Two 1960s movies with Civil War themes, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come and Shenandoah, reveal the traditional Hollywood penchant for combining questionable history with cornball sentimentality, although at least the latter movie, with the great actor James Stewart as its star, manages on occasion to rise above its mawkishness.
Despite its good intentions, however, Huston’s movie still presents a fairly well-scrubbed version of the decidedly dirty Civil War-down to the immaculate blue uniforms worn by Murphy and his comrades. Starring real-life World War II hero Audie Murphy as the reluctant, ironic hero Henry Fleming, the movie succeeds in giving viewers a slight inkling of what the war was like on the level of the humble Union foot soldier. Perhaps the best Civil War ever made-faint praise though it may be-is writer-director John Huston’s 1951 version of Stephen Crane’s remarkable novel, The Red Badge of Courage. It was the Civil War that people wanted to imagine-even, inexplicably, many northerners. Still, with such larger-than-life stars as Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh and its vivid if now rather dated storyline of noble cavaliers, intrepid southern belles, and happy, loyal slaves, Gone With the Wind was a blockbuster success. Most famously, the 1939 film Gone With the Wind etched an idealized, “moonlight-and-magnolias” portrait of an Old South that only existed in frothy romance novels and on movie screens.
Virginia-born President Woodrow Wilson, seeing an advance screening of the film at the White House, memorably praised Griffith for “writing history with lightning,” even if it was more lightning than history. Instead, he set out to craft a partisan indictment of postwar Reconstruction. Griffith, the son of a Confederate veteran, cared little for the complex issues that led to the war and its aftermath. Griffith’s controversial The Birth of a Nation in 1915, Hollywood has shown a persistent but shallow interest in the Civil War.
Ironically, the war that truly shaped the modern-day United States has been comparatively underrepresented by American movies. Even as filmmaking techniques have grown increasingly sophisticated in depicting the real horrors of war (see story, page 36), such films as Saving Private Ryan have still underscored the basic, old-fashioned decency of American soldiers in World War II. Beginning with the wartime movies that shamelessly if sincerely promoted American efforts to rally against the fascist evils of Germany, Italy, and Japan, the silver screen gave audiences stirring depictions of brave GIs risking and sacrificing their lives for the greater good. World War II, America’s last “good war,” has always been a fruitful source for homegrown moviemakers.