Fred's Book Club: Golden Ages, Silver Screens.

Welcome back to another entry in the Wednesday book blog known as the Humpback Writers, because it is Wednesday, and that's hump day, and oh just forget it.

This week we have an unusual entry, a nonfiction book by one of the great writers of historical novels and screenplays, George MacDonald Fraser. 

The Hollywood History of the World: From One Million Years BC to Apocalypse Now, published in 1988, is a terrific book about historical films throughout the history of filmmaking itself. It's also an informal autobiographical sketch of Fraser, whose love affair with great classic films inspired his love affair with history and historical fiction.

It might be easy to think that a true lover of the academic discipline of history could despise the way Hollywood mangles it, but Fraser was not one to scoff at the filmmaker's art because of its necessary dramatic shortcuts:

They and the films they introduced paid the audience the compliment of supposing them to have at least an elementary knowledge of, and interest in, times past, and with all their faults (and there were many) they took history seriously.
     In view of some of the monstrosities that have been put on film in the last half-century, that may seem a bold claim. There is a popular belief that where history is concerned, Hollywood always gets it wrong -- and sometimes it does. What is overlooked is the astonishing amount of history Hollywood has got right, and the immense unacknowledged debt which we owe to the commercial cinema as an illuminator of the story of mankind.

In the films mentioned in the book, Fraser intends to note those who have gotten it right and where they have fallen short. And he would know; he made his living as a writer first as a reporter, but from early on he was also a historian. Scattered throughout the book are notes about movies Fraser saw growing up, movies that engaged his young mind and brought to life events he had barely been able to imagine, reading about them in school. Here he compares movies to these historical events and persons that inspired them, and includes a few great anecdotes along the way. Fiction is not scoffed at, either; a film like The Plainsman is pure nonsense, but it involves real figures and places, and is thus worthy of a look in this volume.

The book is structured like the history of the world itself -- by time. It begins at the beginning, both biblical and geological, covering films such as The Bible ("the film got no father than Genesis 22. Which was a mercy") and One Million Years BC ("Miss Welch's voice lacked the true prehistoric timbre, and her shrieks and exclamations had to be dubbed by a specialist who is now, of all things, a barrister"). Chapters following, with some of the many films highlighted, are as follows:

• Knights and Barbarians (The Thief of Bagdad, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Becket)
• Tudors and Sea-Dogs (The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The Sea Hawk, Mutiny on the Bounty)
• Romance and Royalty (Bonnie Prince Charlie, The Scarlet Empress, Scaramouche)
• Rule, Britannia (Zulu, Gunga Din, The Four Feathers)
• New World, Old West (Stagecoach, Drums Along the Mohawk, Gone with the Wind)
• The Violent Century (All Quiet on the Western Front, Mrs. Miniver, Public Enemy)

Fraser is a good critic of actors as well, able to applaud a performance even if he thinks the actor was miscast. He also writes of his enduring admiration for some actors who appeared in lots of costume dramas, such as Charleton Heston. Heston did make a lot of them, from The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur to El Cid to Will Penny -- and also the 1973 Three Musketeers, for which Fraser wrote the script.

Fraser was less positive about modern films, meaning movies set in the present day as it was in the 1970s and 1980s. He calls 1971's  Dirty Harry "Nasty and sadistic," saying that the tastes of modern audiences "are matter for the psychiatrist rather than the market researcher." I wonder what he thought of Tarantino.

I was informed that there was an updated edition of Fraser's book in 1996, but have not been able to locate it or determine if it had substantial edits or additions. I suspect that Hollywood has done exceptionally few historical dramas since 1988 that he would have enjoyed; as an industry they have become about as bad at making them as they are at making musicals.

One might expect that a 31-year-old book of this sort would be 1) out of date and 2) out of print, and one would be right. In a way, so is its author, George MacDonald Fraser having left this world in 2008.

Worse, he never wrote the often-hinted-at adventures of his cowardly lecher of a hero Harry Flashman in the American Civil War, drat it. (I believe that all we ever knew for sure was that Flashy fought for both the Union and the Rebels at different times in the conflict, and that of course he met Lincoln.)

Fraser wrote a dozen Flashman novels, several non-Flashman novels (although Harry makes a cameo in Mr. American, and Harry's father appears in Black Ajax), plus two very silly novels (The Pyrates, which I have discussed before, and The Reavers). He also wrote three collections of stories of the Gordon Highlanders, which I first read in college; they are military comedy, like M*A*S*H, but more honest and funnier.

His other nonfiction works include The Steel Bonnets and his excellent memoir of the Second World War, Quartered Safe Out Here. I would recommend all of those, and his shopping lists too, if we but had them in a bound edition.

It might be as easy to get a copy of such lists as it is to get a copy of The Hollywood History of the World, but if you're a film buff, especially of period dramas, Hollywood History is a must-read. It also includes a lot of great movie stills, often juxtaposed with art or photos of the historical persons portrayed, which makes for some interesting comparisons.

Because the book is so hard to find, I'm going to allow myself the pleasure of quoting the very last sentence of it, because it is a winner:

If this random and no doubt erratic journey through the Seven Ages of the cinema has awakened any pleasant memories, or a wish to see again those glorious old movies, then it has been worth while, and no more than they deserve, for however flawed and occasionally inaccurate Hollywood's history of the world may have been, there is this to be said for it, that it was certainly better fun than the real thing.