The Guns of August
1965
I enjoy Barbara Tuchman’s books and am sad that we won’t be getting any more from her, but this documentary-version of her book The Guns of August teeters between being a good 100-minute video condensation of the text and being a tacky paste-up job complete with bad accents on the quotations.
That comment aside, I can say that this video is both valuable and reprehensible: as a Tuchman history work I can’t rate it, as I’ve not read the book itself yet and therefore cannot say whether this is a faithful representation of it or not, but certainly Tuchman’s work didn’t quote international statesmen with phonetic spelling to exaggerate nationalistic stereotypical accents such as are employed in this production to its full discredit; the other major fault of this video (again, not necessarily of Tuchman’s book) is a rampant judgemental hindsight…and sometime the judgemental tone is downright bigoted, as quick to generalize Them and Us as was the press coverage of the day, which is unfortunate to say the least. (Why do I have it in my collection if I’m so ready to trash it? Because it has scads of documentary film footage, mostly all-too-fleeting, to illuminate many otherwise too-distant parts of the story.)
Comments © 2009 Mark Ellis Walker, except as noted, and no claim is made to the images and quoted lines.