Sticking up for Salieri: Historical movie thread

[Deleted]

Who the wha? You mean some parts of The Patriot weren't entirely true? But....the part of Tavington being killed with the American flag on the flag pole, surely that happened.

Hee! If ever there was a time to use the "pop eyed" face graphic, this is it! The Patriot wasn't completely accurate?

Sorry, having a little fun here (unlike Tavington when he was killed with the flag pole - USA! USA!). Does anyone remember when the mayor of Liverpool challenged Jason Isaacs to an arm wrestling match or something because he was so disgusted with Isaacs for his role in The Patriot? Why he chose arm wrestling and how that would have disgraced Isaacs if he lost, I'll never know but it was pretty funny. I don't get why you would attack a low level actor who was a virtual unknown (espeically then) instead of the writers or people with real power, but there you go.

[tinyshoes]

As much as I disliked The Patriot, I did like the flagpole impaling scene. It was just so over the top, I couldn't help but love it.

[Deleted]

Zoom forward to WWII and Hollywood's "The Nazis were unstoppable, until America saved the world at Normandy!" conceit. Someone should explain to Tom Hanks that, by June 1944, the Soviets were grinding their way into Poland and wiping out most of the German army in the process. There were some front-line quality units in France, but they were hopelessly outnumbered by the Allies because most of the German vetrans were either already casualties of the Red Army, or about to become such. Read the memoirs of any German combatant, and they will tell you that they had mostly contempt for the Americans.

As opposed to the high regard the Germans had for everybody else? I'm not sure what the point of that was, as one would expect the Germans to have contempt for the victors. (Although if you look at individial German soldiers' diaries, those on the frontline, a lot of them have respect for Americans and vice versa.)

Your above interpretation is accurate in some respect (in that we couldn't have done it without the Soviet successes), but also just as simplistic as the "Americans won Word War II" interpretation. The fact is that the fighting on the western front was needed (obviously) and anyone who thinks it was a cakewalk and the Americans outnumbered the Germans is dead wrong. Three words for you: The Ardennes Offensive. Two more: the Hurtgen Forest. My grandfather is a veteran of both and the desperate, absolutely horrible conditions that the frontline Allied troops were fighting in is no trifling matter. That the Americans were not needed because the Soviets were taking care of the Germans fine by themselves will be news to him, because those were the same Germans who decimated his unit that winter.

Had the Allies not been pushing in from the west while simultaneously the Soviets were pushing in from the east, what do you think would've happened? By February 1943 the Red Army was weakened by the don Basin offensives, and Stalin could not have sustained an assault on the Reich entirely by himself. Remember that it wasn't all Soviet victory all the time, it was a hard and bloody struggle. In part, the Allies' successfully invasion of Italy was what allowed Operation Bagration to be successful. And also, of course, Operation Overlord (Normandy invasion). You don't think Overlord (which predated Bagration by about two weeks) had the Soviets thanking God? The Germans were still reeling to a large extent from that western assault and having to pull troops from the eastern front to help with the new western front. If we didn't have Overlord, it wouldn't have been as you implied: an easy victory with the Red Army just continuing to sweep in and push back the Germans. For one thing, it would've put more stress on the Soviet Army, as the Germans could've retreated all the way back into France had they wished, regrouped and launched from their own territory. There would've been no western front to trap them or distract them or engage some of their best units, there also wouldn't have been the Allied air forces which were almost singlehandedly responsible for grounding the Luftwaffe. If the Soviets had to pursue further and further to the coast they would've gotten further and further from their supply sources and been in a precarious position, which is what actually happened and halted the progress from Bagration in 1944. The Soviets were planning a massive offensive that winter, how do you think that would've gone had not a good portion of the best German forces (such as the Panzer divisions) not been engaged in the Ardennes?

[marywebgirl]

As much as I disliked The Patriot, I did like the flagpole impaling scene. It was just so over the top, I couldn't help but love it.

I remember the local movie critic was just stunned at that scene because it was so close to a scene from The Simpsons that guest starred Mel Gibson.

[Deleted]

The Simpsons thing was after, IIRC. I remember because I thought it was funny because it mirrored that scene in The Patriot. Unless I saw the rerun after I saw The Patriot.

[Deleted]

Great post, poorfrancis, and I don't want to take this thread too far OT, so I'll just comment that, after Stalingrad, it was pretty evident that the Germans best hope was to hold out and sue for peace, and that they had about as much chance of coming to terms with the Russians as Napoleon did. And Stalingrad was well before the West had made itself felt. Message me if you want to go further off-topic.

I do want a chance to use my favorite quote from the West front, referring to the Allies air supremacy. "If you see a silver plane, it's American. If you see a brown plane, it is British. And if you don't see a plane at all, it must be the Luftwaffe."

Topic? These fact-based movies tend to create their own myths, which then become facts for the next generation. Lets just dismiss "Pearl Harbor" the movie, as making fun of it is like picking on Britney Spears - too easy a target. But even "Tora!Tora!Tora!" perpetuates the myth that the sneak attack before the declaration of war was a horrible mistake in timing that shamed the Japanese deeply. In fact, the tradition of "Strike first, declare later" was long ingrained in Samurai culture. And Japan had established a pattern since 1931 of inciting an "incident", seeing how it was received, and only later choosing whether to go to war or not.

[Deleted]

poorfrances said:

The Simpsons thing was after, IIRC. I remember because I thought it was funny because it mirrored that scene in The Patriot. Unless I saw the rerun after I saw The Patriot.

That Simpsons epsiode aired in 1999, and The Patriot came out in 2000. Perhaps the movie "borrowed" from The Simpsons.