The scene is a town in medieval times, and a tumbril-like cart loaded with young men, dressed for battle, is rattling across the cobbles towards the outer gates. One of the passengers leans out and waves excitedly to an elderly peasant woman. He calls out: "Goodbye, Mother! I'm off to the 30-Years-War!".
If such a film does not exist, then it ought to, belonging as it does to the great Hollywood tradition which begat the anonymous clerihew:
Cecil B. DeMille,
Rather against his will
Was persuaded to keep Moses
Out of the Wars of the Roses
De Mille, of course, specialised in biblical epics, and whether or not these may be classified as historical is a mute point. Certainly they were educational, for at one point in Samson and Delilah a merchant waves a length of filmy cloth and declares: "Dey call it gauze on accounta it comes from Gaza." The same town was obviously famed for its gastronomy as well, for, a little further on, Victor Mature tells an adoring parent: "Mudder, you're still the best cook in Gaza!".
De Mille was not the only offender. He never, for example, perpetrated anything approaching Virginia Mayo's line, in King Richard and the Crusaders: "Fight, fight, fight! That's all you ever think about, Dick Plantagenet!". And, at the beginning of Robert Aldrich's Sodom and Gomorrah the heroine, against all wise counsel, announces - and it is uncertain as to whether it is by way of naming a destination, or uttering a threat - that she is "going to Sodom". At this, a friendly stranger, encountered in the desert, adjures her: "Watch out for Sodomite patrols!".
Max Beerbohm observed: "There is something rather absurd about the past", and went on to prove it with his stage direction for Act III of Savonarola Brown: "Enter Michael Angelo. Andrea del Sarto appears for a moment at a window. Pippa passes.". And those of us who cherish such fine things will recall a moment in a Warner Bros movie called Devotion which traces the lives of the Bronte sisters, phthisic cough by cough. On the strength of Jane Eyre, Charlotte (Olivia de Havilland) has been taken up by Thackeray (Sydney Greenstreet). As they enter a London bookshop, a bearded man passes on his way out and the following ensues:
Bearded man: "'morning, Thackeray."
Thackeray: "'morning, Dickens."
What joy it must have been to write this.
And, as a further delight, the studio's publicity department came up with the following mind-boggling encomium for Greenstreet/ Thackeray: "The `friend', the furious fat man: they couldn't fool him - they couldn't trust him!".
Alone among the moguls, the Warners were, for a time, respectful of history. In the 1930s, there were The Story of Louis Pasteur, Dr Erlich's Magic Bullet, A Dispatch from Reuter, Juarez and The Life of Emile
Zola, all custom-made for the studio's most prestigious stars, Paul Muni and Edward G Robinson. Each was simplified, but filmed without any glaring distortion. However, in the case of the last-named, the idea of anti-semitism was swept under the carpet. At one point, as a general of the French high command seeks a likely scapegoat on a register of expendable officers, those quick-witted enough may see that next to the name "Alfred Dreyfus" is written the word "Jew".
In dealing with American history, Warners were not so scrupulous. One of the oddities was a western, inexplicably called Santa Fe Trail, in which George Armstrong Custer (Ronald Reagan) and "Jeb" Stuart (Errol Flynn) are first of all chums at West Point. The villain is the abolitionist, John Brown, played like a raving maniac by Raymond Massey (whose previous film role was as Abraham Lincoln). Astonishingly, the film is rabidly pro-slavery. When John Brown tells a group of darkies that they are now free, the moan goes up: "Free? But where are we to go? What's to become of us?". In the end, after the siege at Harper's Ferry, Brown is hanged, and the Warner Brothers all but say "Good riddance!". Actually, a Mormon actor named Moroni Olson intones: "So perish all enemies of the Union!".
John Brown, so the film says, slaughtered a number of slave-owners, and, in fact, he did order a mass execution of pro-slavers at Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1859. Nonetheless, and in spite of Warner Bros and Errol Flynn, his soul goes marching on.
The studio that most cheerfully played ducks and drakes with history was, perhaps, 20th Century Fox. I have fond memories of Suez, which showed the young Ferdinand de Lesseps (Tyrone Power) and his beloved cousin, Eugenie de Montijo (Loretta Young) consult a fortune-teller. "You," the seer tells Young, "will live a hundred years and wear a crown". "And you," he scornfully informs Power, "will dig ditches". In the film, Eugenie dumps the youthful Lesseps and becomes the Empress Eugenie, whereupon the ditched Ferdinand digs his ditch. In fact, she lived, not to be 100, but 94; and Lesseps, who was 19 years her senior, began the canal when he was 54, finished it when he was 63 and was sentenced to five years in prison (never served) for fraud when he attempted to tackle another ditch in Panama.
Tyrone Power was a one-man history book. In Lloyds of London he saved the insurance company from going under with the aid of Benjamin Franklin and his boyhood chum, Horatio Nelson. In In Old Chicago, he was Dion O'Leary whose mother's cow knocked the lantern down and started the fire - this was a source of annoyance to both his brother (Don Ameche), who was Chicago's mayor, and to the villainous Brian Donlevy. In Marie Antoinette he was the Swedish Count Frederik Axel von Fersen, who was devotedly in love with the Queen (Power was 26 at the time, and Fersen was 70). And in Jesse James he was an almost saintly farm boy, victimised and aggravated by the railroads, the Pinkertons and Brian Donlevy (again).
The great MGM, which had the motto "More stars than there are in heaven", was not much better. Viva Villa was the wildest fiction, with lovable Wallace Beery telling Fay Wray: "You geev Pancho beeg kees, eh?". Why he elected to speak to a Mexican senorita in pidgin English was anybody's guess. In Mata Hari, Garbo goes to the firing squad rather than reveal her lurid past to her young lover, Ramon Novarro. In fact, she feigns a fatal illness, and so it is no wonder that, visiting her in hospital, he delivers the film's most memorable line: "What's the matter, Mata?". This is run a close second by Charles Boyer's line to Garbo in Marie Walewska when, as Napoleon, he enquires: "Are you real or born of a snowdrift?"
One of Metro's rare flops, losing $600,000, was Parnell co-starring Clark Gable, sans beard, and Myrna Loy. In this, Willie O'Shea (Alan Marshall) is a sneering blackmailer, and Parnell has a weak heart. When Tim Healy speaks slightingly of the lady whom the credits call "Katie" O'Shea, Parnell's reply is a sock on the jaw. And when Loy promises never to leave him, Gable's dying words are: "I know you won't. One's destiny can never go away from one." At which point, one dies. Among the bit players, as an MP, was Randolph Churchill, who said that he earned more by representing MGM than the Conservatives.
One of the more interesting views of Irish history was offered in a Sam Goldwyn film called Beloved Enemy. In this, the hero is a daredevil Irish patriot named Dennis Riordan (Brian Aherne), who bears a more than passing resemblance to Michael Collins. He becomes enamoured of an Englishwoman, Helen Drummond (read Lady Lavery), played by Merle Oberon, who helps him no end when it comes to signing a treaty with Britain.
For this, he is marked down for assassination, and is felled by a sniper's bullet while speechifying in Free State uniform. He is carried into a chemist's shop and, expiring, tells Helen: "Darlin', I can hear the angels singin' " as an off-screen choir lets rip. At least that is what happened when I first saw the film; but Sam Goldwyn shot two endings. On the film's next outing, Riordan/Collins opened his eyes, twinkled, gave the heroine a hug - it was, apparently, only a flesh wound - and told Merle that he would make a good Irishwoman of her yet. I wonder why Neil Jordan failed to think of this.
THERE was one Hollywood studio which never meddled with history, and that was Columbia. The ogreish Harry Cohn loathed period films, which he defined as movies where "they write with a feather and walk out of rooms backwards". He got a pain, he said, from scripts where characters said "Yes, siree" and "No, siree". This mystified the writers for a while, then they worked out that Cohn meant "Sire". So Cohn stuck to the Durango Kid, Blondie, and Frank Capra. He never got around to making the kind of historical epic where the hero, as Tony Curtis once did, said: "Yonda lies the castle of my fadda". He did, however, make a biblical film, Salome, which, because of Rita Hayworth's shedding of two or three of her seven veils, was banned in Ireland. I recall that I saw it on a trip to London, and was bemused to discover that Salome, a nice girl, danced not to encompass the doom of John the Baptist, but to save his life.
Alas for good intentions, there was a failure to communicate, and the prophet's head was all the same carried in on a salver. Across the years, I can still hear a voice from the upper recesses of the Odeon, Leicester Square, marking the event with an awed cry of "Dig that crazy dessert!".
Hugh Leonard is a playwright. He is currently writing a novel: A Wild People