I highly recommend the movie "Lincoln" for the acting and drama, but also because it is the most realistic attempt to recreate 19th century U.S. life and Lincoln's actual person and personality in the history of movies. It is fascinating for that reason alone. Some examples of what I mean:
The actor speaks in a high pitched voice. That is how Lincoln's voice sounded, according to contemporary accounts. Probably it was even more "reedy" than this. He could never have won a modern election. The sound effects were as realistic as the foley man could make them. He went to the White House to record the sounds of the door hardware and clocks still in use from the 19th century. He recorded one of Lincoln's own pocket watches: http://www.american.edu/soc/news/Adding-Ring-of-Authenticity-to-Spielbergs-Lincoln.cfm http://soundcloud.com/ausoc/ticking-watch He mapped out the churches and railroad lines in the neighborhood of the White House to determine how well they could be heard, and he recorded the bells in churches that were there in 1865. Here are two other movies that I believe are extraordinarily accurate portrayals of the past: "Girl with a Pearl Earring," set in the Dutch Republic in 1665. Shot on location, you might say, in parts of the city unchanged from the 17th century "The Seven Samurai" set circa 1600 at the beginning of the Edo period, in a village that was carefully built from scratch by experts. The houses are quite unlike any modern Japanese dwellings. The clothing, food, tools, weapons and so on are authentic as far as I know. It was filmed in 1954, so the adults all reached maturity before WWII, and they did not eat a lot of meat or drink a lot of milk, so their physique is smaller than post-war adult. Their legs are shorter, I think. Somehow, Kurosawa rounded up a large number of wiry farmers who look just like Edo period peasants must have looked. A lot of them talk that way, which is fairly incomprehensible to modern ears. For the scene in which an ancient woman waves a pitchfork, driven crazy with grief, wanting to avenge her family killed by the bandits, they employed an actual ancient old woman who was crazy with grief. Her family was killed by B-29 bombers. I gather she was muttering something about B-29s, and they used a voice over. She herself may have been born in the Edo period, that is, before 1868. The past is closer than you think. When I lived in Japan in 1975, I filled out a census form that had a check block for people born "before the Meiji era" (1868 - 1912). Around 1984 I was reading a Japanese newspaper article about "This Year's Crop of Corporate Presidents." It said that for the first time, none of the top management was born in the Meiji era. - Jed
