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I Say, Old Chap
The Economist, July 15, 2000

The British like to think that they have a "special relationship" with the United States. But the assumption that the Americans have a soft spot for their transatlantic cousins is being undermined by a spate of historical films, which have provoked yelps of anguish and anger in the British media, and even in Parliament.

Recent Hollywood films seem to airbrush the British out of glorious roles, and shoehorn them into villainous ones. A naval adventure called "U-571",which is currently showing in Britain, portrays American sailors retrieving an "Enigma" code machine from a German U-boat -- a feat which was in fact achieved by British sailors before America entered the
second world war. British servicemen involved in the action, and the relatives of those who died in it, were miffed at this appropriation of heroism; Bill Clinton ended up writing a mollifying letter to an MP. Another recent film, "Saving Private Ryan", seemed to portray the Normandy landings of 1944 as an exclusively American affair.

The latest bout of British hand-wringing has been provoked by "The Patriot", a film set during the American War of Independence, which was released in Britain on July 14th. The film is a rumbustious anthology of Hollywood cliches: it stars Mel Gibson as a freedom-fighter (this time from South Carolina), who sports a period pony-tail and spends much of the film covered in gore. It has two "love interests", some good punch-ups, and one spectacular decapitation. It also has the cartoonish moral simplicity of most Hollywood products.

In one episode in the film, a group of blacks are enslaved by evil British soldiers. This curtails their idyllic life, happily working as free men on a plantation owned by Mr Gibson's character. Betty Wood, an historian from Cambridge University, says that the idea of blacks in South Carolina voluntarily working on a plantation at the time the film is set is "so unlikely as to be unbelievable".

The film's villain is a murderous English officer, with a sub-specialism in infanticide. Afflicted by typically English anxieties about his social class, he commits a series of atrocities, culminating in the incineration of a village church, with the local population locked inside. The officer assures his men that this incident "will be forgotten" -- which may be the filmmakers' oblique way of acknowledging that it never actually happened.

Whether or not art has a duty to be historically accurate is an old and insoluble question. On this subject the producer of the "The Patriot" says, somewhat evasively, that he "tried to keep all the events of the movie true to events that happened in the American revolution -- they may just not have happened in the same way or in the same place."

But some British critics sense a plot. Jonathan Foreman, the English-educated son of an American film director (Carl Foreman), argued in the Daily Telegraph that the producers of "The Patriot" had perpetrated a "blood libel" against the British. Adding a flamboyantly paranoid touch, Mr Foreman pointed to the fact that the film's director is German, and that the fictional church-burning in "The Patriot" bears some resemblance to a genuine Nazi atrocity at Oradour-sur-Glane in France.

Part of the explanation for Hollywood's especially negative and negligent treatment of the English in the last few years might lie in the end of the cold war. Whereas Hollywood war films used to concentrate on waste and psychosis in Vietnam, now filmmakers are more confident about depicting Americans winning (or borrowing) military honour. American audiences have always been much keener to see films about Americans than about foreigners. (As Jon Teckman, director of the British Film Institute, observes, British films that have succeeded in America, such as "Notting Hill" and "Chicken Run", have catered to this taste by including American characters.)

The end of the Soviet empire has also required filmmakers to find new categories of villains. For a while South Africans and Arabs provided useful targets, but the end of apartheid and the peace process in the Middle East have dried up these sources. Under the circumstances, the old, colonial, class-obsessed enemy has returned to the fore.

Arguably though, traditional British-made films, which have portrayed the British as emotionally retarded fops, amateur gangsters or unemployed depressives, are no more flattering to the country than their glitzier Hollywood counterparts. And whatever its causes, the fashion amongst Hollywood producers to appropriate foreign glory, and implicitly disparage the British, is set to continue. A forthcoming film will depict gallant American soldiers escaping from Colditz castle in Germany. The fact that no Americans actually managed to do so is only a minor historical inconvenience.

Does any of this actually matter? Affronted Brits might draw some comfort from a recent survey of American public opinion by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, which found that Britain was the second most popular foreign country among Americans, just after Canada. Mind you, that was before the release of "The Patriot".