Michael Caine might not like it, but Zulu shows cinema’s power to rewrite history | Peter Bradshaw

By turning an armed invasion into a plucky underdog story, the classic war movie propagated a very dubious British mythology

There's an urban myth about a scene in Zulu in which a British officer in a red tunic is gruesomely struck in his throat by three successive spears: after a stunned silence in the cinema auditorium, a bloke is said to have shouted from the back: One hundred and EIGHTY!" (Other versions of the story have an extra on location shouting it - and then getting fired - or even the star himself, Michael Caine.)

Now the film is contending with more darts. Sir Michael Caine is furious at the news that Zulu, the 1964 film about the battle of Rorke's Drift that made him an international star, has been named as something that could encourage far-right sympathies by the Research Information and Communications Unit, run as part of Prevent, the government's counter-terror operation.