[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Movie Madness



Oh, good, I've been waiting for a chance to jump in, and someone mentioned historical accuracy and John Wayne in the same paragraph.  My husband has an ancestor named James Smith who was active on the Pennsylvania frontier from the 1750s on. His life was novelized by a man named Neil Swanson in a book called _The First Rebel_. I'm guessing it was from this book that someone in Hollywood got the idea of making a movie based on a piece of his life. John Wayne played James Smith in the little known movie _Allegheny Uprising_. The movie begins when Smith returned from three years of captivity with the Indians. In real life, the woman he had planned to marry had waited for him for a while, but finally decided he was dead, and supposedly was married just a few days before he returned--which seems to me like a story made for Hollywood. In the movie, there is a hero-worshipping teenager who has been waiting for his return and follows him around throughout the movie, causing me to mutter through clenched teeth, "The part about the girl isn't right."   

Then, a while back A&E had a historical show about people who had been captured by Indians. In the segment on James Smith, they say that after his return, he rose to be a colonel in the British Army. This had him turning in his grave, since he rose to be a colonel in the Pennsylvania militia during the American Revolution!  

Christine Crawford-Oppenheimer
Special Collections Librarian/Archivist

(note change of address as of May 2000)
Culinary Institute of America
1946 Campus Drive
Hyde Park, NY  12538
(914) 451-1757
c_crawfo@culinary.edu

>>> Casey Grene <cgreene@ROSENBERG-LIBRARY.ORG> 06/30/00 01:12PM >>>
There are books available with titles such as _The Fifty Worst Movies of
All Time_, or along those lines, which will aid this discussion.  Many
of the reviewed titles in these books have historical themes.  Take John
Wayne's portrayal of Genghis Khan in THE CONQUEROR (1956).  Susan
Hayward played his love interest.  My favorite are World War II movies
which incorporate film footage dating from before or after the war as
part of the movie.  As a military and naval history buff, I can usually
spot the inaccuracies, especially in the warship models used for
miniature work.

A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to listserv@listserv.muohio.edu
      In body of message:  SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname
                    *or*:  UNSUB ARCHIVES
To post a message, send e-mail to archives@listserv.muohio.edu

Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html

Problems?  Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <rschmidt@lib.muohio.edu>