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The 12 Best Civil War Movies

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One hundred and fifty years after the surrender of Appomattox, we count down the 12 best Civil War films that have been released.

David Crow

In case you missed it, yesterday marked the 150th anniversary of the surrender at Appomattox Court House. When people speak of this “battle,” they often are referring to the afternoon following a brief morning struggle in the small Virginian village, as it was on that day that Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Lt. General Ulysses S. Grant, essentially ending the American Civil War.

To be sure, conflict continued past this date, as the Confederacy’s President Jefferson Davis was not captured until May 10, 1865, and some Confederate leaders fought on in skirmishes until well into June. However, the American Civil War had reached its conclusion when Lee stepped into Wilmer McLean’s parlor on the ninth of April, which was swiftly followed by the disbandment of the Army of Northern Virginia a few days later…and U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination a few days after that.

In a 150 years, 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 too in our fiction and our art.

As the most utilized era for American literature in the 20th 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 of them right here.

12. 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.

The 1895 novel by Stephen Crane is considered iconic by many, not least of all because it was published before Southern revisionism transformed the conflict for several generations as a Lost Cause romance between Southern gallantry and Northern aggression. Crane’s narrative instead focused on the psychological effects of the war from the perspective of a universally poignant young soldier, who is depicted as a human and not a Yankee carpetbagger.

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.

11. 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.

10. 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.

The film didn’t live up to such lofty aspirations, but it did net Zellweger her much sought-after Oscar. Also, I actually think despite its more cynical elements, it is still a wonderfully harrowing tale that, much like Frazier’s novel, recounts another side of the Civil War.

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. 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.

9. 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 19th 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.

Both men are there when a Confederate soldier attempts to gun down Grant after the Battle of Shiloh. Ultimately, a Union private (George Peppard), who is the son of a previous generation of characters from earlier segments, saves his commander by being forced to kill a spy. It is heavy handed, and not the film’s best segment, but like so much else with the Civil War, it feels torn between its loyalties.

8. 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. While the greater American conflict is mostly a stage for a blood and tears passion play between a young Irish immigrant (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the contradictory, bigoted father figure he swore to assassinate (Daniel Day-Lewis), it comes crashing into the overall narrative in fitting fashion.

Either too long or too short (again, the editing is chaotic), Gangs of New York is still a marvelous film that allows Scorsese to explore the immigrant experience that is mostly forgotten about when it was the Irish who endured Nativist prejudice and violence, as opposed to the filmmaker’s own Italian roots from the more cinematically represented early 20th century (or what Hispanics are facing today).

It also allowed Scorsese to showcase a major incident during the Civil War that is often overlooked due to its ugliness: the Draft Riots of 1863. As the first generation forced to deal with the draft, the working poor were understandably galvanized to frenzy when they’re youth are conscripted at gunpoint to join the Union army while the sons of New York’s rich and elite could buy their way out of the draft for $300 (about $5,000 by today’s standards). But it takes on a horrific, bloody visage when the protests turn to violence, and African-Americans are lynched in the street by a community meant to be on the side of Our Better Angels.

Like so much in life, petty squabbles and small-minded racisms are laid bare for their pointlessness when history and political realities are confronted, as seen in the film’s closing moments when the riots and reacting Union army obliterates petty gang rivalries.

7. Friendly Persuasion (1956)

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.

6. 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 20th 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. More a general commentary on the stupidity and pointlessness of war during the era when America was just ramping up its Vietnam madness, the Civil War in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly does not bear broad similarities to any specific event. But it makes for a powerful backdrop in one of the best Westerns ever made.

4/10/2015 at 8:29AM

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