Errors - thousands of 'em!
Zulu, of course, is the 1964 re-enactment of the Battle of Rorke's Drift during the Zulu War of 1879. Starring Michael Caine and Stanley Baker as Lieutenants Bromhead and Chard, it was directed by the blacklisted American Cy Endfield, with a script by Endfield and the Anglo-Canadian journalist John Prebble (an erstwhile member of the Communist Party), based on a magazine article by Prebble about the battle. 11 VCs were awarded to the defenders (1), after less than a hundred and fifty British and colonial troops held off several thousand Zulu warriors.
Bromhead: You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!
Chard: I think you're in the wrong film, Maurice.
Endfield had started in film as an assistant to Orson Welles. After making shorts for MGM and low budget second features for smaller companies, he directed two more significant features; The Underworld Story is about press corruption, and The Sound of Fury, a lynch-mob thriller. I've not seen either, but apparently both might be seen as attacks on the McCarthyite "witch-hunts" then in progress, and in 1951, Endfield was accused of being a communist by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Unable to get work in Hollywood, like many cinema people in similar straits, he left for Britain and remained based there till his death in 1995. He wrote (but did not direct) a later prequel to Zulu, Zulu Dawn, which depicted the disaster at Isandlwana to which Rorke's Drift was a face-saving postscript.
Cy Endfield
It is perhaps not surprising given their backgrounds that Endfield and Prebble insert into Zulu some pacifist sentiments which were most unlikely to have been voiced by the characters to whom they are assigned - army surgeon Major James Reynolds (Patrick Magee) and Swedish missionary Otto Witt (Jack Hawkins) - and it is the treatment of Witt which is one of the marked deviations from fact. The pastor is depicted as a drunken troublemaker who has to be ejected, along with his (fictional) daughter, from the compound prior to the battle after persistently preaching pacifism to the soldiers. In reality, Witt got on perfectly well with the troops and only left to go to his (real) family, a wife and two infant children, who were off-station at the time.
You're all going to die! You're all going to die! (hic)
Another character who was markedly revised was Private Harry Hook (James Booth); in the film, he is shown as a drunken malingerer, allowing a narrative of redemption as he reluctantly becomes a VC-winning hero in the defence of the hospital wing. The real Hook was a teetotaller, and at the premiere his aged daughters stormed out in disgust at the depiction of their father. Amusignly, Mancunian alternative musician and bar-room philosopher Mark E Smith of The Fall claims to be related to Hook. One of the other VCs, Corporal William Allen, had been demoted for drunkenness just a few days before the battle, but is depicted as a model soldier; it seems as if his faults have been transferred to Hook, a more dramatically satisfactory character.
One can see how these changes were made to suit the desires of the screenwriters, in the first case to provide a vehicle for sentiments unsympathetic to the military, in the second to supply a redemptive sub-plot for one of the heroes. In other cases, we might see a desire to introduce stock characters at the expense of accuracy. For instance, Colour Sergeant Bourne is played by the redoubtable Nigel Green (2) as an archetypal 40-ish NCO, ramrod straight and extravagantly whiskered; but the real Frank Bourne was a small man, at 24 the youngest of his rank in the entire army, who died in Beckenham aged 91 in 1945 as the last known survivor of the battle. A similar distortion occurs with the Natal Native Contingent policeman, Christian Schiess (spell that carefully!), who despite being 22 at the time is played by a balding middle aged man.(3)
What do you mean, I'm only 5'6"?
There are some notable reductions in roles as well. Bromhead (Caine) is depicted as haughty but uncertain, in contrast to the more tough-minded and astute engineering officer Chard (Baker), who as the marginally senior officer takes overall command; but both were inexperienced and it is now thought that the commissary officer James Dalton played a major role in planning the defence. Dalton was a retired Sergeant-Major who had rejoined the army in South Africa in the non-combatant Commissariat arm (supply and transport). His role in the film, though, is peripheral, and he probably only avoided being written out because he won a VC; one might compare the padre, George "Ammunition" Smith, who also played a prominent role in the battle but was not eligible for a VC, and does not appear in the film.
Lt. John Chard, sporting VC
A remarkable detail left out of the film, too, is that Lieutenant Bromhead was largely deaf, a disability which (as he was well aware) would likely have precluded much further promotion, a galling position for the grandson of a general. Also, pictures of the two lieutenants show them sporting full moustaches, which is no surprise, as in the latter 19th century moustaches were de rigeur for army officers, a situation which persisted until 1916. Caine and Baker of course are smooth shaven.
Lt. Gonville Bromhead
These inaccuracies, though, relate to character depiction, and such things are perhaps to be expected in a dramatic presentation, where there is a need for cleaner narrative and a more compact, archetyped cast of characters than is likely to be the case in reality. This probably also explains the "welshification" of the 24th Regiment of Foot. This unit, though based at Brecon, had its origins in Warwickshire, and was not an explicitly Welsh unit till some years later, nor was it yet called The South Wales Borderers as it is in the film. It is likely that fewer than half the personnel were Welsh, and the "sing-off" against the Zulus towards the climax of the film is entirely fictional.
Didn't happen. Sorry. "Men of Harlech" is a cracking song though.
The scriptwriters have also chosen to reduce the roles of the two other British units at Rorke's Drift. In the film, an auxiliary cavalry unit passes through but refuses to aid in the defence of the station, whilst the small number of black levies at Rorke's Drift run away after being harangued by Witt. Neither of these episodes is accurately depicted.
There was a unit of the Natal Native Horse in the area, under the command of Lieutenant Henderson, numbering about a hundred, and they had briefly engaged the Zulu vanguard on the other side of the Oscarberg as they approached. This unit was reluctantly allowed to leave by Lt. Chard as they were critically short of ammunition (for carbines, and thus not interchangeable with the rifle munitions with which the regulars were well stocked (4)) and their morale was shaky. Unlike the white farmers depicted in the film, most of these men were black.
The foot soldiers of the Natal Native Contingent, numbering over a hundred, then fled like the rather less numerous black levies in the film - but they left with their commander, Captain Stephenson, and his white NCOs. Possibly they were unnerved by the disappearance of Henderson's horsemen, but their departure was not approved by Chard, and as they fled, they were fired on by irate regular troops, resulting in the death of a Corporal Anderson. Stephenson was later convicted of desertion by a court-martial and dismissed from the army. The writers chose to play this rather shabby episode down in the film, reducing the number of men involved, removing the white officers from the scene, and omitting the gunfire and the killing of Anderson. The native soldiers are also shown in uniforms, which the British were too cheapskate to provide them; they wore local dress, distinguished only by a red bandana.
The loss of these two units, which would have at least tripled the manpower available to Chard, substantially affected the battle, as he had previously believed that he had sufficient troops to resist the Zulu force. This change in circumstances is not really reflected in the film, which reduces their numbers and downplays the significance of their disappearance.
There is also some exaggeration of the nature of the Zulu force. It is shown as being commanded by Cetshwayo, the Zulu paramount leader, suggesting thst it is a major push by the main army (and giving Mangosuthu Buthelezi the chance to play his own great-grandfather). In reality, it was a smaller raiding party, and the commander was Prince Dabulamanzi ka Mpande, a son of the previous Zulu king and half-brother of Cetshwayo. Dabulamanzi was a hothead who, having been detached to pursue survivors from the massacre at Isandlwana, had disobeyed orders not to cross into Natal. If he had followed the instructions of his king, Rorke's Drift would never have been attacked.
Prince Dabulamanzi
One could argue also that the film as a whole is rather decontextualised. There is a little foreshadowing in the discussions between the Boer irregular Aldendorf, and Lt. Chard, of the coming conflict between the Dutch settlers and the British authorities, but the context of the Zulu War is limited. The action at Rorke's Drift is presented essentially as a free-standing act of heroism, the much larger (and disastrous) battle at Isandlwana a mere scenesetter. This mirrors the narrative established at the time by the colonial authorities, in which the glorious defence of Rorke's Drift - and its attendant flurry of gallantry awards - was allowed to obscure the humiliation inflicted by Cetshwayo the day before. There is some dialogue which hints at this, but it has a limited effect given the nature of the entertainment. The pacifist rhetoric of Witt (and, to a lesser extent, Reynolds) is also undermined by being put into the mouth of a rather foolish character, as if to dismiss it as the ravings of a raving whiskey priest.
Nevertheless, it is a classic of its type and, even if one is aware of the manipulations, they work very well. Good score by John Barry, as well.
Once Upon A Time In The Middle Ages
Zulu, of course, is set in Victorian times, amongst people whose world-view we can understand, even if things have changed a little in the interim. The event is well documented and we know the names of many of the individual actors, not just their leaders.
Ironclad faces an entirely different set of challenges. It depicts a historical event - the siege of Rochester Castle by forces loyal to King John in 1215 - but in a period remote from us not only in time but in thinking. Many of the individual actors in any such drama are hidden from us by time, and motivations may seem opaque to modern audiences. The dramatist will have to invent much of the superstructure of the story, and the supporting cast. The participants will often have to be made to act in ways which are understandable by the modern viewer, rather than in an authetic manner.
I'm not a mediaeval historian, and my knowledge of the background story was fairly thin (largely the result of a visit to Rochester Castle a couple of years ago). Watching the film I didn't find myself railing at obvious solecisms, but I was curious about certain aspects of the plot and background, and looked them up afterwards. There are indeed a few problems, but once more one can see how some of the infelicities were required to streamline the narrative, make it more comprehensible to the audience, and supply a dramatically satisfying conclusion.
Rochester Castle now, one of the best preserved 12th century keeps in Europe.
The siege at Rochester took place in the aftermath of the signing of Magna Carta in June 1215, when relations between the King and barons again broke down, resulting in the First Baron's War. The castle, which had been under the control of the Archbishops of Canterbury, had been temporarily signed over to the king and put under a constable, Reginald de Cornhill, but this agreement had lapsed by the time war began, though Cornhill remained at the castle, apparently having switched allegiance. When the king demanded the castle be handed over again, a group of rebels under William d'Aubigny, Lord of Belvoir, afraid that Archbishop Stephen Langton would cave in, seized control of the fortress with a force of around one hundred knights along with various crossbowmen and other support troops. This was apparently done with the connivance of Cornhill. Langton at this point fled the country in fear of royal retribution, having conspicuously failed to secure this important castle against the rebels.
Archbishop Langton, Canterbury Cathedral statuary
King John reacted immediately, and royal forces took control of the town of Rochester on 11 October 1215, with the king himself arriving two days later. The castle was placed under seige, and bombarded by siege engines. When these proved ineffective - Rochester was a large, important and soundly constructed castle - John began attempts to undermine the walls. On October 26 a rebel relief force of 700 cavalry was forced to return to London. By 25 November, the defenders having retreated to the keep after the outer wall was breached, attempts had began to undermine the keep itself, including the burning of forty fat pigs in a mine beneath the south-east tower, provoking its collapse. Though some of the less combat-capable castlefolk had surrendered by then - some chronicles suggesting they may have been punished be having their hands and feet amputated - the keep held out till November 30, until lack of food forced their capitualtion. King John initially wished to slaughter the garrison, but was persuaded by his captains that this would provoke similar measures against royal castles captured by the rebels, and desisted. Instead, most were imprisoned, though one bowman who had previously been in royal service was hanged for disloyalty.
King John's control over Rochester lasted only till 1216, however, when a French invasion led by Prince Louis in support of the rebels recaptured it. However, when John died later that year, his 9-year-old son Henry was accepted as king by the rebel barons and the war came to an end. Louis, having lost his baronial support, returned to France.
In order to turn this incident into a dramatic narrative, the screenwriters have invented a number of characters. The most important of these is Thomas Marshall (5) (James Purefoy), a Templar knight who witnesses King John's brutality while escorting a priest to Canterbury, and is persuaded by William d'Aubigny (Brian Cox, given the variant name of Albany), with the assent of Archbishop Langton (Charles Dance), to join him in seizing Rochester for the rebels in order to protect a French landing in their support. Gathering a small force of half a dozen men (including Jason Flemyng and McKenzie Crook) they defeat the small scouting party of Danish mercenaries that John has sent to take over the castle, and browbeat the twittery, reluctant Cornhill (Derek Jacobi) to allow them to garrison it. Counting the constable's existing guard, they have only about 20 men at their disposal.
Paul Giamatti is a petty, vindictive King John. Actually, John really was petty and
vindictive, but not quite as incompetent as his posthumous reputation might suggest.
Soon, King John (Paul Giamatti) arrives with the rest of his Danish mercenaries, led by the colossal Captain Tiberius (Vladimir Kulich), who is attempting to curry favour with John in order to protect his homeland from being aggressively Christianised. A vicious siege ensues; during their confinement, Marshall develops feelings for Cornhill's much younger wife, Isabelle (Kate Mara) - it is implied that Cornhill is homosexual - and eventually violates his vows to sleep with her, just before the outer walls are breached. The defenders retreat to the keep, but d'Aubigny is caught and has his hands and feet hacked off before being launched at the castle walls with a trebuchet.
I google "burning pigs" and this is the second image I get...
The keep is the undermined with burning pigs, and one tower collapses. As the attackers attempt to force their way in past the handful of surviving rebels, Marshall orders Guy, d'Aubigny's squire, to kill the women to save them from the indiginities that will be visited upon them, but Guy hesitates. As it appears that all is lost, and Marshall fights a desperate and ultimately victorious battle against Tiberius, the French turn up with the Archbishop in tow, and the attackers turn tail. Guy, Marshall and Isabelle clamber out of the rubble, Archbishop Langton releases the Templar from his (by now, pretty shredded) vows and the lovers ride off on Marshall's white charger, the only horse not to get eaten during the siege. King John, it is explained, is replaced by the French prince and dies whilst being hounded across the country.
Obviously there are a few factual problems with this version of events. Cornhill's role is made much more reluctant, and a fictional trophy wife is introduced to get off with the fictional hero. In order for there to be a moderately happy ending, the siege is lifted at the last moment by the arrival of the (French) cavalry, rather than the castle falling as it did in actuality. D'Aubigny is murdered by John, whereas in fact he survived the siege and was imprisoned until John's death, after which he swore allegiance to the new child king and died peacefully at home in Offington, Leicestershire in 1236. The numbers of troops involved in the action has been drastically reduced - in the film, a baron, a squire, one knight, and assorted guards and footmen defend the entire castle successfully for several months, whereas in the real siege, the rebels numbered 95-140 knights alone, plus supporting troops. There is some stuff about Langton being excommunicated by the pope for rebelling against John, but this conflates Stephen with his bother Simon, who was Archdeacon and acted as a negotiator on the rebels' behalf. Simon was indeed excommunicated, but the Archbishop was not, though he was suspended from officiating for some time and had to flee to Poitigny during the war. I also rather think the pigs were killed before being put into the mine :)
"Yonder is the castle of my fodda". It's not as bad as the Black Shield of Falworth....
Much of this is understandable from a dramatic and budgetary perspective. The budget side of things must have been difficult, as the enormous list of executive producers in the credits attests, and it would have been very difficult to put a hundred knights on screen for the cash. Instead the writers have gone for a small, Seven Samurai type band, and combat scenes with jerky-cam to hide the joins. Similarly, Rochester Castle (a mixture of sets built in Wales, and CGI) is presented without the accompanying town, to make things simpler - despite the fact that there was already a cathedral there by 1215, and that the river crossing had been populated from pre-Roman times. The fictional characters allow for an admittedly rather obvious romantic subplot and a manly hero, and killing off d'Aubigny gives another opportunity for England's least positively remembered king (6) to behave like a snivelling bastard.
There are a couple of more serious problems, though. I was confused as to why d'Aubigny's squire was meant to be so hopeless at fighting, given that a squire is basically an apprentice knight. Did he fall asleep during the sword fighting lessons? He also looks alarmingly like Frodo in Lord of the Rings. The sub-plot about the Danish pagans seeking to stave off the Christianisation of their country by working for King John is unnecessary and unconvincing, even if you don't know that Denmark had already been Christianised by this point anyway. (They speak Hungarian to each other, too, which is amusing. And why is the big guy called Tiberius?) John didn't have Danish mercenaries anyway - the writers just wanted to shoehorn in some enormous Vikings. Fortunately they don't have silly helmets on, though Tiberius puzzlingly smears himself in woad before the final battle. Several different things mixed up there, I think.
More importantly, the stuff about the crown being taken by a French prince is nonsense; John died soon afterwards and was succeeded by his son, Henry III, at which point the rebels backed down, satisfied with a weak child ruler, and the French were sent off home. We've never had a King Louis, and I'm not sure why the writers suggested as much - it really wasn't necessary. Furthermore, the idea that the rebels were for "the people" is an anachronism; this was a baronial revolt in favour of aristocratic privilege over royal authority. The Magna Carta is regarded as an important early stage of English constitutional development but treating it as if it were intended to be a people's charter is a bit romantic.
A fantastically ludicrous 19th century painting of Prince Louis "The Lion" Capet (later Louis VIII)
- never to my knowledge King of England - by the German-born Henri Lehmann (1814-1882)
The name of the film is also a bit of a puzzle. There's one scene in which Marshall fights with a full face helm on, but otherwise it's mostly jerkin time. Are they referring to the strength of the castle? It's not made clear.
Does Ironclad represent an authentic mediaeval England? No, of course it doesn't, but it would be foolish to expect anything of the kind. The time is too remote, and this is an entertainment not a documentary. Though some of the history is ropey, it nevertheless doesn't feel totally ridiculous or serve up horrible anachronisms. Nor did it overcompensate with daft attempts at Olde Englande jargon. Also there was no Kevin Costner, nor Orlando Bloom. Brian Cox is always good value in grizzled alpha-male scenery-chewing roles (7). In fact, I was quite gratified to see a relatively straightforward attempt at recreating a dramatic but little known incident from early English history, even if Jenny (prompted I think by the laddishness of Jason Flemyng's character) described it as like a mediaeval Brit gangster movie. However much later romanticisation dressed them up in shiny armour and contemporary ideology posited a hierarchy descending from God, mediaeval knights weren't so far removed from gangsters.... so - fair dos. I actually enjoyed this - its flaws could be put to one side for the duration.
Summary
Historical recreations pose different challenges depending upon the remoteness of the subject. For recent and well documented events, the primary obstacle is not contradicting known facts. When the period is more distant, the writers must be able to build up a fictionalised superstructure around the more limited knowledge available, which doesn't contain solecisms or anachronisms, but remains comprehensible to a modern audience. In both cases, however, strict accuracy may need to take second place to demands of narrative cleanliness and dramatic effectiveness. It's a balancing act, and getting it wrong can make a movie seem ridiculous. I don't think Ironclad quite falls into that pit.
Notes
(1) There might have been more at Rorke's Drift, but at the time, posthmous awards were not made. Nor is 11 even the largest number awarded for one day's action; that would be 18 at Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny. VCs are awarded somewhat less freely these days.
(2) A distinctive face from films of the time, even if you don't recognise the name; Green played Hercules in the 1963 Jason and the Argonauts, and the treacherous Major Dalby, once again alongside Michael Caine, in The Ipcress File. Died unfortunately young (47) in 1972 of a (possibly intentional) overdose of sleeping pills.
(3) Schiess supplies the saddest tale of the VC winners: released from British service when the volunteer units were disbanded, he could not find further employment and descended into penury in Cape Town, where he was found living on the street by naval personnel in 1884. The Navy fed the starving Schiess and organised him passage to England aboard the troopship HMS Serapis, but he sickened and died en route, aged only 28, to be buried at sea. He remains the only Swiss national ever to win a Victoria Cross.
(4) There were 20,000 rounds stockpiled at the station, of which only 900 remained unspent after the battle.
(5) Thomas Marshall is a fictional character but his name at least may have been suggested by William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, one of the foremost knights of the period, who acted as regent to four kings. Nevertheless, William Marshall was nearly seventy at the time of the Rochester siege, and far too prominent a personality for this to be intended as a depiction of him, even under the thin disguise of a changed forename. As a name for a fictional character Marshall is somewhat problematic at a time when hereditary surnames were only just developing. William Marshall was called that because he was a marechal, a master of royal horses, and there's no indication that Thomas in the film had any such background. It's a subtle mistake but a telling one, as it involves applying modern conventions incorrectly to a previous time period.
(6) John gets a bad press, was not a pleasant man, and his reign was full of disasters, but he was far from the worst English king; many of his problems stemmed from the profligacy and neglect of his brother Richard "the Lionheart", king before him, who has been hopelessly romanticised despite his incompetence. There have also been plenty of truly colossal berks on the throne - Edward II, Charles I or Edward VIII, for instance - and for someone totally unsuited to his position, one need look no further than Henry VI.
(7) Cox was one of the bright spots in the rather ludicrous Troy, along with the wonderful Peter O'Toole, who seemed to be in a different and much better film than anyone else as Priam. Oh, and minus ten points if the only Brian Cox you know is a shiny faced physicist.
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