The entire population of a small American village is herded into the local church by British soldiers. The commanding officer sneeringly orders that the doors be locked and the church set ablaze. The villagers - men, women and children - die, screaming, as the officer and his men ride away . . .
This scene from the new Mel Gibson blockbuster, The Patriot, purports to illustrate the behaviour of British troops towards the people of South Carolina during the American War of Independence. The film-makers (to add insult to injury, the movie is directed by a German, Roland Emmerich) are unperturbed by the fact that no record exists of such an atrocity - reminiscent of Nazi activities during the second World War - or that the film is described by The Hollywood Reporter as "an unconvincing rewrite of American history that comes perilously close to spoof".
Rotters, cads, scoundrels and bounders - there's nothing like an Englishman to get audiences booing at Hollywood movies these days. In The Patriot, described by one reviewer as "Braveheart in buckskin", Gibson plays the commander of the South Carolina Militia, irregulars who harassed British forces during the War of Independence with their guerilla attacks and unconventional tactics.
The English actor, Jason Isaacs, plays the reprehensible villain, Colonel William Tavington, who relishes shooting wounded prisoners and murdering the families of his enemies. Although The Patriot is described by its producers as fictional, it is claimed Tavington is based on Banastre Tarleton, an officer who subsequently spent 20 years as an MP for Liverpool (it will hardly spoil The Patriot to reveal that his fictional alter ego meets a quicker, gorier end in the final reel).
Liverpool city council has passed a resolution condemning the depiction of Tarleton, who was a hate figure to 18th-century South Carolinans, but whose activities are still the subject of some dispute among historians. The city's mayor told reporters that there was "no real evidence" that Tarleton was the sort of war criminal depicted in The Patriot, and that the filmmakers should publicly apologise.
All of which would be something of a storm in a Boston teacup were it not for the fact that British - or, more specifically, English - commentators are becoming increasingly agitated by the depiction of their compatriots in Hollywood films. If they're not being unjustly demonised, it is argued, then they are being written out of history in crassly distorted commercialisations of true events. The second World War movie, U- 571 (which opened last month in the UK but doesn't arrive here until August) provoked a storm of criticism for depicting the capture of the Nazis' Enigma code machine by the US navy. In reality, the device was captured by the crew of the British destroyer, HMS Bulldog, who were decorated for their heroism in disabling and seizing a German submarine, and risking their lives to retrieve the machine.
In a Commons motion, British MPs expressed their regret over U-571, which they said had "detracted from the valour of the British sailors concerned", while the Culture Secretary, Chris Smith, found it a "little galling" that the Americans were taking credit for British wartime heroics. Letterwriters to UK newspapers have suggested that Hollywood will soon be showing how "the US conducted the brilliant rescue operation at Dunkirk".
It probably doesn't help that the screenwriter of The Patriot, Robert Rodat, also wrote Saving Private Ryan, in which it seemed to be possible to trek across Normandy in June 1944 without spotting evidence of a single British soldier, or indeed, even mentioning that Operation Overlord was anything but an all-American operation.
It wasn't always this way - most classic war movies of the 1950s and 1960s featured Anglo-American casts - William Holden and Jack Hawkins setting out to blow up The Bridge on the River Kwai; Gregory Peck and David Niven trying to do the same thing to The Guns of Navarone; Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood parachuting behind enemy lines in Where Eagles Dare. But Vietnam and the counter-culture put paid to Hollywood's taste for epic war movies for more than a decade, and when it returned to the subject, it was a generation further removed from the events it depicted. Such peripheral niceties as the involvement of Britain in the second World War clearly seemed to be of little importance (and after all, hadn't Hollywood been ignoring the huge sacrifices on the Russian front for 40 years?).
In reality, the English are not the worst offended against by The Patriot. African-Americans are likely to be surprised by the esteem in which their forebears are held in the film's version of life in the southern colonies. In the words of the San Francisco Chronicle: "The slaves are so cordial and upbeat you fear for the entire future of the blues".
THE Patriot is not a historical text; it's a big, dumb, not unenjoyable, summer blockbuster. To expect historical accuracy in such circumstances is naive. And in any case, even the best historical movies are ultimately works of fiction; reshaping the (often confused) historical record for the purposes of entertainment or art. But the plaintive response to these films, and to previous movies ranging from medieval times (Braveheart) to the recent past (In the Name of the Father) reveals an unease in English society about the loss of its place in the world.
In a way, they have only themselves to blame. Nobody does villainy so well as good, classically trained English actors, many of whom have grown very rich as a result. The trend has increased over the last decade. Since the end of the Cold War, Hollywood has been casting around rather desperately for new baddies, preferably ones who won't offend the sensibilities of America's own ethnic minorities. What could be better than a seemingly inexhaustible supply of white, male, well-trained villains? And where would the Die Hard movies have been without Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons? Gary Oldman and Tim Roth have also done very nicely out of the British baddie boom, while it's no coincidence that the biggest bogeyman of recent popular culture, Hannibal Lecter, has been portrayed on screen by two British actors, Anthony Hopkins and Brian Cox. An extraterrestrial seeking to learn about Earth from recent Hollywood movies would conclude that the greatest threat faced by modern society was from plummy-voiced chaps with a taste for elaborate, sadistic practical jokes.
Another of this year's big summer blockbusters, Gone in 60 Seconds, sees Nicolas Cage going head-to-head with a psychopathic English gangster (Christopher Eccleston) who has a taste for early 20th-century wooden furniture (Brit baddies often have little tics or fetishes which suggest none too subtly that they might be gay, thus providing a satisfying contrast with red-blooded American males such as Cage or Bruce Willis).
IT'S not surprising that the fashion for English baddies should have spilled over into a handful of quasihistorical dramas, of which The Pat- riot is just the latest. Braveheart, Rob Roy, Michael Collins and In the Name of the Father have all set angst-ridden heroes from the Celtic countries against the amoral scoundrels of the English imperium. These major studio productions are not made with local audiences in mind (although Scottish and Irish audiences may have loved them); they merely take the British baddie to a new level.
For an Irish viewer, there is a certain amount of schadenfreude to be derived from English annoyance at these films. After all, we're used to gross, unthinking stereotypes of our own country from across the water, so it's rather enjoyable to see the shoe on the other foot. In Britain, the most outraged expostulations come from the true-blue Tory press, the very same quarter which usually tries to position the UK as near as possible to the US and as far away as it can from Europe (where they do try to make accurate, and often rather dull, historical movies).
There is a touch of the jilted suitor about these complaints, along with a very English, post-imperial astonishment that anyone could possibly have negative feelings about the British Empire and its aftermath. But they really haven't that much to complain about - in movies, as in music, the devil has the best tunes and Jason Isaacs has by far the best role in The Patriot - all curling lip and scornful tone, he clearly relishes being the biggest, baddest baddie in town. In such a situation, who but an idiot would want to be Mel Gibson?
The Patriot opens next Friday. Gone in 60 Seconds and U-571 open in August
