Ride with the Devil (1999), dumb story but some good battle/skirmish scenes in the Missouri guerrilla war.
Cold Mountain (2003), dumb story but an interesting portrayal of the South in the later part of the war.
I liked both these stories. By dumb do you mean unlikely? If so, I can't see them as any dumber than Huckleberry Finn. Whoever heard of a white boy and a negro man on a rafting trip in the antebellum south?
By dumb do you mean unlikely? If so, I can't see them as any dumber than Huckleberry Finn. Whoever heard of a white boy and a negro man on a rafting trip in the antebellum south?
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called
Huckleberry Finn. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."
Ernest Hemingway-Green Hills Of Africa
Yes, but realize that I wouldn't hesitate to argue with Mr. Hemingway about that if he were here. The old drunk.
Hemingway may have drank to excess at times, but he would have made a hell of a great fishing partner.
I always felt the love story in Ride With The Devil got in the way of an otherwise excellent movie. It's actually a reasonably accurate and fair representation of the western Missouri guerrillas. The black character is based most on a real life character named John Noland who really did ride with Quantrill. He's an enigma because no one can fully explain why he did that. He was most likely a mixed race man (a "mulatto" of his age shows up on census records for the Noland farm) and was probably the half brother or half cousin of the other Nolands who rode with Q. He simply went to war with his family. There were a couple of other black guys who scouted for Quantrill, but Noland seems to have been the most prominent. You will see him in several of the post war reunion photos of the Quantrill guerrillas. I can't say why the author chose to make Jake a German immigrant's son. It's a fiction, after all. But to this day there are heavily German immigrant populated towns in Lafayette County and elsewhere in Missouri. Many of those immigrants came to American to flee civil war in Germany, and, yes, most of them did side with the union or with home guard militias. The guerrilla Dave Poole hated the German community at Concordia, Missouri, and raided them a number of times. I've never read a reason for his hatred, unless it was pure nativism. The character Pitt Mackinson (who shoots Roedel) is based on the real life Archie Clement, who might have turned on anyone he perceived as getting in his way. I launched a thread on the death of Archie Clement a few years ago, which you might find interesting. It illustrates that he was considered unpredictable and dangerous well after the war's end.I guess I just mean boring and unrelatable to me. I like Huckleberry Finn because I think it's really funny and entertaining and it's at least plausible.
I actually do like the part of Cold Mountain with Jude Law returning home but the long cutbacks to Nicole Kidman and that other woman I just found really boring and melodramatic, but I don't remember it that well so maybe I should see it again.
Ride with the Devil I just found boring throughout and I couldn't relate to any of the characters. Why was that black guy fighting for the Confederacy? Why was the main character when he's German and the Confederates hate Germans so much they purposely shoot him in the leg at one point? Why did that woman try to say he was the father after she had sex with another guy and why was he okay that and married her? All odd to me.