Politically Correct History / Live-Action Films

aka: Film

• Whether The Birth of a Nation (1915) qualifies as politically-correct history or merely Jim Crow propaganda is something of a Mind Screw. The film did reflect the Dunning Thesis of Reconstruction, which claimed that the South were victims of the Northern Republicans and dangerous egalitarian sentiment to which the heroic(!) Ku Klux Klan was a tragically necessary corrective. This view of Reconstruction was the political orthodoxy of the time. Especially striking to modern viewers is the scene where the Klansmen and Northern whites who have settled in the South join forces to, as the title card puts it, "defend their Aryan birthright."
• Don't Worry Darling: Unusually for a midcentury America setting, there are several people of color in Victory, CA in longterm interracial marriages.^note Such marriages would have been legal in some states, including the state of California since 1948, but the couples have moved there from all over. Subverted, as the film is actually set in the modern day, and Victory is a nostalgic simulation of midcentury America that kept out the racism but kept in the patriarchal aspects.
• Gone with the Wind is more politically correct than Birth of a Nation in terms of building consensus. It avoids the controversial racism of Griffith's film via avoidance of blackface, and changing a Klan meeting in Margaret Mitchell's novel into a more "innocent" night of gentlemen getting drunk, which makes the film's basic internalization of the Dunning thesis more palatable to the mainstream audience. More dubious is its portrayal of the relationship between Scarlett and her slaves as one of friendship rather than one of master and slave.
• Song of the South features a sanitized version of the post-Civil War Deep South, something that people often criticize.
• Kingdom of Heaven is essentially the tale of a bunch of 12th-century secular humanists fighting for peace and tolerance, opposed by Templars both literal and figurative. Appropriately enough, one historical figure's name was changed from "Barisan" to "Godfrey", a homonym for his anachronistic stance on religion. Near the end of the film, Orlando Bloom's character gives a speech to the defenders of Jerusalem, in which he argues that the Christians have no special claim to the city above the claims of the Jews and Muslims. The population is shockingly open-minded about this statement. Just to make sure viewers got the point, all the priests are self-serving jerks, and the villains are turned into Templars (which is itself an issue; the real life Knights Templar were monks and by definition renounced all noble titles, therefore couldn't have held the positions of power many do in this movie), despite them having been secular nobles in Real Life. At one point a monk of The Knights Hospitallers, heavily implied to be a case of an Angel Unaware to boot, straight-up tells the protagonist that God prefers "right action" to religion.
• The 1972 musical 1776 originally featured a musical number in which the "conservatives" of the Continental Congress express their unwillingness to jeopardize their personal positions and wealth by supporting American independence. Though the song was historically accurate, producer Jack Warner's good friend President Richard Nixon objected to the scene on the basis that it depicted "conservatives" in a negative light, in spite of the difference in meaning between the term then and now. In an instance of Chief Executive Meddling, Warner had the sequence removed from the film at Nixon's behest, though copies of it survived, and the most recent Blu-Ray release has the sequence restored to the film.
• Mel Gibson's The Patriot (2000) exaggerates British atrocities during the American Revolutionary War whilst downplaying similar actions from the American side to non-existence. It also conveniently makes all of our hero's African-American farm laborers freedmen.
• In Sherlock Holmes (2009), Rachel McAdams plays Irene Adler. Adler has no problem running around London in very tight pants, and is depicted as something of a Victorian era Catwoman. In the original story "A Scandal in Bohemia", she goes out disguised as a boy, in male dress, and her impressive talent is carrying this off well enough to fool Holmes. The story praises Adler as the only woman able to outwit Holmes (three unnamed men are also mentioned); in the film, she's the only person who does it.
• Some viewers mistakenly accuse Hollywoodland of this trope, due to the presence of black patrons in an upper-class Hollywood restaurant in the 1950s. On the commentary, however, the director defends this, saying that in the 50s many of these restaurants were not segregated, and a number of popular Jazz musicians did frequent them.
• A weird in-universe example occurs in the movie C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, where the South won the American Civil War. After the war ends, there's a strong effort to repaint the North as honorable but misguided, with the issue of slavery swept under the rug. As the announcer put it, "The Civil War became civil". This is meant to parallel real-life whitewashing of the horrors of the Antebellum South - to the extent that the film highlights a fictional novel and subsequent musical production called "A Northern Wind."
• In Annie Get Your Gun, Annie gives up her sharp-shooting career to marry Frank Butler. In reality, the opposite was true: Butler began courting Annie Oakley after losing a sharp-shooting contest to her, and their marriage helped launch Oakley's public career. Considering it was made in the 50s, the film was politically correct history — for its time.
• Played with in Wild Wild West. Jim West is treated pretty much exactly as you'd expect a black man to be treated in the late 19th century... even though he's a commissioned officer in the Army, prior to when the first black man actually held such a rank at the time.
• Captain America: The First Avenger: The film was criticized for including Gabe Jones as part of the Howling Commandos, due to the fact that the army was still segregated at that point in history. However it's largely moot anyway since the Howling Commandos were handpicked by Captain America in the first place: strike forces assembled from different army units are "temporary" and don't have to adhere to certain regimental regulations, so Cap may have found a good use for Loophole Abuse. Otherwise, the film does a good job of averting this. Dum Dum is suspicious of Jim Morita since the latter is a Japanese-American and the lyrics to Cap's USO show song call the Germans "krauts". And we should probably consider that the Marvel Universe is a separate timeline to ours in any case so military segregation might well have been ended there prior to WW2.
• The live-action Beauty and the Beast (2017) has a racially diverse French village, with the priest himself being black. While that may be theoretically possible (though unlikely) in 18th Century France, the large number of black courtiers dancing in the prince's palace is not really possible. Then there's the interracial marriages among the French elite, Belle's two-centuries-out-of-place feminism, and commoners at the castle.
• In King David, starring Richard Gere, King David falls in love with Bathsheba and sends her husband, Uriah, to the front lines of an army to die. In the movie, Bathsheba claims that Uriah whips her to make David more sympathetic. In the actual story from The Bible, there is no mention of Uriah beating his wife, and even that wouldn't have been used to justify David's actions. The whole point of the story was that even King David was a flawed person. The film keeps a scene from the Bible in which the prophet Nathan chastises David for his sins, which leads to a Broken Aesop.
• In the Chinese martial arts biopic Ip Man, there are several changes to history to make the film more PRC-friendly. In the film, the title character is a bourgeois martial arts teacher who is forced to join the working class during the Japanese invasion. He then leaves the mainland for Hong Kong to escape the Japanese. In reality, Ip Man had a day job as a police officer and never worked as a laborer. Also, he was a supporter of the Kuomintang, the enemies of the Communists. He fled to Hong Kong to escape the Communists, not the Japanese.
• 55 Days at Peking shows the ordeal of foreigners in China during the Boxers' 55-day siege of the Legation Quarter in Peking before the armies of the Eight-Nation Alliance show up and put down the Boxer Rebellion. There's no mention of what happens next.
• The Shirley Temple movie, The Littlest Rebel, has Shirley being friends with the slaves that work on her father's plantation. When someone questions why the slaves would want to be freed, Shirley says, "Makes you think, doesn't it?" As if there's no problem with slavery. To be fair, they may have been going for Deliberate Values Dissonance here.
• A Man for All Seasons: Sir Thomas More is shown as a calm and rational judge who politely but firmly discusses his views with others. In reality, he was a Knight Templar who ruthlessly supported the suppression of "heretics," which included all Protestants. It also leaves out the scatological language he and his contemporaries used on both sides of the religious debate.
• The titular character in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010) is rebellious in ways which wouldn't even have occurred to girls of her day. She holds attitudes which would have shocked and offended proto-feminists of the era. Her father's former business partner offers her (an unmarried 19-year-old girl) a 50/50 partnership in a fledgling business as if it were no big deal and only a little strange.
• To some extent in X-Men: First Class. Sexism is still present, but the racism of the era is glossed over.
• The film Gladiator has Emperor Marcus Aurelius attempting to prevent his son Commodus from becoming emperor, stating his wish to end the Empire and return Rome to being a Republic, before being murdered by Commodus. In reality, none of this happened; Marcus specifically set up his son as his successor, and certainly no Roman emperor at this time would ever have considered returning to the Republic, nor was there ever a great deal of nostalgia for the Republic. After all, Julius Caesar was far more popular and well liked than the Senate.
• Annie (1999) features an interracial couple during a time period where it may not have been illegal there in New York City, but it certainly would have been frowned upon. Daddy Warbucks was a chairman on many boards and worked with the president. An interracial marriage could have caused him political and financial ruin.
• Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It (set in a British Colony in late 19th century Japan) ends with two interracial marriages. Being based on a Shakespeare script with ethnically ambiguous characters, this is never commented on.
• Haunted Mansion (2023): Despite being a wealthy landowner in the American South in the 19th century, Master Gracey married a biracial woman (who he clearly loved very much, as his attempts to contact her via Madame Leota is what led to all of the ghosts being in the mansion in the first place). He also seems to have no problem helping Ben in his mission to end the mansion's curse.
• If the movie Xica da Silva (released as Xica in the United States) is to be believed, at least some 18th-century Brazilians were well versed in Marxist-Leninist theory.
• Hostiles: While the film has plenty of Deliberate Values Dissonance in regards to the treatment of Native Americans in 19th century America, it completely avoids the subject of racism toward African Americans. The film portrays an army detachment with a black corporal whose race is never directly addressed. None of the white soldiers bat an eyelash at serving with or taking orders from a black man. While "buffalo soldiers" did serve in the Indian Wars, they were always in segregated units. The United Stated military did not begin desegregation until 1948. Rosalie also has no reaction to a black man presiding over the funeral of her family.
• Warm Springs:
  • Tom Loyless, manager of Warm Springs inn, was forced out of the newspaper business because he had "offended the sensibilities of a local civic group." In Real Life, Tom Loyless had been one of the few newspaper editors in Georgia to support Leo Frank, whose trial and lynching led to the rebirth of the KKK.
  • One of the black employees in the Warm Springs inn is surprised when a polio victim from New York wants to shake his hand.
• In The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the title don once reprimands the main character for sounding religiously intolerant towards what he believes to be some praying Moors. The literary Don Quixote would have never defended any kind of religious tolerance, however, as his medieval Christian ideals would have effectively set him against Islam by definition (in fact, he does occasionally speak against "pagan" Muslims in the actual text). Possibly an in-universe example, though, given that the one from the film is not the real Don Quixote, but a modern man who believes himself to be him, and who might be not familiar enough with the book (not many Spaniards are in real life, actually) to know how would have Quixote reacted to the Moors in his place. Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote the original book, would likely be ever more hostile toward Muslims than usual, as he had been tortured while imprisoned by them, and thus quite unlikely to have characters show tolerance.
• The movie Overlord (2018) is a World War II movie about a secret mission to destroy a radar tower the night before D-Day, featuring a paratrooper unit where not only is the main character black in an otherwise all white unit, but their commanding officer is black too, in a time when units weren't integrated and African-Americans would never have authority over white people.
• Muppet Treasure Island uses this as a joke in the beginning of the movie.
  Rizzo: (about Blind Pew) It's some kind of a blind fiend.
  Gonzo: I think they prefer "visually challenged fiend."
• Lady Macbeth: The film generally doesn't gloss over classism and racism of the time period. In the case of Teddy however, no one reacts at all to the fact that his mother was black. Though it's not impossible, the reaction would far more likely be negative, with his existence considered a scandal that had to be hushed up, rather than having his white father Alexander's family openly care for him.
• Fear Street:
  • Zigzagged. The 1666 Puritans have a very low (period appropriate) opinion of same-gender relationships, but don't seem to have any racial bias, as Black people are living among them without any notable signs of discrimination. However, since the entire 1666 segment of the story is framed as a vision by Deena imagining herself in the role of Sarah Fier, and the real Sarah shown later in the film is played by a white actress, it is implied that the cast are just playing parts assigned to them by Deena's vision. Additionally, racial attitudes towards Black people hadn't really solidified yet, with the majority view the White colonists had at the time being one of ambivalence.
  • Solomon is shown treating Sarah as an equal and a friend. And although he lacks the vocabulary for it, he shows a 21st century view of homosexuality. This is a Bait-and-Switch to the viewer (who probably until then assumed they would be like him if they lived back then) for when he is revealed to be the Big Bad.
• The Woman King: The Agojie are portrayed as being anti-slavery despite the reality being the opposite, and the Dahomey's practices in general are heavily toned down to keep them sympathetic. One notable example is Nanisca pressuring King Ghezo into ending the slave trade in favor of trading palm oil, which is portrayed as the more moral route. In reality, King Ghezo was pressured by the British government, which was trying to end the transatlantic slave trade, and went back to selling slaves once trading palm oil proved to be less profitable.
• Gods and Generals has this all over the place, not for nothing has it been denounced as Confederate propaganda. Stonewall Jackson is portrayed as being privately against slavery despite being a Confederate general, of which there is no historical evidence; the only two black characters support the Southern cause, and one of them, Jackson's cook, is portrayed as a freedman when he was actually a slave. The Confederates also discuss the possibility of freeing the slaves and arming them to fight the war; in real life, only arming the slaves was suggested, much later in the war as a desperate measure, and it was shut down as madness.