I saw the very young Harrison Ford and had to watch this late 1960s action film about 7 friends from west Texas who are drawn into their imagined adventure of joining the American Civil War and fighting for the Confederate States (south). Harrison Ford probably has the fewest lines of the seven friends. What happens on the journey? Everything goes wrong. In fact, they do not make it to their destination, Virginia. Their ideals begin to drop off, along with their numbers, along the way as they see a runaway slave being hung from a tree. They encounter prejudices against them as they try to join upper-class party in east Texas, dishonesty at a saloon gambling game in Louisiana, and the bloody severity of war at The Battle of Shiloh.
The strong premise about the destructiveness of war and civil rights is obvious, but offered up with a "teenage adventure" smile on the easy to criticize setting of the South during the Civil War. This may have been one of the earliest anti Vietnam War movies out of Hollywood and is worth watching to see how an anti-war message was beginning to come out of Hollywood. You can see the conflicting messages as The Green Berets was made the same year.
There are some historically accurate portrayals that are worth seeing, such as 2 different treatments of African-Americans - one had a comfortable life and another was lynched. Some of the battlefield scenes looked like they were taken from another movie. And what happens to the main character at the end is a surprise, but keeps with the premise.
The strong premise about the destructiveness of war and civil rights is obvious, but offered up with a "teenage adventure" smile on the easy to criticize setting of the South during the Civil War. This may have been one of the earliest anti Vietnam War movies out of Hollywood and is worth watching to see how an anti-war message was beginning to come out of Hollywood. You can see the conflicting messages as The Green Berets was made the same year.
There are some historically accurate portrayals that are worth seeing, such as 2 different treatments of African-Americans - one had a comfortable life and another was lynched. Some of the battlefield scenes looked like they were taken from another movie. And what happens to the main character at the end is a surprise, but keeps with the premise.