Period film/TV that get the details frustratingly wrong

Not one particular movie but a lot of historical films made in the 70’s where they insisted on using funky 70’s music in the background.

Stirrups in Gladiator (2000). About four centuries too early!

Gladiator 2 also a had scene where a character was feeding a bunch of Rhode Island Red and ISA Brown chickens. Didn't exist back then.

Every last single one of them.

The Gilded Age

Thread closed.

Although mostly a great movie, (which I thought at the time. I haven't seen it since), I was furious when, in Born on the Fourth of July, there was a scene set in 1968 and Don McLean's American Pie was prominently playing in the background.

The song wasn't released until the end of 1971, and was one of the top 3 biggest selling hits of 1972!

Sometimes a song can be used out of context if it sets the right tone, but this was such a huge anachronism, it bothered the hell out of me!

Tuesday Weld and Ann-Margret's flowing locks in THE CINCINNATI KID (1965) even though it's supposed to be set in the 1930s.

Also being hatless in public.

The 60s hairstyles in Doctor Zhivago. Geraldine Chaplin’s pristine dress when getting off the train from Paris also bothered me. It was gorgeous though.

R7, you wouldn't even know it's a period film based on that picture

Joanie's perm and Chachi's feathered hair in a 1950s setting.

Last night I was watching a movie called "Galveston" with Ben Foster and one of the Fannings. It was set in 1998 and there was a long scene where neither Foster nor the director or anyone on the set noticed Foster's iPhone was prominently sticking out of his back pocket. Ooof.

"Thoroughly Modern Millie" is set in 1922, but the fashions are clearly late '20s.

Skirts didn't rise to the knees until 1925/1926.

Well it is "Thoroughly Modern” Millie, R13!

Anybody remember the short-lived “Rags to Riches”? Set in the early 60s but the girls all wore leggings and had crimped long hair.

Vivian Vance's hair in Being the Ricardos

They never seem to get the hair right.

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) takes place in the early 1900s but all the young women wear '40s inspired hairstyles instead of the Gibson Girl pompadours that were all the rage at the time.

The ENTIRE production design of Pride and Prejudice with Olivier and Garson.

"The Age of Innocence" received a lot of favorable attention for it's period authenticity. But it wasn't, very.

I know various consultants and antique dealers and art experts who advised on the film. But for a film that tried so hard it fell short of achieving a sense of 1870s New York in its interiors, table settings, and very visible props. I assume that for all the excellent intentions, the expert opinions were tinkered with often and rather badly.

Art and furniture and silver and table settings and decorative objects of the houses of prominent New Yorkers in the 1870s had s range of styles and dates and tastes, but the film mixed them all up in a jumble.

[quote] it fell short of achieving a sense of 1870s New York in its interiors

And exteriors. The CGI, or whatever it was called back then, for the city views of New York City was awful.

R18's ENTIRE colostomy BAG.

The mother's 1980s poodle perm in A Christmas Story. No sane woman would be caught looking like that in the 1940s.

This is a little petty for a much-beloved move, but Melinda Dillon's hair in A Christmas Story always bugged me.

Robert Redford's hair in almost every fucking movie he was in.

I never watched The Waltons back in the 70s but started watching the reruns a bit a few years back. Toward the end of the series the girls were wearing 70s designer jeans and had feathered hair

[quote]"The Age of Innocence" received a lot of favorable attention for it's period authenticity. But it wasn't, very.

I remember there was a party scene where the wallpaper was full of female nudes and everyone was oblivious to it.

I don't think that was prohibited during the Victorian era when furniture legs were covered and male/female authors were arranged separately in libraries.

R22 and R23 jinxed each other!

“Mad Men” did pretty well on a lot of things. But there was an episode maybe 3/4 of the way through when Joan had a friend visit from out of town and no effort was made to make her hair look late 60s. It was this shoulder length curly mass that looked contemporary. And nobody commented on it in episode critiques, not even Tom and Lorenzo.

Which is funny, R17, as the few movies set in the 1940s now try to style every woman’s hair as if they all looked like Veronica Lake or Rita Hayworth. There were a lot of very ugly women’s hairdos in the 40s and they get glossed over.

I don't know if it's anachronistic or not but Kenneth Branagh's mustache in those Agatha Christie movies is an abomination

R16, and Nicole Kidman's fillers and botox in the same film

It's true that more often than not the hairstyles are all wrong for whatever period they're supposed to be in.

R31 is correct - you have a big budget movie with a big name star - do you want give her "ugly" (currently unfashionable) clothes and hair that are 100% accurate to the period in the film, or have her still seem sexy (and certainly at least attractive) to the beauty conventions of the time the film is being made? They usually choose some variation of a contemporary look with slight period adjustments or a more accurate period look that is still modified heavily by contemporary tastes.

It usually works well enough when the film first comes out, but becomes glaringly obvious when the then contemporary styling becomes just as dated as the actual period styling they were dancing around.

MISS Michael Learned’s severe facelift midway through The Waltons was not very Depression-era housewife.

Julie Christie's 60s hair was completely out of place in Doctor Zhivago.

Streisand's hair in Funny Girl.

I never realized Datalounge was filled entirely with hair stylists.

R36 It's filled entirely with gay men. We're all armchair hair stylists.

I only watched the first episode of the Shogun remake, but the hair and fashion was all wrong. In fairness, Japanese period dramas get it wrong too. Sexually mature adult men shaved their pate. Only young men sexually available to older men (wakashu) had normal hair like you see in the series. Having a full head of hair was a marker of sexual availability to older men.

As for the women, elite women shaved their eyebrows and blackened their teeth. The slutty looking chick in Shogun seemed so out of place that I didn't bother watching. And I say all that as someone who loved the book when I was a teenager.

Scorsese's "Silence" did a lot better job capturing that period. The fashions were wrong, too, but most of the characters were peasants, so they would not have followed the fashions. I didn't even mind "The Last Samurai."

Kevin Costner's "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" because the whole effin' thing was wrong.

r39 I've never seen it. Was it set in a particular year (or even century)?

Haha. [R40] It was notionally set during the reign of Britain's King Richard I (1189-1199), by way of 1991, with Costner's feathered mullet and a Bryan Adams theme ballad.

The Edge of Love, with Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller. Set in the 40s, but the characters look like they went shopping at Anthropologie

Every WWII movie filmed in the 60s, the women had contemporary hair. The worst one is In Harms Way, there was an officers club dance and all the women wore 60s cocktail dresses. It’s like they didn’t even try.

R43, I saw The War Lover, from the 60s but set during WW2 and Shirley Ann Field looks so 60s

Nobody puts Baby in Keds and a perm.

The hairstyles on Mindhunter are distractingly 21st century.

A House is Not a Home is set during the Roaring 20s but the hair and makeup are so 60s

I'll tell you something that got it right. David Simon's The Deuce on HBO. He nailed mid-70s Times Square.

Ryan Murphy and co. didn’t make an attempt at early 80s hair in the Normal Heart film.

I really enjoyed that show, r48. I watched it with my mom. She was a teenager in the mid-70s and said the clothes and hairstyles were dead on. We usually don't like the same shows so it's nice to be able to talk about something.

I liked it way more than The Wire

I know we're supposed to be a post-racial society, but I still cringe at historical dramas that show POC as aristocrats, or suggest that it was common for them (or women) to own property, have a voice, etc. We're not doing future generations any favors by washing over racism, classism, or misogyny - most of these kids won't discern that societal prejudice is deeply systemic.

Ginger, 1942.

Not the first image one comes up with when thinking about 1940's hairdos.

Ginger was in costume for the very first Roper Romp Bar Crawl R52

Even when they curl actresses hair for movies set in the 1930s - 1950s, the curls are so loose and floppy-looking compared to how the real thing looked, probably because they don’t use the right techniques and actresses don’t want to get perms

Always feel a bit betrayed by all the PDAs in 18th/19th century period dramas. This is especially apparent in recent British productions of Pride and Prejudice.

I think it was the one with Colin Firth that had Darcy and Elizabeth smooching in the carriage at the end. Ridiculous. She might as well have been sucking his dick.

R52 in a film set in the roaring 20s…

“Dazed and Confused”, however, gets it mostly right.

In the Cate Blanchett movie in which she played Elizabeth I, the music underscoring one of the most dramatic moments was Elgar (was it the Enigma Variations? ——can’t remember). I finally calmed down and said “get over yourself. After all, they’re not lighting the sets with candles “.

Any period film that has women walking around in public with their hair down.

The Crown series had young Queen Elizabeth's (played by Claire Foy) hair all wrong. It was distracting.

And to a lesser degree, if you're going to have different actresses play a character at different stages of her life, at least have some continuity. Going from Foys's big blue eyes to Olivia Colman's brown -- you couldn't put some blue contacts on the old broad?

The thing about period films/tv is that everybody is in the style of that year, which is not what happens IRL. Depending on the socioeconomic status of the characters, some would be in older styles. For example, most of us are old enough to have been around in the 1980s. We can all remember people back then who were still in the styles of the 1970s and even 1960s. This is never reflected in movies and tv shows.

Something that's set in the 1920s and all the women have bobbed hair and look like flappers - there were many women back then who wouldn't have looked out of place in the Victorian era.

Cars too. I don’t know anything about cars but I do notice in daily life theres always a spread of old to new. Movies, especially ones set in the 50s, love to populate them with 50s cars all in perfect condition.

I find it really annoying that anything old and not American is often portrayed by giving everyone a British accent - regardless of the setting.

R63 I think it's because to Americans, the British accent sounds archaic, so it's utilized in movies set in the distant past (e.g. Ancient Rome).

The irony is that Received Pronunciation was not developed until the 1800s, so movies/shows set before then that make use of RP (Shakespeare's time or the American Revolution) are anachronistic.

In fact, according to linguists/historians, the English spoken during that time sounded closer to the American accent.

r64 that's what I've always heard. Pre-1800s English people sounded more like Americans.

I remember there was some criticism of Barbra wearing a snood in a post-war scene in The Way We Were. It was said that snoods were out by then but Barbra insisted on wearing one.

R62 they hire cars from collectors who won’t allow them to get scuffed up for the sake of realism

Oh for sure. It just takes you out of the scene when the cars look so pristine.

The Battle Of The Bulge - Where was all the snow? Some patchy snow, not the heavy snow that trapped an army.

Why all the blue skies? Where were the clouds and fog that hampered air support?

The terrain looked nothing like the Ardennes. It was filmed in Spain.

R7- Their long straight ( both beautiful by the way) hair could not look more 1970’s if they tried.

On the TV show the Waltons the Waltons girls had long straight 1970s hair but it was supposed to be 1932 1933 when women had short bob hair. Even when guest women appeared on the show like a love interest for John boy they all had long straight 70s hair which was the polar opposite of the hair that women had in the 1930s.

Just watched the final season of "Wolf Hall" on PBS. There were Black and other nonwhite actors playing roles as courtiers and officials in the early 16th century. It's factually wrong, although nonwhite actors playing historical persons who were white is acceptable in the early 21st century. And it is different from Bridgerton, which is a account of a fictional society set in the late 18th/early 19th centuries.

Were there Black people in Tudor England? Yes. And they were not enslaved people. There was even a Black African musician at the court of Henry VII and Henry VIII.

But this current production has Black actors playing elite roles. Again, it's acceptable in the early 21st century. But will it cause confusion?

[Quote] In fact, according to linguists/historians, the English spoken during that time sounded closer to the American accent.

This is completely untrue and linguists have repeatedly proven it wrong. But people keep repeating it.

(I’m American by the way.)

We know this because people who learned English in early modern times sometimes wrote books to help others speak it too, and they included pronunciation guides. This video is extremely helpful to show how this worked and what pronunciation was actually like in 1590. It’s clearly a form of British English rather than American English.

I don't think it will cause confusion, r71. People know that they're watching a piece of entertainment, not a documentary. I thought r51's argument was pretty weak. Future generations will understand that 19th century landed British gentry weren't actually black. It's just a way of employing a larger pool of talented actors, not all of whom are lily white.

or we could just have a wider range of stories than British court pieces

I'll forgive Robin Hood just because of Alan Rickman's hilariously villainous portrayal of the Sheriff.

I think one of the biggest mistakes Hollywood has always made is making everything too squeaky clean especially old Westerns. Men did not wear clean western shirts with pearl buttons and bolos. If you want authentic Western, Deadwood is spot on. Dirty, the saloon whores aren't wearing pretty dresses and feathers, and the language was very colorful. Whoever did the show put a lot of research into the speech of the time and place.

R55, I found that a nice departure from no pda at all.

I remember when I first saw "The Grifters" I was sort of disoriented since I tried to place the events of a movie in a particular era, based on its art direction, and had no way of doing it. It was based on a novel from 1963, it was *supposedly* set in the 80s/early 90s, but it was also going for the film noir visuals and aesthetic. I still don't know what to make of it as much as I enjoy the movie.

In "The Fall of the Roman Empire," Sophia Loren playing the daughter of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, emerges from the Roman hinterland, resplendent in sumptuous fur-lined cloak. In reality, no high-born Roman noble would ever wear fur. It was seen as barbaric and a sign of being of low-born or Germanic stock.

The Romans preferred wools and linens and would don several layers of tunics to stay warm out in the chilly borderlands.

My husband and I were invited to a dinner party by a woman I used to be closer friends with. She's making an effort to stay in touch, which is admirable, even though she was disappointed in me for not going to her trans daughter's bat mitzvah (I was out of town on work).

After I agreed to this, she told me that another White/Asian gay couple she met recently will also be joining the dinner party. I find it strange that straight people try to set us gay people up with each other, even if we're married.

SueEllen at R79, you been drinking again?

Somebody said that the UK or the BBC whoever products these costume dramas require all UK productions to hire people of color so in contemporary media, it’s no big deal but can be a bit jarring in period pieces.

I can’t imagine anybody being cool with a white Kunta Kinte though.

There was a British adaptation of Little Dorrit years ago. One of the characters was played by Freema Agyeman and that the character was an orphan raised to be the companion to the daughter of a wealthy man. I forget the details but there is one hair raising scene where she is castigated for trying to rise above her station; that she should be grateful for her position no matter how badly she was treated. Dickens only said she had dark hair and eyes, no further specification. Having a Black actress play the part resonated so much more.

Every western tv show had actresses in blue eyeshadow in the 1960s.

All those tv westerns had women with bouffants and guys with Elvis hair in the Wild West

Funny Girl. Barbra with her 1960s hairdo and Egyptian eyeliner in a movie that took place in the 1920s.

Similarly, Lady Sings the Blues. Diana in her 1970s fashions in a movie that took place in the 1930s and 40s.

Babylon. Nothing in that movie looked like the 1920s.

Costumes designed by Bob Mackie, no less, r86.

Cameron Diaz in Gangs Of New York - A filthy slum in NYC in the 1860s and there she is with highlighted hair and a red carpet makeup job.

Another movie that got it right was [italic]Dick[/italic]. I remember some of the girls' clothing as having been very specific to that early 70s time period.

[italic]The Cincinnati Kid[/italic] was also frustrating because Rip Torn's wardrobe seemed to be correct (I'm not an expert, but the collar shape and hair seemed right to me). That contrasted with how anachronistic McQueen and Ann-Margret's hairstyles were.

Heather Graham in From Hell. All the other street whores in the movie look appropriately grimy but she looks like she just got back from the beauty salon

When I first watched [italic]Good Morning, Vietnam[/italic], Robin Williams' broadcasts were anachronistic. At this point, I can't give you the specifics, but I remember thinking: No,they didn't say that back, then. The director seemed happy to just let Williams riff, but it was "off" to someone who grew up then.

On last Sunday's "The Gilded Age," set in the 1880s, Peggy responded when her doctor boyfriend told her a story about a patient by saying, "Wow."

The 1960s’.

All of those Fifties Westerns with leading ladies heavily made up and low-cut dresses.

Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke - her whole look, basically

I caught that too R94.

hair is the detail that gives away poor costume and makeup choices

R13: Even with the inaccuracies, every once in a while, I'll paly the clip.

One thing movies and shows get wrong about the Victorian era is that so many men had beards, mustaches, sideburns, etc. You see something set in that time period, and the actors are mostly clean shaven

Also a lot of women and even young girls in the 50s had those short, permed Mamie Eisenhower 'dos but in movies and shows set in the 50s, the female characters have long, flowing hair.