Ever since 1915, when D.W. Griffith transformed the Ku Klux Klan into Civil War heroes for The Birth of a Nation, cinema and historical accuracy have had a slippery relationship. Movies have the power to clarify the past and edify the public, but they can also be full of hooey.
Sometimes the lies are fully accidental. In 1973, for example, Joe Don Baker starred in Walking Tall, an exploitation extravaganza in which he played real-life Tennessee Sheriff Buford Pusser, a lawman pushed to vigilante justice after villains murder his wife.
The picture made a mint and turned Pusser, a former pro wrestler, into a hero. Fast forward to 2025, when Tennessee state investigators announced that newly reviewed forensics evidence pointed to the likelihood that Pusser had killed his wife Pauline. Since the sheriff died in 1974, we’ll never know for sure the real story. Between Griffith’s racist propaganda and Pusser’s Walking Tall Tales, the practitioners of fake history celebrated here are considerably more tame.
Crucially, the titles below all knew they were taking liberties with history.
10. The Hindenburg (1975, dir. Robert Wise)
Doing the seemingly impossible, the movie takes the 1937 explosion of the Hindenburg, one of the 20th century’s most infamous disasters, and makes it a bit dull. There is no evidence Germany’s luxury zeppelin fell to sabotage—the culprit was most likely a combination of static electricity and highly flammable hydrogen—but the film says otherwise. The Hindenburg theorizes the catastrophe stemmed from a bomb plot designed to humiliate Adolf Hitler, who presumably took the zeppelin to be a matter of national pride. George C. Scott plays a German intelligence officer sent on the Hindenburg’s fatal final voyage to ferret out any nefarious scheme. Since the airship went up in flames, it isn’t a spoiler that Scott doesn’t avert tragedy.
9. It Happened Here (1964, dir. Andrew Mollo and Kevin Brownlow)
This grim speculative drama imagines a United Kingdom occupied by Nazi Germany as a result of the Second World War. Shot in grainy black and white with a docudrama sensibility, It Happened Here is a startling examination of how easily a fascist state can slide into legitimacy with the backing of people who simply go along—even when it means embracing hate. In this case, the fuel for despotism is antisemitism. It Happened Here was a labor of love for the writing-directing team of Andrew Mollo and Kevin Brownlow, who filmed it over eight years with a largely volunteer cast. Their commitment to authenticity extended to casting real fascists as extras, some of whom delivered genuinely antisemitic dialogue on camera. An uproar over the scene led to its removal from early release.
8. Insignificance (1985, dir. Nicolas Roeg)
Marilyn Monroe breathlessly explains the theory of relativity to Albert Einstein in a New York hotel room. Marilyn’s husband, baseball great Joe DiMaggio, shows up in a fit of jealousy. Red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy leans on Einstein to name suspected communist sympathizers to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Insignificance fancies that these events happened one evening in 1953. The movie doesn’t use names, instead referring to its quartet of main characters as the Actress (Theresa Russell), the Professor (Michael Emil), the Senator (Tony Curtis) and the Ballplayer (Gary Busey). Still, there is no mistaking who these folks are supposed to be in this oddity from director Nicolas Roeg and screenwriter Terry Johnson, who adapted his own play. Roeg uses the imagined encounter less as a historical what-if than as a meditation on celebrity, intellect and Cold War anxiety.
7. Braveheart (1995, dir. Mel Gibson)
Even by Hollywood biopic standards, director-star Mel Gibson takes considerable creative license in the story of William Wallace, the Scot who led a 13th-century rebellion against English rule. As slick entertainment, Braveheart is an A-, netting Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. As history, it’s maybe a C-. Contrary to Randall Wallace’s screenplay, there is no evidence William Wallace was motivated by the murder of a wife (Catherine McCormack). Heck, there’s no evidence he was even married. He wasn’t the child of peasant farmers, as the film purports, nor did he have an affair with French Princess Isabelle (Sophie Marceau), who was a child when Wallace was an adult. The title Braveheart isn’t even a reference to Wallace, but rather a name posthumously given to Robert the Bruce, whom the movie inaccurately paints as having betrayed Wallace. Oh, and those kilts worn by Wallace and others? They didn’t turn up until centuries later, but that didn’t prevent Braveheart from winning an Oscar for Costume Design.
6. Zelig (1983, dir. Woody Allen)
This faux documentary from writer-director Woody Allen chronicles a man so nondescript and desperate to fit in wherever he is that he morphs into whomever is nearby, regardless of ethnicity, body type, or even—in a joke of dubious taste—skin color. It’s a clever idea for a comedy, but what elevates Zelig is its impish visual commitment to having its fictitious subject rub elbows with some of the most iconic figures of the 1920s and ‘30s. Dubbed the “human chameleon,” Leonard Zelig (Allen) takes on the characteristics of the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charlie Chaplin, Babe Ruth, Al Capone—even Adolf Hitler. Allen and his longtime cinematographer Gordon Willis created sublime magic a decade before advances in digital filmmaking enabled Robert Zemeckis to pull off similar effects in 1994’s Forrest Gump. To capture the look of old newsreels, Willis used vintage camera lenses and afterwards encouraged crew members to do their worst. “We’d all drag the film on the floor and stomp on it,” Allen later recalled. The film earned Academy Award nominations for Cinematography and Costume Design.
5. Dick (1999, dir. Andrew Fleming)
Contrary to what Dick would have us believe, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch in this incarnation) did not break the Watergate burglary story with the help of two hapless 15-year-old girls—nor was their infamous “Deep Throat” source anyone other than FBI deputy director Mark Felt. Andrew Fleming’s endearingly daffy comedy riffs on Richard Nixon (Dan Hedaya) and the cover-up that took down his presidency, with the central premise being that the Washington Post reporters’ scoop came from Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams as adorable dog walkers Betsy Jobs and Arlene Lorenzo. But Dick, much like its tricky namesake Richard “Dick” Nixon, doesn’t exactly tell the truth. Thankfully, the movie is a delight, stuffed with terrific rock ‘n’ roll needle-drops and featuring a game cast that includes Dave Foley as H.R. Haldeman, Saul Rubinek as Henry Kissinger and Harry Shearer as G. Gordon Liddy. Virtually ignored upon its initial release, Dick is a sweet, spunky celebration of boy-crazy teen girls who accidentally stumble onto the biggest political scandal of their era when they mail a letter to the Bobby Sherman Fan Club.
4. Amadeus (1984, dir. Miloš Forman)
The yawning gulf between desire and talent is the cruel joke at the core of Amadeus, Miloš Forman’s lavish adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s play. The tortured artist is Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), who longs to honor God through music but is of mediocre ability. As Vienna’s court composer for Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones), Salieri reveres the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as much as he despises the man himself, who Tom Hulce plays as an immature fop with an unfortunate cackle. Consumed by jealousy, Salieri renounces God and schemes against his rival. “From now on, we are enemies, you and I,” Salieri tells a carving of Jesus on the cross, “because you choose for your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy—and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation.” Abraham and Hulce are tremendous in this film, which is as beautiful, complex, and enchanting as Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.” There is only one problem. It’s bunk. The rivalry is a fiction. But who cares? Amadeus raked in Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay (Shaffer) and Best Actor (Abraham).
3. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019, dir. Quentin Tarantino)
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969,” Joan Didion wrote in her celebrated essay collection, The White Album. On that night, five followers of cult leader Charles Manson broke into a house at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, California—the home of filmmaker Roman Polanski and his wife, actress Sharon Tate—and shook a nation to its foundation. The murders of Tate, who was eight months pregnant, and four others are arguably the most infamous American crime of the 20th century. But what if it didn’t happen? In Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, writer-director Quentin Tarantino imagines a scenario in which the Manson family members get their bloody comeuppance by mistakenly breaking into a neighbor’s house. In this alternative history, B-movie star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) conveniently has access to a flamethrower, stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) is on an LSD trip, and Cliff’s pet Pit Bull is hungry for hippie meat. Call it vigilante justice by way of cinematic alchemy—Tarantino’s rescue of Tate and her fellow victims is fantastical catharsis.
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2. JFK (1991, dir. Oliver Stone)
There is no shortage of skeptics when it comes to the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald alone was responsible for the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Count among them Oliver Stone, whose JFK takes as fact a wide-ranging conspiracy theory posed in the late 1960s by New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison. Stone and co-writer Zachary Sklar contend that the president’s killing was the work of interesting bedfellows including the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson, the Mafia, and sundry eccentrics in the New Orleans community. For good measure, JFK even offers Donald Sutherland as the mysterious “X,” loosely based on a real-life Air Force colonel, who tells Garrison that the plotters wanted Kennedy dead because he wouldn’t have escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Kevin Costner plays Garrison as a courageous maverick seeking the truth. JFK ignited a firestorm of controversy upon its release. Critics assailed Stone for presenting speculation as fact. Yet the film’s impact extended beyond the multiplex. Its release directly contributed to the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which mandated the declassification of thousands of previously secret government documents related to the case. In 1969, Garrison prosecuted Louisiana businessman Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones in the movie) for the assassination. A jury acquitted him in less than an hour.
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1. Inglourious Basterds (2009, dir. Quentin Tarantino)
Sometimes the revisionism of revisionist history is too enticing to resist. No one understands that better than Quentin Tarantino, whose reimagining of World War II would later be echoed in his version of the Tate-LaBianca murders (see #3). Tarantino’s war flick gives us a secret squad of badass Jewish-American soldiers whose mission is to scalp Nazis. Inglourious Basterds is more a parade of set pieces than a heavily plotted narrative, but that’s not a bad thing when the set pieces are this extraordinary. “You know somethin’?” Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine says as he admires the carved-up forehead of SS Col. Hans Landa, a particularly vile Nazi (Christoph Waltz, in an Oscar-winning performance). “I think this might just be my masterpiece.” Surely the line is also Tarantino’s own boast for Inglourious Basterds, and it would be bluster if it didn’t also happen to be true. But the movie’s biggest jaw-dropper—the detail that stunned audiences at the time—has a vengeance-seeking Jewish theater owner, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), setting fire to a moviehouse filled with Nazi bigwigs while the machinegun-wielding “basterds” turn Hitler into Swiss cheese. A few years after the picture’s release, I happened to be at a military museum that included a number of Hitler’s personal items confiscated by Allied forces. A man nearby pointed out the artifacts to his two small children. “You kids know what happened to Hitler, right?” he asked rhetorically before answering his own question, and with confidence. “Military got him.” If only it were so. One of history’s most monstrous killers took his own life just as Allied forces took Berlin. But I couldn’t help wondering if this mistaken dad had seen Inglourious Basterds.
Honorable mention: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (2012, dir. Timur Bekmambetov), Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002, dir. George Clooney), C.S.A: The Confederate States of America (2004, dir. Kevin Willmott), Executive Action (1973, dir. David Miller), Forrest Gump (1994, dir. Robert Zemeckis), The Good Dinosaur (2015, dir. Peter Sohn), They Died with Their Boots On (1941, dir. Raoul Walsh), 300 (2006, dir. Zack Snyder), Walker (1987, dir. Alex Cox), Watchmen (2009, dir. Zack Snyder)
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 