Agree on the dialogue, RR, but with one caveat... that it captures the essence of their relationship and it is not a reinvention of it. By happenstance, I caught a bit of The King's Speech the other night after having seen it when it came out, and those scenes seemed real. But... I know nothing more about the subject (no pun intended) than the movie gave me. 

What you're describing in your second paragraph is what quickly put me off a series that was highly recommended to me: The Queen. It quickly became clear that each episode was structured to turn E2 into the not-so-subtle hero of an array of pivotal events in British and world history. Once my BS-detector went off, I looked up some of the events depicted and realized that the writers were straining mightily, as the cliche goes, to retro-fit fact into historical fiction. One good example: the "Killer Fog" that afflicted London during WW2. I just want to tell these writers to either write a work of fiction (a la Foyle's War), with invented characters encountering the problems and crises of a particular time, or tell the real story compellingly enough to make the truth interesting. Both of those may be more difficult to accomplish, however.

I'm also with you that it's easier to accept the combining of characters, the compression of time and place, and invented or inferred dialogue in stories set a comfortable distance from our time.

Full disclosure, though: I love Shakespeare's history plays, and he never let a few hundred facts get in the way of a ripping yarn.

As to the general question, I wouldn't historical inaccuracies so much if I knew people wouldn't assume accuracy and would do their research. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people assume movies based on true stories are accurate and shape their views based on them.

Sometimes the changes from reality shape a narrative. I really enjoy Bonnie and Clyde as a work of art. To some extent, the protagonists are misfits searching for meaning. But they are also portrayed as fighting against "the man" in robbing banks that kicking people out of their homes and farms. But apparently, the targets of their robberies were mostly small stores and gas stations. In other words, they were mostly victimizing small mom and pop operations, not powerful financial institutions. I think it's a great film, but part of it's greatness comes from ignoring the reality of who Bonnie and Clyde were.

I think the propaganda in inaccurate films can shape public opinion in damaging ways. Gone With the Wind is one of the most popular movies of all time, but it's all one of the most political destructive. It's basically includes an assemblage of ridiculous myths that were used to excuse racism of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras but later generations. For quite a while, Southerners and Southern sympathizers were mostly the ones that wrote about the period, and they came up with a lot of BS.

Agreed. Marion was a fascinating figure to me because, as a kid, I had devoured the Disney Swamp Fox episodes. When the Gibson movie came out, I was more than ready for an honest appraisal of what Marion had done and who he was, albeit in a bio-pic, especially b/c the Revolution has been underserved as a source for good popular moviemaking.

 Of course I should have known they'd make a botch of it. The treatment of slavery was the most obvious mistake, but in their effort (need?) to make the British as buffoonish and evil as the villains of the piece, they present the atrocity of the church-burning and various bits with the Cornwallis figure played by Tom Wilkinson that just do not fly at all. 

It was essentially Braveheart in buckskins and was just as awful a movie.

The part where the British burnt all those people in the church is a sort-of famous piece of propaganda that was made-up (supposedly by Benjamin Franklin) to pass around in Britain to make the war even more unpopular than it already was with the British public.

And there's some real British atrocities they could have used! The British decided to wreak havoc among the Southern states by urging the slaves to flee the plantations and fight with the British. And the slave population answered by rushing to the ports in the thousands. But they didn't serve with the redcoats. They were held captive on prison ships and were thus unable to help the American war effort by their labor. Many died of disease and starvation.

But you can see why the filmmakers decided they'd rather use a made-up atrocity against white people. It made the Americans look bad that such a huge number of slaves were so eager to abandon their masters to take a chance with the British 

I like it as a movie... in the same way that I enjoy Michael Curtiz's Charge of the Light Brigade as a movie. 

It barely makes a brush with the history, though.

Right. About all they got right was that there was a George Armstrong Custer.

Interesting about Bonnie & Clyde. It had quite an influence on fashions at the time. I am very conflicted about it myself, have the DVD but not quite in my all time faves list. It definitely is fantasy and manipulative in ways, yet they ultimately meet up with the real fate of the two historical individuals which sort of reedems it, like Thelma and Louise later. Gets them off the hook morally somehow as they pay for their sins in a visually impactful way.

I resisted ever making my way through Gone With The Wind, finally did so and didn't hate it so much as I thought, I expected to have to consign it with Birth Of A Nation, one of the most negatively impactful movies on America ever made.

Hmm, doesn't the word 'impactful' exist? Autocheck keeps scolding me on it! The again 'autocheck' doesn't seem to exist either. There could be an autocheck for biography films... then they'd at least be choices made rather than ignorance or callousness to fact shown.