The Hollywood History of the World: From One Million Years B.C. to Apocalypse Now.

The Hollywood History of the World.- From One Million Years B.C. to Apocalypse Now, by George MacDonald Fraser (Beech Tree, 425 pp., $22.95)

ANYTHING MR. FRASER writes is well worth reading; he has been an amusing and enlightening presence for years. His suavely outrageous "Flashman" books, for instance, affectionately and shrewdly celebrate the history they send up; and there are always lessons along with the laughter.

The same is true here, as Fraser pursues his usual anti-antithetical course. He asserts the essential validity of those bodice-ripping costume-dramas, papier-mache Biblical rehashes, and pectoral-flexing epics we've either despised or been instructed firmly that we should.

At their best, [movies] have given a picture of the ages more vivid and memorable than anything in Tacitus or Gibbon or Macaulay, and to an infinitely greater audience. Nor have they necessarily been less scrupulous. At least they have shown history, more faithfully than they are usually given credit for, as it was never seen before. For better or worse, nothing has been more influential in shaping our visions of the past than the commercial cinema.

He's not kidding. He doesn't hesitate to dish up for us all the hoary horse operas, inert melodramas, and leaden turkeys of youthful popcorn-scented memory. There are no references here to the icons of cultists, to theories of film, to Bergman or Godard or Truffaut. We are talking about your basic Cecil B. De Mille.

Fraser celebrates films you never hear mentioned these days, and the makers of those "wrong" films, for giving us "the image of the image," for effectively teaching some history by imprinting it on the public imagination. There's a lot of instruction and fun along the way, and not only about film. Fraser's strictures about history itself form a subtext that is the strongest part of the book-and is related to the serious implications of the boisterous and seemingly satirical "Flashman papers" he has "edited" for many years. For example, he goes after anachronistic sentiments as expressed in Zulu (in which, by the way, the part of King Cetewayo was played by Chief Buthelezi!) as follows:

After Rorke's Drift the film has Bromhead viewing the carnage and saying he

feels ashamed. I doubt if Bromhead really felt or said any such thing; he

had no cause to. I question, too, whether Chard expressed such repugnance.

They were professional soldiers, doing their duty, and when it was done I

would guess they just felt very tired, very relieved, and not a little

elated. That may be hard for modern audiences to take, but it is how British

soldiers were. I'm sure Chard and Bromhead felt great admiration for the

Zulus, but shame, or disenchantment with the profession of arms? No. They

continued to serve in the Army until

their deaths, by which time they were both colonels.

Fraser has no truck with present-day cliches or revisionism; he doesn't indulge in any self-flagellation about imperialism and colonialism. Seeing Holl wood westerns as "the best his- torical films ever made," he goes on to press a point about the Indians and the frontiersmen:

The current fashion is to overlook or condone Indian atrocities, and hold the

American Army and invading settlers guilty, and indeed America had much to

answer for in its treatment of the tribes. But it has to be remembered that

those soldiers and settlers were the grandchildren of Fort William Henry and

Fort Pitt and the Mohawk-Valley, and with such a folk-memory it is possible to

understand why they regarded Indians as they did.... they cannot fairly be

blamed for not seeing things from the academic viewpoint of the 1980s. They

had the feeling of their time-as did the Indians. Fraser's dismissals of all kinds of fraudulent assumptions have a special authority when he writes about war movies set in Southeast Asia, wbere he served as a rifleman in tbe Britisb 14th Army during the Second World War. He really doesn't like The Long and the Short and the Tall, with its whining, hysterical, garrulous caricatures":

It is not the only film to attribute exaggerated emotions to military men in combat, but it happens to be one of which I can say that it does not, to put it mildly, tally with my own experience. It trivializes war, most of its conversation is ludicrous, the needling and hatred would not have been tolerated in a real infantry section for five minutes, and it lacks any sense of how soldiers think or behave in action. For example: they do not discuss the Geneva Convention; they do not go into pathetic heart-searchings about killing a Japanese prisoner (they either do or they don't); the notion that they would attach importance to the kind of cigarettes the prisoner was carrying is simply nonsense in a theater where both sides commonly smoked each other's, including those looted from the Chinese; they do not have impassioned arguments about whether or not to obey orders; above all, they do not shout the odds when there are Japs about.

By extension then, Fraser's observations about The Deer Hunter, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket have a certain authority and impact that I have not seen from any other source.

Even though Fraser's enthusiasm for "bad movies" has a way of reminding us of just how bad they were and are, his gusto and good sense are contagious, as always. Fraser's Hollywood History suggests that even in the age of mass communications, we may know" more history than we think we do. His advocacy justifies our indulgence in all those movies we secretly preferred all along.