Rating: 
Summary: a great antidote to Hollywood's political claptrap
Review: Roquemore is a guy with a skillful pen and a highly sensitive BS detector, which goes off every time a Hollywood movie tries to foist some piece of ideological stupidity on us customers. One good sign for this book is the ire it seems to raise among "professional" historians, particularly those with a vested interest in being lefter-than-thou.
Another plus: Roquemore knows military history and is terrific on the history behind those movies.
Rating: 
Summary: A waste of time
Review: Roquemore understands neither history nor movies. He judges his chosen titles according to one standard -- the historical "truth" as he sees it, with no room for interpretation or speculation. There is no understanding of the complexity of historical study, and no understanding of the interplay of fact, collective memory and myth-making that inevitably informs any historical film. His readings of history are consistently reactionary -- he belittles the 1960s counterculture, for example, and would have us believe that the 1968 demonstrations in Chicago did nothing to sway public opinion against the Vietnam War. When reviewing Oliver Stone's self-evidently absurd JFK, he refuses to delve into the most interesting issue -- the abundance of conspiracy theories on the assassination, the reasons for their existence, and the merits and demerits of their various expounders -- because, as he makes clear, he doesn't think there is anything to add to the Warren report. Moreover, Roquemore's film culture is shallow and far more influenced by middle-of-the-road Hollywood values than he would have us believe. He discusses a number of versions of the Wyatt Earp story, but omits the greatest of them, John Ford's My Darling Clementine. Ditto with film versions of The Front Page -- he doesn't mention His Girl Friday, which turns the main reporter character into a woman and makes the movie even while consciously altering the source material. Roquemore's only real merit is thinking up a great idea for a book. What a shame someone else didn't write it.PS -- Roquemore lives in the Chicago area, according to the dust jacket, so you might want to take the geographical proximity of the two previous reader-reviewers into account when assessing their takes on his work.
Rating:
Summary: Right-Wing HIstory Goes to the movies
Review: The author's historiographic slant is extremely conservative. He claims that the portrait of "nuts and bolts plantation operations" in Gone With the Wind, is "right on the money". Reviewing Ken Loach's Land and Freedom he denies that Franco was a fascist. Of Platoon he claims that Oliver Stone vastly exaggerates the extent of atrocities like My Lai. So this is historical film as seen through the eyes of a "history buff" apparently unacquainted with current history writing, or even journalistc accounts. Even if the reader sympathizes with, or is willing to overlook the author's political ideology, ninety percent of each entry is historical background. So there's really very little about each film, and far to much of the author's own revision of history. Given the need for such a book, and the appealing title, "History Goes to the Movies" is a major disappointment.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent reference guide for movies and history
Review: This has become one of my bedside books. I love not only the movie reviews themselves, but also the insightful summaries of the related historical events, sometimes rather obscure and difficult to find in mainstream history books. I do disagree with Roquemore's judgement sometimes: for instance, he definitely did not do his homework as far as "Braveheart" is concerned, as I believe another reviewer has already noted. And I don't understand why he chose to review the 1934 "Cleopatra" rather than the far better known 1963 version - which is also better history, by the way, apart from the overly extravagant costumes and sets. As for his supposed political biases: he obviously dislikes PC movies of the "Dances with Wolves" sort, and as far as the Spanish Civil War is concerned, he is skeptical of the Republic, which is very far from being pro-Franco. Finally, when reviewing Oliver Stone's "Nixon", he says something to the effect that, without exonerating Nixon, it is clear that everyone involved (including the press) behaved badly during the Watergate crisis - - this kind of thing. As already mentioned, Roquemore tears to shreds Oliver Stone's movies (as far as their historical content is concerned) - rightly, in my opinion. That is what leads some to regard his views as "right-wing". I consider this to be utter nonsense. Actually, I strongly suggest that those whose historical perception of the Kennedy - Nixon era has been formed by Stone's films would profit greatly by reading this book.
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