The movies have a long history of telling true stories by making them completely untrue. I’m not talking about taking a movie about a famous person, like Night and Day‘s telling of Cole Porter’s life, and highly fictionalizing it to the extent that it’s almost completely created from scratch. And I’m not talking about alternate history movies where famous events turn out a different way than they really did, like in Inglourious Basterds. No, I’m talking about movies like tonight’s showing of The Great Dictator by, as it turns out, the great Charlie Chaplin, where it’s about a specific figure, in this case Adolf Hitler, but the name is changed to Adenoid Hynkel. Is there an advantage to doing it that way instead of just lampooning the real person? Absolutely, but there are drawbacks, too. Let’s look at five famous examples where the stories are eerily familiar but the none of the names ring a bell.
The Great Dictator starts us off and it’s probably obvious why Chaplin chose to fictionalize his account of Nazism and Hitler to the point of changing all the names. He wanted to make a movie with farcical elements to lampoon Hitler and with the war in Europe underway, making a satire at face value may have not come off well at the time. Real people were suffering and dying in Europe and a comedy about it probably wouldn’t have seemed in good taste. At the same time, Chaplin wanted to make very sharp and specific points about Nazism and if he could make up his own story, all the better. Now, this was at a time when alternate history movies weren’t a commonplace thing and may have confused the audience. I’m not lying when I tell you I spoke with several people back when Inglourious Basterds was released who were confused by it because World War II didn’t actually end that way. Well, no, it didn’t, it was just an alternate take. People are used to alternate takes in science fiction and on The Twilight Zone but, even now, there’s confusion if it’s spelled out plainly in the marketing materials. Also, when it comes to political satire like this, I think it’s always better to create your own characters and run with them. I think Chaplin made a terrific movie and I don’t care what people say about the final speech (the usual complaint is that he steps out of character to which I say, “So what?”), I think it’s great.
Citizen Kane came to the cinema just a year later and, like The Great Dictator, everybody knew who it was really about. Of course, Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz had good reason not to call the film Citizen Hearst or Big Bill Hearst or Willy and Marion Take a Holiday (although I think that last one would have really caught on). That reason involved the real William Randolph Hearst being a very powerful man at the time who, even with the name changes, threatened all kinds of action against RKO, up to and including no more advertising ever in Hearst controlled papers, including reviews (unless they were bad, presumably). Without name changes who knows how far he would have gone. I assume, as a public figure, no defamation suit would have held water but he could have filed them, one after another, just to run Welles and RKO into ruin. Besides, like Chaplin, Welles wanted to tell a story and Hearst’s story needed some changes. For one thing, Marion Davies actually was talented and Mankiewicz knew that so that part of the story would have been rather boring. Instead of Kane forcing a bar hall singer to become an opera diva, the movie would have shown Hearst trying to force a very gifted comedienne to become a still gifted but not as gifted dramatic actress. Not exactly the stuff dramatic tension is made of. Still, even with all the changes, it’s said that the very character of Susan Alexander is what upset Hearst the most. He could take himself being dragged through the mud, but not Marion.
Speaking of Orson Welles, he’s on the list again, this time as Clarence Darrow only in this movie, he’s called Jonathan Wilk and he’s defending two guys who sure seem a lot like Leopold and Loeb but are named instead Judd Steiner and Artie Strauss. The movie is Compulsion and the reason for all the name changes is a little more mysterious given that the real story isn’t that far off from the fictionalized account. There are issues of what was allowed at the time, too, but it was 1959 and if certain things couldn’t be shown explicitly they could certainly be implied at that point. Still, the film sticks fairly closely to most of the original case, including finding the pair of glasses that eventually did do the real Leopold and Loeb in. There’s talk that there were rights issues with using the real names but, again, they were all public figures thanks to the trial and trial transcripts, unless specifically sealed, are also a part of the public record. Hell, you can actually look up and read the real Clarence Darrow’s 12 hour long summation because, no matter how much the Darrow estate may have liked to claim that was their property, it was the state’s. So why not just use the real names and use a little dramatic license? In this case, I’d say it has more to do with how they wanted to structure the movie and portray the not so famous around the main characters. Still, that’s been done a million times in other movie by simply changing the names of the minor characters while retaining the names of the major ones.
We went from Hitler to Hearst and then connected Hearst to Leopold and Loeb via Orson Welles’ Clarence Darrow. As long as we’re connecting the dots, Clarence Darrow may as well take us to Inherit the Wind, where his name is Henry Drummond. Now in this case, it’s open and shut why the names were changed. The playwrights themselves, Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, even explained it in interviews. The answer? They were making a movie about McCarthyism and the right of intellectual freedom. If you read about the actual Scopes Monkey Trial you will find that the state of Tennessee’s Butler Act, which outlawed teaching evolution, wasn’t enforced because Tennessee required its teachers to use textbooks teaching evolution. In other words, the act was a just a way to please a specific fundamentalist subset. Then, those for the act and against it actually got together (no, seriously, you can read about it) and decided to have a trial to… wait for it… bring publicity to the town. So, basically, the whole trial was one big carnival-like affair where lawyers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan could do a lot of showboating for the crowds. That didn’t interest Lawrence and Lee so they used the skeletal framework to create a more potent piece on, as they said, intellectual freedom. All I know is, Spencer Tracy kicks major but in his courtroom scenes. And Fredric March ain’t exactly a slacker. It’s very play-like but the performances are great.
And while we’re on the subject of crimes and trials we might as well go into our last selection, Badlands, all about Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, or as I like to call them, Kit Carruthers and Holly Sargis. Oh no, wait, I mean as the film likes to call them. I call them Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. The film was written and directed by Terence Mallick who would make only one other film for the next 20 plus years, Days of Heaven in 1978. Once he got to the late nineties, he started up again and is now going stronger than ever. In the beginning, though, their was Badlands and it still stands as one of the best movies of the seventies, poetic and beautiful. And that’s the explanation for the name changes right there. Mallick was never interested in making a true crime biopic like Bonnie and Clyde. He was, as he still is, interested in making a meditation of American life, in a way that only Mallick can do. In the end, Badlands has as much to do with history as Days of Heaven or Tree of Life. It may have as its basis a real event with real people but it’s just a way in for Mallick to muse on the culture of troubled youths living inside fairy tales of their own violent making.
There are many more examples of this, even some more examples of the stories listed above. Leopold and Loeb finally got a movie that uses their actual names (Swoon) but just five years after the actual crime, Rope was written, a play based on the characters but having nothing much at all to do with reality. Hitchock filmed it nearly two decades later with Jimmy Stewart, Farley Granger, and John Dall. Other real life figures, like serial killer Ed Gein, have been called the inspiration for many movie killers, from Norman Bates to Leatherface. Given how much the movies changes history in biopics, it’s a wonder they ever bother to change the names at all. I mean, if you’re going to make up most of the story anyway, and we all know you’re going to do that, why bother changing the names? Well, in the end, it somehow comes off as being a little more honest, doesn’t it? By changing the names, they’re admitting that what you’re seeing is fictionalized, not trying to give themselves a little legitimacy by using the old “based on a true story” line. As always, though, I don’t care what name they use, as long as the movie’s good. A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet but no amount of “real history” can improve the aroma of a stinker.