Having been told, over and over, that Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is a must-see, especially as an historically immaculate treatment of the man and the times, it recently came to light that a significant event in the film not only didn’t happen, the opposite occurred.
The film shows that in 1864, two of Connecticut’s Congressional members voted to reject the 13th Amendment. In fact, they voted in favor, to abolish slavery. In fact and in deed, the Connecticut House members are known to historians to have courageously and conspicuously supported ridding the nation of slavery.
As oopsies go, that’s a bad one. Too late now!
That Spielberg has generously offered a free DVD of “Lincoln” to every junior high and high school is nice, but makes for the probability that Connecticut will be stained and sustained as a pro-slavery state, at least in April, 1864.
Oh, well.
Coming this April, coinciding with the start of the baseball season, will be the movie “42,” a cinematic history of Jackie Robinson, who wore that number as the first African-American in the major leagues.
Is Robinson’s story too important to mess with, play loose with? Apparently not. The first TV ad/trailer released for the film shows Robinson hitting a home run then standing at home plate, immodestly preening, posing and exhibiting his defiance toward the pitcher.
Never happened. Such home plate-posing — now an unfortunate, TV-driven baseball standard — didn’t exist until the early 1970s. Robinson retired in 1956. Furthermore, he was known as a man who played the game hard, full-out, a man who’d steal home plate, not languish near it in self-admiration.
Jackie Robinson’s essence couldn’t otherwise have been captured without this harmful artificial additive as a come-on?
But sports “history” almost always takes it on the chin in the movies.
Billy Crystal boasted that his HBO movie about Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and the 1961 Yankees, “61*,” was accurate right down to the brands of deodorant seen in the lockers. Wherever he went, TV and radio interviewers — those who didn’t know better — congratulated him for his diligence.
But those who covered and chronicled the Yankees that year knew otherwise, knew that it was loaded with false “facts.” Heck, that a fan in the stands who angrily hurled a chair at Maris? Wow! I was a kid, then, but still, I’d have remembered that.
Except that it never happened. Besides, by 1961 — and long before that — all ballparks had all seats bolted to the cement floors.
It seemed that every time we heard about the 2005 hit “Cinderella Man”— the comeback story of heavyweight boxer James Braddock played by Russell Crowe — we were reminded that it’s “a true story.”
But the movie relied on the portrayal of Braddock’s 1935 championship opponent, Max Baer, as a very bad guy, establishing a good vs. evil storyline.
Yet, Baer, who died in 1959, was widely known — as a matter of fact — as a nice man.
That those who knew him, including Max Baer, Jr., who played Jethro Bodine on “The Beverly Hillbillies,” tried to tell the true story about the “true story” was too little, too late.
The US TV rights to “Cinderella Man” were sold for $8 million to Turner, and it will be Turner’s audience who will be now told — if not reminded — that Max Baer was a very bad man, but no worse than those Representatives from Connecticut who in 1864 voted to preserve slavery.
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Last month, our TV and radio stations rushed to report the latest data compiled by the International Shark Attack File: “Unprovoked shark attacks were up 21 percent in 2012.”
Reader Michael Di Raimondo wonders how such statistics are registered; who determines for the sharks whether they were provoked: “Does hunger qualify as a provocation?”