Reviews for History of the Franks

The average rating for History of the Franks based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-11-06 00:00:00 Wolfgang Hinkel Nice, scholarly but not too scholarly. Toplin sets out a few ways that Hollywood manipulates history in films for its own purposes, and then he uses a bunch of case studies to illustrate these methods. For example, he discusses "Mississippi Burning" and how the filmmakers started from an actual event but invented many characters and most of the plot, in the service of telling a story that they felt captured something valuable about the civil rights era. Many others disagreed, and felt that by making so much up the film, the filmmakers cheapened the real history. Toplin looks at "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Patton" and how the history in those films was molded in the service of making statements about contemporary American life. He has a particularly interesting chapter on "JFK" and Oliver Stone. Really interesting book, I didn't read the essays about movies I hadn't seen, but the ones I did read were really good.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-23 00:00:00 Jay Gonzales A collection of essays from the Journal of American History's film critic, laying out the process by which movies like Mississippi Burning, JFK, Norma Rae and Missing constructed productions out of real events, with detailed background on how real people and events were altered for dramatic effect--and more importantly, why those decisions were made.