An Epic of the Civil War

The release on Blu-ray of the director’s cut of the epic Gods and Generals is another stage in writer-director Ronald F. Maxwell’s nearly twenty-five-year commitment to bringing to the screen his vision of the American Civil War.

It began in 1974 with the publication of Michael Shaara’s book The Killer Angels. The book was, as Shaara put it in a note to the reader, “the story of the Battle of Gettysburg, told from the point of view of Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet and some of the other men who fought there”. In fact The Killer Angels was a great deal more. Shaara included the perspectives of a whole range of Union and Confederate soldiers. There were few descriptive passages. Shaara’s emphasis was mainly on what was going on inside his characters’ heads. As one critic observed, “it reveals … men in context, men in action, and thought within the changing scenery of events”. Shaara toned down some of the naivety and sentimentality but with the characters’ internal monologues he recreated the eloquence found in many of the letters of the period.

Even though the book became a best-seller and won the Pulitzer Prize no one was particularly anxious to turn The Killer Angels into a film. Ronald F. Maxwell optioned the book, discussed the project at length and walked the Gettysburg battlefield with Michael Shaara, but for a long time couldn’t get the backing. Finally, four years after Shaara died, Maxwell pitched the idea to ABC as a mini-series. At first they seemed to want to produce the series but pulled out when Son of the Morning Star, a not very good telemovie about General Custer, flopped. Ted Turner, a Civil War buff since he was a boy, then took over the project, now titled Gettysburg, for his cable channel. However, once he saw the footage he decided to release the film as a feature. Maxwell had secured the co-operation of thousands of Civil War re-enactors as well as permission to use some locations on the original battlefield. As a result the action was far more spectacular than expected from the film’s comparatively modest $25 million budget. Clearly Gettysburg belonged on the big screen.

Still, while it was well received by the critics, Gettysburg failed commercially as a feature. Almost certainly one of the problems for the distributors was that it ran for three and a half hours, which made it awkward to screen in the multiplexes where it could be run only twice in one day. I suspect what happened to the film in Sydney was more or less typical. It opened in mid-1994 at the Pitt Centre in one of the multiplex’s larger theatres. The night session I attended on its opening day was a quarter full, the audience made up mainly of Civil War buffs, among them Les Murray, David Malouf and, I think, Bob Carr. The Saturday matinee was packed with an appreciative audience attracted not so much by the advertising or the reviews, but by word of mouth. This, however, was not good enough for the distributors, who even then were addicted to the quick returns from mass releases of so-called blockbuster movies from theatres in the suburbs and country towns. After a week or so of screenings with session times even more erratic than usual, Gettysburg transferred to the Cremorne Orpheum, where once again it played to packed houses. Reportedly in the USA the film screened in only 248 movie theatres, booked mainly on the basis of word of mouth. However when Gettysburg was broadcast on cable television it was to a viewing audience of 23 million, and the videos on tape and later DVD were best-sellers.

The film richly deserved this belated success. Maxwell closely followed the original, incorporating much of Shaara’s dialogue into his script. He also turned many of the novel’s internal monologues into dialogue, as with the speech by Brigadier General Buford (Sam Elliott) about “the high ground” where he imagines what will happen to the Union army if he doesn’t engage a division of Confederates with his brigade. The speech concludes with a line written by Maxwell, “I will deprive the enemy of the high ground,” delivered by Elliott with spine-tingling intensity. Maxwell also wrote arguably the wittiest line in the movie when he has General Kimber (Royce Applegate) respond to Pickett’s (Stephen Lang) description of the Confederate states’ secession as like leaving a gentlemen’s club: “George, you have genius for trivialising the momentous and complicating the obvious. Have you ever thought of running for Congress?”

Maxwell didn’t try to shape the complex story of the battle into the fashionable three-act structure of so many contemporary screenplays where everything is built around one or two central figures and the action moves predictably from one carefully placed turning point to another until the climax. Like The Killer Angels, Gettysburg takes the viewer inside the lives of a whole range of protagonists on both sides of the “irresistible conflict”. There is not one climax in the film, but two—the fight at Little Round Top halfway into the narrative where the main protagonist is the unlikely hero, former Professor of Rhetoric, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain (Jeff Daniel), and the detailed recreation of Pickett’s charge against the Union centre that brings the film to its tragic conclusion.

The main influence on Gettysburg’s visuals appears to have been the Civil War paintings of Winslow Homer. At least one of his compositions is reproduced exactly, and cinematographer Kees Van Oostrum’s lighting of the night scenes with their rich amber tints appears to have been derived from Homer’s painting Before Yorktown. Nevertheless the film’s style is anything but static. Certainly scenes are filmed in long takes with the rich language given full weight, but in the battle sequences the cameras cover the action from every angle, tracking with the lines of soldiers as they move into the fray and, in one powerful moment, Pickett’s charge is seen from above. This was in the best sense old-fashioned film-making in the style of the great epics of the 1960s, but with one vital difference: the recreations were almost entirely accurate. (When Maxwell heard about questions from historians about Michael Shaara and the film’s treatment of the relationship between Longstreet (Tom Berenger) and Lee (Martin Sheen), he included a commentary exploring alternative interpretations on the DVD.) 

As a direct result of Gettysburg’s success Michael Shaara’s son Jeffrey wrote a “prequel”, Gods and Generals (1996), and a sequel, The Last Full Measure (1998), using the format his father had employed in The Killer Angels, telling the story through the eyes of many of the same characters. Ronald Maxwell soon optioned both novels and in August 2001, backed once again by Turner, filming commenced on Gods and Generals. The film was released in 2003 at about the time of the Iraq war, and rather bizarrely was specially shown to some of the departing troops.

Unfortunately for Turner and Maxwell the film attracted some of the most idiotic reviews of a great work of art since the music critics savaged Puccini’s Madam Butterfly. Gods and Generals was attacked for putting the great Confederate general “Stonewall” Jackson on a pedestal and failing to denounce the South’s peculiar institution of slavery. Some critics found fault with Maxwell’s identification of particular formations in the titles; others with his portrayal of the religious faith of the period, where for men like Lee and Jackson “everything was in God’s hands”. One supporter of the film remarked that Gods and Generals “was being condemned for promiscuous praying”.

Ironically the film was condemned for some of its greatest achievements. Maxwell honestly recreated the piety of the time, showing that belief in God could inspire men to sacrifice their lives to end slavery, as with Joshua Chamberlain, or fight for the rights of Virginia even though they opposed slavery, as with Lee and Jackson. This is why there are no chains or “darkies” working in the fields in Gods and Generals. As Maxwell has pointed out, as his main southern characters opposed slavery these sorts of scenes belong in another film. Both films however portray Joshua Chamberlain’s opposition to slavery. (Chamberlain moved in the same circles as Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.)

Maxwell’s portrayal of the slavery issue is far more interesting than if he had dragged in say Bedford Forrest, the brilliant Confederate cavalry leader, former slave trader and war criminal who massacred a Negro regiment after they had surrendered to him and later founded the Ku Klux Klan. The director shows the blacks sharing the same attachment to the places and people where they grew up as did their masters. A very moving scene shows Jackson and Sam Beal, his black cook, praying together. “One way or another you will be free,” Jackson promises. In another sequence a freed slave explains that he has to take his former master’s body back to his family because “he gave me my freedom papers”. Most eloquent of all Martha, a house slave, with a close attachment to the family she and her children serve, stays to protect their home from the Yankees during the siege of Fredericksburg but welcomes the Union wounded into the house and nurses them when it is requisitioned as a hospital. As she says to General Hancock, “I want to die free and I bless you all.” Maxwell cast Donzaleigh Abernathy, daughter of the great civil rights leader Dr Ralph Abernathy, as Martha. For those in the know it was a nice symbol, but Ms Abernathy also proved to be a fine actress.

Partly as a result of the terrible reviews, Gods and Generals did not do well in the US multiplexes even though it was briefly on a thousand screens. One can’t help suspecting the theatre owners pulled it with a sigh of relief. Even though Maxwell had cut nearly an hour out of his first cut the film still ran for over three and a half hours—four hours in the movie houses with an intermission—and like Gettysburg could only be run twice a day. Within weeks the film was out on DVD; and again like Gettysburg it was a huge success, selling 600,000 copies on its first weekend.

After the DVD release in the USA the film did get at least one theatrical screening here. Once again the Cremorne Orpheum came to the rescue with some late-night four-hour sessions which were, I was told, quite well attended. On the night I went the audience was delighted with the film, some expressing their enthusiasm to perfect strangers. A lady remarked, “There are no villains; I like all the characters”; another man turned to me and said, “Isn’t this wonderful”; all, I believe, found in the work a richness and complexity rare in contemporary mainstream cinema. When the lights came up there was a round of applause. 

Now that we can see the full four-hour-forty-minute version it is clear that Gods and Generals and its sequel Gettysburg are among the great American epics, part of a planned trilogy that may eventually become the definitive visual narrative of the American Civil War. In preparing the script Maxwell didn’t follow Jeffrey Shaara’s original as closely as he had The Killer Angels. Gods and Generals the novel has a whole range of characters. Many of these appear in the screenplay but Maxwell concentrates on Lee’s “right arm” Lieutenant General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee himself on the Confederate side, and on Joshua Chamberlain, the future hero of Little Round Top, on the Union side. As he explains in the commentary on the DVD, Maxwell sees Jackson as a kind of Homeric hero—an Achilles—in a new American mythology. Historically with Jackson he has a marvellously complex figure. He is devoutly religious—he virtually makes love to his wife as they read the Bible together—but still contemplates running up the black flag and killing all the Yankees. The part is a gift to any actor. How often does a performer get to make rousing speeches on horseback, lead armies into battle and die on screen after achieving his greatest victory? It is to Stephen Lang’s credit that his performance is so emotionally truthful. A lesser actor might have relished the beard, the accent and the big moments too much and lost the character. Lang gives us the man himself.

The same can be said for Robert Duvall’s Robert E. Lee, replacing Martin Sheen in the earlier film. Maxwell has said that he likes both actors’ performances and indeed there is little to choose between them. Sheen had more opportunities to portray Lee’s skills as a leader of men; and in his disputes with Tom Berenger’s authoritative Longstreet he conveyed a hubris that is to destroy his army. “General Pickett, look to your division,” says Lee. Pickett replies: “General Lee, I have no division.” It works brilliantly as drama and was all in the script but Maxwell now thinks it may not be historically accurate, hence the discussions on the DVD.

In a superbly understated performance Duvall suggests the anguish beneath Lee’s measured phrases when he reject’s Lincoln’s offer of command of the Union army. Equally good with only the words Lee actually used when he refused to go to the bedside of the dying Jackson (“Tell General Jackson I have prayed for him as I have never prayed for myself”) Duvall implies that Lee expects God to save his friend. Duvall has always done much of his best work between the lines of dialogue; never more so than here.

Maxwell and Kees Van Oostrum have assimilated the artistic influences of the Civil War painters and shot the film in a fluent nineteenth-century visual style but without any more tableaus. With four battles to stage, Van Oostrum is if anything even more resourceful in depicting the action than he was in Gettysburg. As he explains in an interview included in the special features on the DVD, he now not only pans with the action as the troops advance but also very effectively against their movement when they are encountering resistance.

Gods and Generals reaches an apocalyptic climax when Jackson overwhelms the Union flank at Chancellorsville. The lines of Confederate troops reaching across the panavision frame—Maxwell had 7000 re-enactors this time—looks great on the Blu-ray but was really something on the big screen at the Cremorne Orpheum. Randy Edelman and John Frizell’s score is in the best tradition of the operatic film music pioneered in the 1930s and 1940s by Max Steiner and Erich Korngold. Here the score evokes memories of The Ride of the Valkyries.

So is it possible to view this four-hour-forty-minute version of Gods and Generals in one sitting as you would in a theatre? To be sure, with the scenes showing John Wilkes Booth playing Macbeth, Hamlet, and Brutus in Julius Caesar, Maxwell is laying the foundation for the film he hopes to make of The Last Full Measure. But such is Maxwell’s command of narrative that yes, you can view the extended version comfortably in an afternoon. What is more, there is something profoundly wrong with a system of distribution that virtually sabotages the screening of any film longer than two hours.

Gettysburg has also been released on Blu-ray in an extended version seventeen minutes longer than the theatrical cut that has been available on DVD. I was able to compare these two versions in the 1990s when a special extended edit of the film was released on video. Most of the cuts were of superfluous material. But there was one sequence that should never have been removed in the first place. In the theatrical release there is a powerful scene where Isaac Trimble complains to Lee that General Ewell, in spite of all his pleas, failed to take a vital hill. “Give me a division and I will take that hill. Give me a regiment and I will take that hill.” In the extended version Lee asks Ewell, played sensitively by the late Tim Scott, why he did not take the hill. Ewell replies, “General Lee, I think I was a little slow.” Historically Richard Ewell was a courageous soldier and an honest man. He is quoted by Michael Shaara as remarking after the war, “It took a great many mistakes to lose that battle. And I myself made most of them.” It is good to know that in the definitive film on the Battle of Gettysburg Lieutenant General Ewell is now truthfully portrayed.