From the Shelves of the Paco Library

Combine the keen eye of the historian with an in-depth interest in movies and a fine sense of humor, and what do you get? George MacDonald Fraser’s The Hollywood History of the World, that’s what. In this loving tribute to movies that sought to bring history to the silver screen, Fraser employs the amazing research skills that he brought to bear in the Flashman novels, and shows how the films stack up against the historical record.

Fraser is not writing simply as a well-read film enthusiast; he authored the screenplays for the Three Musketeers movies that came out in the 1970’s, which featured an all-star cast (Michael York, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Raquel Welch, Faye Dunaway and Charlton Heston, among others), and are easily the most entertaining film versions of the Dumas novels, as well as being among the most evocative cinematic representations of 17th-century France (Fraser describes his own ventures into scriptwriting thusly: “an exhilarating experience akin to being whirled into a multi-coloured maelstrom from which one emerges, damp and dazed, clutching a cheque”). His scriptwriting efforts may well have helped Fraser better understand and appreciate the plight of an earlier scriptwriter who had worked on one of the biblical epics:

Going through the script, it seemed to him [Alan Badel] that unjustifiable liberties had been taken with Holy Writ; the words of Christ, in fact, had been rewritten. Badel complained to the director, high words ensued, minions ran to and fro, the head of the studio (one of the celebrated Hollywood moguls) was summoned, and finally the scriptwriter was asked to explain himself. And according to Babel, the poor soul leafed nervously through the script, compared it with a Bible, coughed, shuffled, and finally said: “Well, you see, Alan, we thought Jesus sounded just a bit cocky in there.”

The book is helpfully divided into chapters that tackle specific sub-genres (e.g., “The Ancient World”, “Tudors and Sea Dogs”, “New World, Old West”), and is illustrated with hundreds of black-and-white photographs. As you would expect, Hollywood History is a wonderful mixture of facts, first-hand observations and lively impressions. Here is Fraser comparing and contrasting two towering pillars of the Western:

There are two Western hero types, the John Wayne and the Randolph Scott, and the difference is marked. Scott is the old-fashioned ideal, quiet, slightly grim, self-possessed, eyes on the horizon, unfailingly courteous, touching his hat-brim to ladies and calling them “ma’am” (he could even remove a note from Marlene Dietrich’s garter with perfect good breeding), meeting trouble with a poker face and a lightning draw. Was he ever heard to swear? I doubt it. Wayne was a harder article altogether, a rugged expansionist with a short fuse, given to strong language and physical violence; even when he was complimenting a school-marm on her cooking he did it with a deep-breathing deliberation which suggested that he was preparing to go out and wreck a saloon, preferably with Scott inside it…Of the two, I have no doubt that Wayne’s was a commoner type in the Old West, but both, being arch-types, had their originals.

If you like movies and George MacDonald Fraser, you can’t possibly go wrong with this book.