all the students who went down in flames because they say the Demi Moore version of "The Scarlet Letter" (and don't even get me started on the John Barrymore version of "Moby Dick" where Ahab kills the whale). "Past Perfect: History According to the Movies" is an interesting critique of famous films from the historian's perspective and a very useful book for elementary and high school history teachers. It is a good thing for kids to be confronted with the idea that movies distort reality and then have them decide what they think about such distortions within the specific context of a particular film. For history teachers this book from the Society of American Historians is a very valuable resource. The book is a collection of essays in which experts look at how films have portrayed the past. For example, in terms of notable historians Michael Grant looks at "Julius Caesar," Antonia Fraser at "Anne of the Thousand Days," James M. McPherson at "Glory," and Stephen E. Ambrose at "The Longest Day." Other essays consider periods rather than specific events, such as when Gore Vidal critiques "Sullivan's Travels" and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. does "The Front Page." We even have Stephen Jay Gould writing about "Jurassic Park." "Past Perfect" also has a couple of chapters useful to literature teachers. In addition to the look at Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" there is Anthony Lewis's comparison of the two "Henry V" films, Alan Brinkley covers "The Grapes of Wrath," George Chauncey reviews "Tea and Sympathy." Besides the fact that there are so many other films that could have been covered-my top choice would have been "Inherit the Wind," but you can also name "The Last Emperor," "Platoon," or "The Right Stuff," and of course recent films like "Saving Private Ryan," "The Insider," Titanic" and "Gettysburg"-the main limitation of the book is that the essays are all roughly the same length which means the pieces that look at multiple films about the same person/event (George Armstrong Custer at the Little Big Horn and Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral). Another note would be that most movies are produced by and for network and cable television, so there is certainly a large body of work for further exploration in that regard. This book is only 300 pages long and it might require the production values to be downgraded in order to come out with a larger book that looks at a lot more movies. Certainly this is a volume that can and needs to be updated. We all know in our hearts that more people get their conceptions of the specifics of history from the mass media than they do from school. Anything that helps remind kids that the truth is really out there is a very good thing indeed. Use this book to help provoke them.
Rating:
Summary: Can you properly portray history in the movies?
Review: When you're both a student of history and a movie buff, as I am, it can be difficult to sit and watch a film that presumes to have an accurate historical context without fighting the urge to evaluate it and pick holes in it. And I'm not the only one. This is a collection of analytical essays, most of high quality, by experts (not all of them historians) analyzing and critiquing individual films: Stephen Jay Gould on _Jurassic Park,_ Antonia Fraser on _Anne of the Thousand Days,_ Thomas Fleming on _1776,_ Dee Brown on _Fort Apache,_ William Manchester on _Young Winston,_ and numerous others. Sticking to those films about which I have some knowledge of the historical events they claim to portray, most are right on the money. James McPherson, commenting on _Glory,_ points out that while the context and general atmosphere are very well done, and the costuming and so on are exact, there are still deliberate historical errors for the sake of drama; none of the soldiers in Col. Shaw's 54th Massachusetts were ex-slaves, for instance, all of them having been recruited from among the state's free black population. And Catherine Clinton does an excellent job taking the wind out of _Gone with the Wind_'s mythical sails. There's a great deal of good information and criticism here and it's a compliment to say that nearly any of these essays will start an argument.
| 
