Reviews

This movie is an insult. A gross distortion of history to no purpose.

JEB Stuart (West Point Class of 1853), George Custer (Class of 1861) and a bunch of other Civil War generals whose real ages vary by about 20 years are shown as classmates and best friends sent out to Kansas to protect the railroad (which didn't actually exist) from the depredations of those naughty abolitionists led by John Brown (who wasn't in Kansas yet and was still a pacifist when the story took place). Along the way they compete for the affections of the railroad magnate's daughter (rather than either of the fascinating women that Stuart and Custer really ended up with), and... oh, why bother? It's not even like the inaccuracy even served a useful function -- swap out a few names and you could avoid a lot of it, especially since it isn't like any of the characters had personalities at all like the real figures. Flynn and Reagan weren't Stuart and Custer, they were Generic Southern Hero and Generic Northern Hero. It's not like they seriously or honestly addressed any of the political and social issues of the day. It's not like they seriously or honestly did ANYTHING.

Was the point of this movie to teach us that "abolitionists are bad and we shouldn't get riled up over a few ((insert demeaning slang term of your choice for African Americans here)) when there's serious business like ethnically cleansing the Injuns to finish?" Or was there no point at all to it? Frankly I'm not sure which is worse. I don't know whether I want this insult to be intentional or accidental.

The only useful function this film could have is to teach us how many idiots there were in Hollywood back in the "golden age."

This film has the usual Hollywood-style errors about the Civil War -- men talking about Andersonville Prison months before it was established, minor diversions treated as the pivotal event of a campaign, that sort of thing. The biggest error though was the replacement of the fascinating Colonel Ben Grierson with Wayne's railroad man character. Grierson was a music teacher who was afraid of horses because one kicked him in the head as a child. Joining the Union army to fight slavery (he was a staunch abolitionist) he wanted infantry duty but was assigned to the cavalry by mistake. He turned out to be good at it and stayed in the cavalry after the war, becoming the first Colonel of the 10th Cavalry (Buffalo soldiers). It'd have been nice to see Grierson on screen.

Historical inaccuracy aside though the movie did quite well. The film showed multiple viewpoints and a fair degree of respect for most of them. It showed aspects of the war that were generally ignored in other films of the period -- the bloody horror of battlefield amputations, the desire of people to give up on the whole thing (I can't think of an earlier film that talked about deserters and the way they disrupted the southern home front), and the pain of the sheer physical destruction of the war -- a pain that affected the destroyers as well as the victims, something Gone With the Wind never quite admitted.

Some posters have complained about southern belle Hannah Hunter's overuse of sex appeal to spy on Union soldiers -- while there was no historical Hannah Hunter there were plenty of southern women who did just that, including Belle Boyd, Rose Greenhow and others. Some posters have complained about the way the film trivializes slavery -- this is unfair. It underplays slavery but never trivializes it. It shows conflicts within the Union army about the institution and addresses the issue of personal loyalty between some slaves and masters without glamorizing the institution as a whole. Does the film go far enough by modern standards? No. But it goes much farther than its contemporary and treats the slavery issue more honestly than modern travesties like Gods And Generals.

One poster actually complained about how inaccurate southern snipers were -- this is completely unfair. There was no indication that the "snipers" were specially trained men with Whitworth rifles or anything like that. They looked more like ordinary troopers out skirmishing, or perhaps the even more poorly trained militia. Ordinary soldiers fired more than 100 rounds for every hit they scored, so poor shooting on either side is nothing to be surprised about.

8 out of 10

This was rather a disappointment for me. The title and the promotional copy pushed the movie as a farce, but the film shied away from really exploring the grotesquery and silliness of the situation. The paranoia such a situation should unleash was seriously underplayed. The film should have been about the fluidity of gender identity as people question each other's sexual orientation based on superficial behaviors and the rumor-mill demand that something must be happening, and even in some cases question their own orientation because of the mass hysteria. Instead we saw a rather conventional coming-out story -- not the worst of its kind, but nothing memorable either. I felt like the victim of a bait and switch. This was not the movie I was promised.

4 stars out of 10