Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Radio War Nerd EP #362 — The US Civil War, Part 13: Civil War Movies, with Eileen Jones (Patreon)

Published:
2023-01-18 23:09:18
Edited:
2023-01-19 11:56:17
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Downloads

Content

Guest: Eileen Jones, Filmsuck co-host & writer 

Recorded: January 13, 2023

We talk to OG friend of the show Eileen Jones about the good, bad & ugly — mostly bad & ugly — in Hollywood movies about the US Civil War. In true Hollywood fashion, this episode even features a happy ending: the 100-year reign of Lost Cause twaddle is finally coming to an end.

Articles by Eileen Jones: -"The Cinematic Lost Cause"-"The Not-So-Beguiled" -"Honoring The Real Nat Turner" -"Emancipation is a Melodrama That Is Highly Missable" 

Subscribe to Filmsuck, Eileen Jones' podcast/newsletter on all things-film.

Total time: 1:43:22

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

Files

Comments

Eric Snow

A wonderful short film (based on a short story) using the Civil War as a setting was An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. It was turned into a Twilight Zone episode in the 60s. I'm pretty sure it's been discussed on the show before. As for Grant, I'll put in a vote for the cartoonishly silly The Legend of the Lone Ranger featuring Ulysses S Grant played by Jason Robards. I used to watch that over and over as a little kid. It has Christopher Lloyd as the baddie kidnapping President Grant. It's pretty goofy, but not nearly as bad as the Johnny Depp one that came out a while ago. Bring some popcorn and be on the lookout for Hawk from Twin Peaks.

(American spirit menthol

Eileen saying "God this has been delightful!" at the end there is how I felt about listening to the episode

triplevalaska

I was originally from the south and as an early teen i moved to the north. I remember romanticized the south in movies not for any other reason then I used it as I am not like all of you. It took until those riots in Charlottesville for me to think oh shit I don't want to be on these guys side. But i do remember thinking the north are monsters burning down your country

radiowarnerd

Yes, that's what I was trying to say in talking about how literary skill and personal morality don't have any connection, any more than being a good pole vaulter makes you a good person. (I might be wrong about pole vaulters, BTW, but not about literary people. DOES pole vaulting make you a good person? No idea.)

Steve Mathews

I got kicked off twitter for writing that they should have hanged General Lee as a traitor.

Peter Z

Crowdfund a War Nerd Civil War script with Eileen's help!

William

Only if it's Shiloh

Peter Z

How about "The Traitors of Westpoint?"

John Zich

Should “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly” be considered a Civil War movie?

a clash of purple

It does fit with the overall themes of the discussion. It portrays the Civil War as a senseless and tragic conflict where neither side has the moral high ground (including the Union operating a prison camp where inmates are tortured). Eastwood even has that line, "I've never seen so many men wasted so badly." There's no mention of slavery or the fact that the South started the war, etc.. But oh well. I think it's a great film regardless.

David Andrews

Mark nearly got it right at 19:32: the men producing movies are/were white, movie goers are/were mostly white, and most white people probably aren't entertained by white people being depicted as extremely evil and blacks being innocent victims.

Martin Davis

Another stinker of note was 'Santa Fe Trail'. Ends at Harper's Ferry with the demise of sinister rabble rouser John Brown (Raymond Massey), whose downfall is ably engineered by heroic duo Jeb Stuart (Erroll Flynn) and George Custer (Ronald Reagan). The former was actually there, adding a note of verisimilitude to an otherwise fabricated 'romance'. Slaves had a walk-on part as dupes of white abolitionists. 1940, Michael Curtiz. After Auschwitz best forgotten.

Mark Ames

Adding to list of flicks to show my kids for warnerdoctrination

Mark Ames

Agree completely about Ride with the Devil, and that was when Lee was at his peak of powers.

Jonathan McClintock

Civil War as backdrop we also got "Cold Mountain" (Odyssian journey- back-home after the human catastrophe of the battle of the Crater, the uniquely Appalachian home front, and the depredations of the NC home guard), "Dances With Wolves" (indirect analysis of PTSD?) and the History Channel's version of "Roots" (the war crime that was Ft. Pillow). Also, I was hoping to hear about y'alls take on "Andersonvile"🙁

PostmasterFenian

i'm pretty sure I watched that with my reactionary (literally a confederate war reactor uncle) and we both were like boy did that fucking suck at the end

Hammer and Camera

I’d love to hear something about Gen. David Hunter and his attempts to free slaves and form regiments of Black men in the south (to the chagrin of Washington) in a future episode. (Apologies if you’ve already covered this and I’ve missed it).

Matthew Garnham

Anyone mention Andersonville 1996 by Frankenheimer?

XmakeX

Cold Mountian is a love story movie, with civil war in the backdrop yet, there is a battle scene that's super intense. All very cinematic of course. I just remembered how visceral it was.

XmakeX

Sorry Jonathan, didn't see your comment.

Christian Bendillo

I’m not saying fascists are good at making art because generally they aren’t by default, but sometimes they get lucky that someone really talented happens to be a fascist. Griffith and Riefenstahl unfortunately fall into this category.

Philip Malcolm

Years late to this, but the John Brown novel referenced is Raising Holy Hell by Bruce Olds.

Matt Colston

The film Birth of a Nation is repulsive and gross. It's literally a fascist and capitalist film that radicalizes you

CR

To quote Auron McIntyre, the right winger tweeter, the side that wants power will always prevail over the side that wants to be left alone. You don’t have to do anything to rest on success. Losers always seethe and plot their revenge.

CR

Re: Wilson and the Progressive Era, remember what friend of the show Brace Belsen asked: “What are they progressing towards?” A lot of it was reprehensible bullshit.

a clash of purple

RWN guests TENE pod did an episode about their thoughts on Birth of a Nation (they went more in-depth because their whole episode was focused on just that movie), and their reaction was similar to Ames's. They pointed out that the depiction of pre-war Southern society in that film could be used as propaganda to rile up anti-Confederate sentiment, but you're supposed to sympathize with those people. It's very strange. On the other hand, Birth of a Nation is apparently very sympathetic to Lincoln. It sounds like an odd duck of a film. Even on its own terms, it's hard to take seriously. I mean, the villains of the film are these evil mulattos who combine the intelligence of whites with the savageness of blacks, which, okay, but where did the mulattos come from, if not white plantation owners raping their slaves? Well, the villains are mulattos and Jews, I guess. In TENE's review they discussed the film's origins... I think they said Griffith used some book by a Lost Cause KKK-sympathizer historian for his source material. The fact that the film still idolizes Lincoln shows how it's really a piece of American nationalist propaganda more than anything (even more than KKK propaganda). Birth of a Nation is a great summary of the whole disgusting American nationalist project.

J P 3

One of the things that Ron Chernow's sympathetic portrait of Grant really drove home was the incredible difficulty that Lincoln and Grant had navigating a war in which a critical mass of northern opinion was only unified around the preservation of the union. In the north, emancipation came later, and a majority never saw emancipation as being equivalent to freedmen achieving fundamental equality. Even people who were originally sympathetic to the cause of emancipation -- political cartoonist Thomas Nast and newspaper editor Horace Greeley -- turned into virulent racists during the period of reconstruction. People like Grant, John Brown and Lincoln, were way ahead of their contemporaries in their racial attitudes, but they were clearly outliers. The predominance of retrograde racial attitudes, helped to provide fertile ground for the Lost Cause myth. As far as Civil War movies go, "Glory!" is about as good as it gets.

radiowarnerd

I remember that book! I know it was a Disney film, but I don't remember that so much, just the book and the feeling that as a 13-year-old rebel in one of those ridiculous hats, you could do great things.

radiowarnerd

OK, we'll do civil war novels but one of you, somebody who still has youth and energy on their side, has to do a novel about Ivan and Nadyezhda Turchina.

Gareth Hedges

Great episode and topic as always. I can't let mention of the Outlaw Josey Wales (a great film) pass without pointing out the extraordinary circumstances of it's origin. The film was an adaptation of a 1972 novel called The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (also known as Gone To Texas) written by Forrest Carter. Forrest Carter built up a whole myth around himself claiming Cherokee roots. Though he would deny it, it would emerge that Carter was in fact Asa Carter, a former Klansman and segregationist who had run for governor of Alabama in 1970 and had been George Wallace's speechwriter and the author of the "Segregation Now, Segregation Forever" speech. There's also kind of intrigue and obfuscation, well recounted in the below documentary made for public television (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xZ_5kPli7A), but the most incredible part of the story is that it belongs to a time and importantly A PLACE not so far away when someone that high profile could simply attempt to vanish and reinvent himself, and it worked for awhile. My dissertation was about crime and southern films following World War II and I did a lot of reading and research on southern films. My whole project was frustrated in parts by the opacity of that place and time—a lot of records simply do not exist despite so much of the circumstances and consequences being visible. The best Hollywood films about Southern tend to deal with crime not the war, often drawn from literary sources and include anti-Lynching films like They Won't Forget (1939, based on Ward Greene's Death in the Deep South a fictionalized account of the lynching of Leo Frank), Intruder in the Dust (1949, based on Faulkner's novel), Stars in My Crown (superb! 1950), through To Kill A Mockingbird (1962). I also love the many films that involve a northern journalist involved or investigating a crimes in the South movies, which are many, including Road Gang (1936) and Hot Summer Night (1957). My thesis was mostly about city crime films like the Phenix City Story (1955) and an unproduced screenplay about the wave of racist violence following the murder of Emmett Till. (I might copy and paste this to the RWN facebook--the Carter stuff is bonkers)

Jason Thompson

All insults are ableist, except moral-judgment insults.

Matt Henry

They made a movie of johnny Tremaine?!

HarshMalarkey

If you enjoy Josie Wales that doesn't necessarily make you a neo confederate, but if you hate on Avatar: The Way of Water then I have to assume you are an apologist for the sky people

Kevin Hickey

It literally predates fascism

Allen M

Glory and the Horse Soldiers were very pro Northern, featuring battles and heroic Northern Perspective.

PostmasterFenian

Do they touch on glory? Was my favorite movie as a kid and inoculated me against all the neo Confederate bull shit in my family

Broadway Joe

Despite all it's flaws, of which there are numerous, I still have a lot of affection for "Gettysburg." I still vividly remember watching it in 4th grade and just instantly being turned into a Civil War nerd. I do think it does Civil War battle sequences better than any other film. The reason why most others fail is because you need a lot of extras. Unlike say a WWII or Vietnam movie where you can do squad or platoon level fighting, you kind of have to do ACW battles at the brigade, or at least regimental level. I think John mentioned how expensive that can be. But with "Gettysburg" you have a ton of reenactors who, for better or worse, bring their own gear and at least look the part with how they're dressed and how they perform ACW tactics. Unfortunately the vast majority of reenactors are middle aged men that haven't missed a meal in their entire life. "Gettysburg" was also intended to be a TV movie, but Ted Turner (who has a cameo in the film as Confederate Col Waller Tazewell Patton, coincidentally George Patton's uncle) liked the finished product so much they put it in theaters. I think if it had been handled by a better director and had a bigger budget, or tried to do less, it could have been a lot better.

Broadway Joe

I can't remember if in "The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid" they mention that the reason the James-Younger Gang chose the Northfield Bank had to do with its connection with two Union generals: Adelbert Ames and Benjamin Butler. Ames, in addition to his Civil War service, was also a Reconstruction-era Senator and Governor of Mississippi and married Benjamin Butler's daughter so he was pretty well despised by ex-Confederates. After his term as governor he moved to Northfield to work for his father's flour mill business, which he'd started back in the 1850s. Both Ames and Butler had invested money in the bank in Northfield, which is why James, a diehard rebel and Lost Causer, chose to rob it.

Jess

They're never going to do a pro-Northern movie because nobody ever made a dollar with a pro-government movie--every American sympathizes with the rebel defending their home, even if they're rebelling for the stupidest reasons. Maybe a story about an ex-Union soldier betrayed by the racist government might fly? I'm sure that happened at the time!

PostmasterFenian

One to stay away from is ride with the devil I think at some point I respected ang Lee and assumed that he'd not be making neo Confederate trash but boy was I wrong about that one. Would be cool if someone made a film about the German 48er militias that drove the piece of shit Missouri governor across the border