Certainly one of my favourite films, and one I know pretty well having researched some of the background over the years.
Aeronut wrote:
It's main weakness was that its history of the second world war from an American point of view ie it was Montgomery's idea so wrong from the out set.
How so? It
was Montgomery's plan, and the film was far from an American re-write of history*, dealing with the Germans, Dutch, British and American stories pretty even-handedly, IMHO.
The film was directed by a (very) British chap, Levine was probably better thought of as Jewish as much as he was American, the book was by an Irishman, adapted (pretty faithfully, IMHO) by an American.
The tank chaps having a 'brewing up' rather than pushing on was the only potentially ant-British element in the film that was unsupported by a real even AFAIK. Certainly there's plenty of American heroics, but all based on real events as were the British heroics. I've never read that any of the real commanders did not feel that their roles were not depicted correctly, and there were a remarkable number of the British commanders alive and involved. (Actor Bogarde didn't like the portrayal of Browning, but it's far from a character assassination - they could've taken a number of real traits and made him look worse than the film did.)
Incidentally, following the screenwriter thread, here's an interesting factoid re- Yeager and
The Right Stuff:
Quote:
[William] Goldman was the original screenwriter for the film version of Tom Wolfe's novel The Right Stuff; director Philip Kaufman wrote his own screenplay without using Goldman's material, because Kaufman wanted to include Chuck Yeager as a character; Goldman did not.[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_GoldmanGood point about PTSD, I agree! Of course that 'didn't exist' as far as the support of soldiers existed then.
Regards,
*See the grizzly
Pearl Harbor or
Uwhateveritwas for that kind of junk. To ave John B mentioning it, the British equivalent is
The Sound Barrier.