PopcornTreeCt

Just looking for some of the movies that got it totally wrong. Most movies about real life people take liberties in storytelling but I want to hear about the ones that truly, awfully, misrepresented the real stories.

sherm42

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. He was not that tall.

islandclaws

I've heard Jake LaMotta wasn't as nice as they made him out to be in Raging Bull.

whotony

Fargo.

Hiro11

Let's just get it out of the way: "U-571". Yes. We know. Also, don't believe the hype that anyone else (for example, the British) "capturing" an Enigma machine was the key to decyphering German codes.

In truth:
1. The Enigma machine was commercially available starting in the mid twenties. Anyone could walk into a well stocked office supply store and buy one. In fact, British Intelligence bought one in 1927. The way the commercial version worked was the same as the German military version, just the military version was slightly more complex. The idea that you needed to "capture" one is ridiculous.

2. The Polish Cypher Bureau broke the German military version of the Enigma in 1932 and openly shared their findings with British and French intelligence. They perfected a volume mechanized process for decryption in 1938 using mechanical computers. Turing and the British came up with methods of speeding up these techniques at Bletchley, this became important when the German Navy increased the complexity of their devices. However, the decryption theory and methodology remained unchanged and had been around for over a decade. Again, no one actually needed an Enigma device to keep the decryption going. Also, the German Army continued to use the old version, which was essentially like sending out hand signed letters to Allied commanders of their plans towards the end of the war.

In truth, Enigma was crap compared even to other encryption systems of the day. Also, the Japanese Purple and JN25 standards were both completely worthless. The Americans broke both before WW2 even got started. The British TypeX and American SIGABA machines were both far superior, neither was broken by the Axis.

Also, "JFK" takes some pretty big liberties with the truth.

majorjoe23

Titanic. Murdoch's kill spree was really downplayed.

inri222

The Patriot – Francis Marion whom Gibson’s character is based on had a reputation as a racist slaveowner who hunted Indians for sport and regularly raped his female slaves.

Gladiator – Emperor Commodus didn’t kill his father, he died of small pox. He wasn’t killed in an arena, he was murdered by strangulation in the bathtub.

Shazam

2001

mhg83

I thought that was based on Mel himself?

Solid Snake

The Alamo...directed by John Wayne.

Fun movie but goddamn.

PopcornTreeCt

Interesting. Didn't know about The Patriot.

Charlie Goose

A Night to Remember - They didn't know in 1953 that the ship actually broke in half during the sinking.

Jesus Christ Superstar - JC didn't sing that much.

Mondo Kane

LOTS of old westerns didn't give a crap about the truth.

I didn't see the whole movie, but there was a laughable conclusion at the end of a Billy The Kid movie I saw (It might've been the '41 version starring Robert Taylor) complete with a showdown set in broad daylight. (I remember The Left-Handed Gun with Paul Newman as Billy also had some "Huh?" moments) It was also funny hearing characters call a 40-year old looking actor, "Kid".

Speaking of old "Kids", MAJOR liberties were taken with The Three Outlaws (1957). It's a fun movie, but I'm quite sure Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid didn't go out like that. Alan (Skipper) Hale Jr played "The Kid", btw.

Another famous "All-gunfighting-legends unite" is The Outlaw (1943), but again, fun flick regardless.

There were a couple of Doc Holliday bloopers in My Darling Clementine (He gets shot and killed at the OK Corral) and Doc (1971) (He befriended and trained one of his OK Corral enemies as a gunfighter....Doc also wanted to kill Wyatt Earp at the end of that movie too!)

Better than The Last Command. Jim Bowie and Santa Anna were cousins in that one!

RichC2

Churchill: The Hollywood Years

Christian Slater did Winston Churchill no favors.

Also, Alexander.

Groucho

Already mentioned, but JFK gets almost nothing right.

inri222

Amistad

Theodore Joadson (Morgan Freeman) is a fictional character
Queen Isabella II was not the queen of Spain at the time

Plus a ton of other shit if you research it

Supermallet

I was going to post that.

Solid Snake

Chaplin (this one bothers me the most for some reason)

The King's Speech

300 (the comic had a self awareness that that I just felt that the film didn't have)

Domino

Ash Ketchum

RAGING BULL ignores the key reason LaMotta became a boxer: he thought he'd killed a neighborhood shopkeeper during a mugging and his sense of guilt fueled the rage that propelled his boxing career. Later in life he learned that the guy survived and moved to Florida, so he didn't feel like fighting anymore and his boxing suffered. This is an important point in the book, yet there's nothing in the movie on it.
Also, the relationship between Jake and his best friend Peter Savage in the book (the whole "You fuck my wife?!" thing) is transposed to Jake and his brother in the movie. There's a whole different dynamic between best friends than there is between brothers and this transposition really changed too much in the story.

THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987) - filled with inaccuracies, just as the TV series was. Eliot Ness throwing Frank Nitti off the roof was complete hogwash. Nitti lived to 1943, over a decade after the events of the movie. In real life hardly anybody got killed on Ness's side. I think maybe one agent was fatally shot. And they hardly ever shot at any bootleggers. Whenever Ness and his men busted an illegal brewery, the brewery workers would put up their hands and go quietly. There were never any shootouts. He also had little to do with the IRS case against Capone and the subsequent prosecution. Ness was basically a publicity-seeking bureaucrat, not some gun-toting, two-fisted crimebuster. I've read his books (and they're probably embellished as well).

Nick Danger

Bonnie and Clyde weren't really cool counter-culture rebels against middle-class bourgeois values. They were a couple of psychos who shot people for the laughs.

d2cheer

Escape From New York. Not really a maximum security prison only seems that way.

Groucho

Argo plays hard and loose with the facts.

wm lopez

DOG DAY AFTERNOON the character of Sal was in real life a teenager.

whoopdido

Jurassic Park--velociraptors were about the size of a dog and most of its length was in the tail. They weighed like 30-50 pounds. The raptors in the movies were more like Utahraptors.

Also, most, if not all, of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park actually lived during the Cretaceous Period, rather than the Jurassic Period.

Dr Mabuse

'The Bridge on the River Kwai' - Holy cow that film gets the history completely, highly offensively wrong. But the film is a masterpiece that I adore.

'Papillon' - Another film that I love, is based on complete nonsense written by the actual man. The film is accurate to his lies, but they were lies he wrote about the events.

'The Battle of the Bulge' - Eisenhower hated it for being so off on the facts.

'The Great Escape'

Movies are not documentaries, nor are they intended to be. It's kind of silly for people to get as 'up in arms' as so many do over films not being accurate.