There has been a growing, if not completely enveloping, tendency to learn history from the movies. As Rick stated, the written word is rapidly becoming a thing of the past (History I guess). The History Channel has a series on Hollywood and History which shows a movie along with interviews of historians or other folks (who were there) discussing the movie versus the reality with Sander Vanocur. Its quite good. It would be nice to think that seeing a movie would trigger an active interest in learning more about a subject, like listening to PPM might trigger an interest in folk music and make the listener want to learn more. Sadly, this is not always the case in either historical events or folk music.

A few years ago, the producers of an excellent 6 part series which aired here on Public Broadcasting, took an awful lot of flak from the "people who were there." It seemed that the major objection was that the book's author had written a fictionalized account and the producers of the series had added even more. It wasn't the fiction part that was troubling, but many objected to ALL these things taking place within ONE GROUP of people. All the incidents and accounts were realistic and DID happen, but the problem seemed to be that folks objected to all this happening within a single group.

Well, Okay...that was correct. But the situation that applies to history is that, in point of fact, it can be rather dull, to put it mildly. At least this series portrayed accurately real events and real composites of characters that everybody could relate to. The series was "Piece of Cake" and followed an RAF squadron from 1939 through the Battle of Britain. I have read every situation that took place in the series somewhere and the characterizations were superb. So it wasn't accurate as the squadron didn't really exist. I think for many though, it at least gave them a depiction of what actually did go on. Is that bad?

I have seen several movies which I think fit that category. Nothing beats the written word and its a shame we don't have more accurate portrayals in the movies of the Billy Bishops or Robert Stanford Tucks. In truth we don't have enough written words either.

Its not only war movies certainly. "Mississippi Burning" was far from completely accurate, but it did raise an awareness. "JFK" was totally bizarre. Stone may have left out a couple of theories but not many. The real problem with all of the movies is the unfortunately growing tendency to accept them as history and not entertainment.

Spaw