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And in spite of some cringeworthy dialogue (e.g., Wales’ and Indian chief Ten Bears’ “words of life and death”), the film does get quite a bit right about irregular violence and its aftermath.

Real war documentaries movie#

Moreover, the movie featured standout performances from Tom Berenger, Stephen Lang, Richard Jordan, Jeff Daniels, Sam Elliott, and Kevin Conway.Ĭlint Eastwood’s iconic role as a Missouri farmer-turned-bushwhacker showed another side of the Civil War: It introduced millions of American moviegoers to the guerrilla conflict. Lee strolling dreamily through wildflowers), but coming on the heels of Ken Burns’ documentary, Ron Maxwell’s film adapted Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels (1974) to show audiences the moving parts and gory results of a major Civil War battle as they’d never seen before on the big screen. It can be campy at times (think Robert E. Chronicling the formation of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry led by Robert Gould Shaw and culminating with the regiment’s heroic service at Fort Wagner, the film illustrated for the first time the major contributions and sacrifices of black soldiers to the Union war effort-and landed a serious blow in American pop culture against the mythology of the Lost Cause. If assessed only for cinematic and technical qualities, Glory would likely be the finest motion picture on this list.

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Despite its flaws and charges of Lost Cause-ism, The Civil War was a TV phenomenon that has stood the test of time it remains the gold standard of Civil War documentaries.

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Ken Burns’ nine-episode documentary series made Shelby Foote a household name, introduced David McCullough’s now iconic voice to television history, and combined new-but ironically quite simple-camera techniques with an unforgettable soundtrack to change what Americans expect from historical documentaries.

Griffith’s blockbuster was “like writing history with lightning” and lamented that the film’s plot-which included black rapists, incompetent black politicians, avaricious Yankee villains, and heroes decked in the regalia of the Ku Klux Klan-was “all so terribly true.” Despite its gross historical inaccuracies, the film served as a rallying cry for proponents of Jim Crow segregation and spawned false understandings of Reconstruction that continue to reverberate. Unfortunately, that influence involved propagating the idea of happy, loyal slaves and caricatured, untrustworthy Yankees in the lead-up to the civil rights movement.įollowing a private screening at the White House, President Woodrow Wilson allegedly said that D.W. Thus, in tandem with Margaret Mitchell’s novel, which was an international sensation in its own right, Victor Fleming’s magnum opus has unquestionably done-and continues to do-more to influence the way multiple generations of Americans remember the Civil War and its causes than any other piece of popular fiction. I have defined “best” here as the films, TV programs, or documentaries that have wielded the greatest influence over how Americans understand, imagine, and remember the Civil War.

Real war documentaries full#

Space constraints prevented us from including the full answers to one of the questions: What are the 10 best Civil War movies? Here are the complete lists of two of our participants, which illustrate that successful historical films rely on a good story well told. For our recent newsstand -only special issue The Civil War Almanac, we asked a number of Civil War historians for their opinions on a variety of popular topics, including the war’s most overrated and underrated commanders, top turning points, and most influential women.