Civil War Ii Movie
It’s now been over 150 years since the sureender at Appomattox Court House, which was the first step toward the end of the Civil War (May 10, 1865 marked the final march with the capture of Jefferson Davis). In the following century and a half, the effects of the war, and the original sin that propagated it, are still felt every day in the news, and with every election cycle that sees familiar lines of division amongst the states that participated in America’s bloodiest conflict. And it has lived on in our fiction and our art.As the most utilized era for American literature in the 20 th century, the Civil War has captured the imagination in many a book and story. It has even occasionally found its way to the big screen. In this vein, we have assembled 12 of the best Civil War movies right here. The Red Badge of Courage (1951)A good place to start with any study of Civil War films is with the one that adapted arguably the definitive Civil War novel: The Red Badge of Courage. Named after its central hero’s greatest desire, Red Badge follows a young private in the Union army that wishes to wash away his shame with a crimson gush after fleeing the field of battle in an act of cowardice.
Hence why this 1951 film is considered a mutilated classic in some circles. Hard-living John Huston had returned from the great war of his lifetime, of the WWII variety, and his cynical outlook crystallized in films like The Maltese Falcon (1941) became only bitterer, such as in The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948). With Red Badge, Huston utilized “crime picture” (film noir) techniques with his black and white photography and vision, creating a darker chaotic atmosphere for hardly vainglorious war.However, The Red Badge of Courage film remains mostly a curiosity now given its visual style but undeniably slight influence. After the film tested poorly with early screenings, MGM cut the film down to a barebones running time of 69 minutes, stitched together only by voiceover narration lifted straight from Crane’s prose. The result is a fascinating, frustrated mess.
Horse Soldiers (1959)Not exactly John Ford’s best film, Horse Soldiers is one of the few times the legendary director ever directly dealt with the Civil War. The conflict informed characters from many of his classics, including Stagecoach (1939), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and The Searchers (1956), but Horse Soldiers is the rare instance he addressed the war head-on for a full feature length film.As it stands, Horse Soldiers is mostly a “men on a mission” adventure film that sugarcoats bloodshed as something closer to John Wayne pageantry. Still, William Holden is terrific in the film, and it shines a light on the Vicksburg campaign where a Union cavalry unit led by Wayne and Holden disrupt Confederate supply lines. Cold Mountain (2003)Adapted from Charles Frazier’s 1997 book of the same name, Cold Mountain was a prestige picture intended to bleed Oscar gold. With a cast that included Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger at the height of their awards darling fame, and from director Anthony Minghella ( The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley), Miramax wanted this saga of a North Carolinian deserter and the woman he left behind to be a modern day Gone with the Wind, even if it was shot in Romania. As a North Carolinian myself, it is admirable to see a Southern Civil War experience far from the plantation life that is reminisced or mocked in so many other narratives.
The film Captain America: Civil War was released in May of 2016 to great box office returns. Besides that, even if filming didn't begin until 2018,.
North Carolina, one of the last states to join the Confederacy and one of the least loved by its Virginian capital, was relatively poorer than its neighbors and the leader in deserters. With so many rural young men sent to die for an institution they could not afford, the state’s futile suffering was only compounded.More than in the scenes of Kidman and Zellweger, this is embodied by Jude Law’s moody performance as W.P. Inman, a fleeing soldier that will cross his devastated homeland to find his lady love. It is also in the people he meets on his odyssey that make this truly stand out, such as a new mother and fresh widow played by Natalie Portman. Ray Winstone also wonderfully embodies the viciousness of the Confederate Home Guard in the picture, an organization not known for its mercy toward deserters or their families. How the West Was Won (1962)Hollywood’s big grand love letter to the mythology of the West (note: not history), How the West Was Won is a hodgepodge pastiche of conflicting ideas, daydreams, and an all-star parade that includes Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, Debbie Reynolds, Lee J. Cobb, Carolyn Jones, Richard Widmark, and many more.
The best sequences in the film involve Debbie Reynolds running off from her frontier-settling sister to the pains of “Greensleeves,” becoming a riverboat dancer and falling for Peck’s sheepish gambler.But for a film that attempts to narrate the entire 19 th century American experience, it could not skip the Civil War, which appears as a segment directed by John Ford, and features Harry Morgan as Ulysses S. Grant and, of all people, John Wayne as William Tecumseh Sherman. The irony of this being only a few years after Wayne played Yankee-hating Texan hombre Ethan Edwards in The Searchers is alone worth the price of admission. Gangs of New York (2002)Gangs of New York was the masterpiece that Martin Scorsese never got to make. At least that was the project’s reputation when Harvey Weinstein gave the Goodfellas filmmaker carte blanche (save for final cut) to make whatever picture he wanted. The result is a big budget opera that is as messy as the cultural melting pot it idolizes with nostalgia and disdain—it is also just as undeniably fascinating.Set in a New York that was only beginning to fall into the clutches of Boss Tweed, most of the film takes place during the height of the Civil War in 1863. Despite its light-hearted title and often even lighter frivolity, Friendly Persuasion is in many respects about how persuasive the call to violence and war tends to be.
Set in Indiana during the Civil War, the film centers on a family of Quakers overseen by a doting and deeply religious mother/minister (Dorothy McGuire) and her slightly more worldly and apprehensive husband (Gary Cooper). While the film is mostly a comedy about staying above violence and familial life bearing many similarities in all generations, be it the 1950s or 1860s. However, war finally comes to town when Confederate Bushwhackers and Johnny “Rebs” slaughter a nearby community, incentivizing the family’s oldest son, a pre- Psycho Anthony Perkins, to pick up a gun and fight back. It tears the family apart, and forces a father to find his son after he is injured on the frontline.I am not sure how accurate the Bushwhacking/Jayhawking is to Indiana in this era (please let me know if you are well versed), but whatever the historical accuracy, this is a wonderfully poignant family dramedy that makes great use of its setting.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)Inarguably one of the best films on this list, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly also is quite arguably a Civil War film. Hence, this relatively low ranking on a Civil War list. Nonetheless, it represents an interesting reason as to why there are so few true blue Civil War movies in the latter half of the 20 th century: a genuine distaste for the subject.Director Sergio Leone fancied himself as something of a history buff and had studied with great enthusiasm the horrors of the Andersonville camp years before the third part of his “Dollars Trilogy” came about. Thus, he claimed to understand the American Civil War, but scoffed at the concept that only the “losers” of the conflict committed such mistreatment to prisoners of war. Granted, much of it had to do with the dwindling supplies and resources in the southern states as the war dragged on than it did with any sort of pure malevolence, but Leone (with heavy revisionism) imagined that the better-funded Union was just as cruel to prisoners out of spite.So when Clint Eastwood’s good anti-hero and Eli Wallach’s not-so-good, ugly bandit are captured by Union troops, they are tortured within an inch of their lives. Other Union soldiers are depicted better when feuding over a bridge with a Confederate army commanded by Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley—who incidentally really did engineer a failed campaign from Texas into the American Southwest in 1862 in an attempt to take Santa Fe, gold resources along the Rockies, and cut off California—but all parties are ultimately presented as moronic, fighting over a bridge that neither side truly needs.
Lincoln (2012)The most recent Steven Spielberg film is also one of the most deliberate and thoughtful in his catalogue. While maintaining Spielberg’s patented sentimentality to mostly successful effect, Lincoln more importantly attempts to simultaneously demythologize the sixteenth U.S. President while deifying him as the patron saint for executive action.The film succeeds on both fronts thanks to two secrets, Daniel Day-Lewis and Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Day-Lewis gives another tour de force performance—in ironically a historic personage his Gangs of New York character despised—as a folksy and elaborately researched rendering of the president that preserved the Union and ended the institution that threatened it so greatly.The second aspect that makes Lincoln rise above any inclinations toward hagiography is its basis on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Rather than attempting to chronicle Lincoln’s entire life, or even his whole presidency, which Goodwin meticulously researched for her biography, Spielberg and Tony Kushner zeroed in on a narrow window between Lincoln’s reelection and his second inauguration.
During this period, Lincoln outmaneuvered the pro-slavery Democrats in Congress and incalculably passed the 13 th Amendment.Often, Southern Revisionists point out that the Emancipation Proclamation was a political document that only “freed” slaves in the rebelling South while maintaining those in the border states that sided with the Union. As a result, it had no real teeth and was (partially) designed to force anti-slavery Britain from intervening on the South’s behalf.Lincoln correctly points out that as the war was winding down, the president recognized this and used his political clout, and some less than honest sausage making, to end slavery once and for all. Despite taking place during the Civil War, Spielberg is content with rarely visiting the battlefield here, and instead focuses on Lincoln’s genius in a Capitol submerged in discontent and disdain.
By studying only a narrow timeline, Lincoln casts a large shadow about the political brilliance of its subject while demystifying the time and acrimony in which he lived. But with Day-Lewis’ performance and Spielberg’s heartstring pulling, it makes him all the more monumental. Kula world playstation rom. Gettysburg (1993)Long before the sleep-inducing, Stonewall Jackson-worshipping Gods & Generals, Ronald F. Maxwell had much better success at recreating a Civil War saga with Gettysburg, an epic version of the battle that turned the tides of the Civil War.Focused on Lee’s first and only effort to invade the North, which ended in ruin after three days of battle near the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg, the four-hour picture was originally intended to be a miniseries.
In what I consider to be the most underrated film on this list, and certainly its director’s most overlooked picture, Ang Lee studied an American conflict from an outsider’s perspective for Ride with the Devil. Based upon Daniel Woodrell’s Woe to Live On, Lee and screenwriter James Schamus turned the camera on the oft-forgotten about border wars of Missouri and Kansas. As the literal center stage for rising tensions during the Antebellum period before the war, including with the Bleeding of Kansas and the famed Missouri Compromise, these areas were too removed from the armies fighting along the east coast to significantly matter. Instead, neighbors slaughtered neighbors based upon political persuasions. It was guerrilla warfare between Americans. In this bloodbath, the filmmakers study teenage rebels, who like so many other young men “enlist” for the adventure.
By joining the Bushwhackers (Confederate sympathizers) they fought as insurgents against their Jayhawk neighbors (Union ones). The film’s central hero of Jake Rodel (Tobey Maguire) isn’t even an American; he’s a German immigrant who traveled with his father as a boy to Missouri. However, his best friend is Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich), a man from a family with gentry pretensions, albeit only George Clyde’s (Simon Baker) family is rich enough to own slaves—including Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright). Ergo, Jake must be a Bushwhacker.The most interesting character in the film is Holt, who fights alongside these boys even after Clyde dies, providing an enigmatic figure that despises the Bushwhacker cause but shows a kinship with the ones who set him free.