Posted on 06/26/2015 5:16:45 PM PDT by Kid Shelleen
--SNIP-- The plain fact is, believe it or not, that up through the 1970s or so, every major male star in Hollywood portrayed a sympathetic and admirable Confederate or ex-Confederate character. In fact, ex-Confederates moving West and/or being persecuted by carpetbaggers is a major theme of Westerns in the period. Hollywood was all on our side on the badness of Reconstruction . Indeed, that was the American consensus at the time. Even the impeccably Bostonian Samuel Eliot Morison of Harvard in his standard college history text deplored Reconstruction.
Here is some evidence.
(Excerpt) Read more at abbevilleinstitute.org ...
more posters!
There were a lot of ex-Confederate cavalry members on John Ford’s trilogy.
Along with Irishmen.
No problem.
In True Grit weren’t John Wayne and Glen Campbell both ex confederate soldiers?
Been a long while since I’ve seen it, but wasn’t Ronald Reagan a Confederate raider out west in “The Last Outpost” (1951). A minor little film, but very entertaining, as I recall.
Duke makes his entrance in The Searchers riding up wearing his gray Confederate overcoat. He refuses to take an oath when he's deputized because he'd 'already taken an oath to the Conferderate States of America'. He buries Lucy after wrapping her body in his 'Johnny Reb coat'. His character was a man who does not quite fit in, so it figures he'd be a rebel.
bump
The movie Cold Mountain (Law/Kidman) and the series Hatfields and McCoys (Costner/Paxton) depicts men who didn’t go off to war but enjoyed throwing their weight around on the home front.
Yep, a lot of the `guerilla raiders’ were as much bandits and malingerers as soldiers, with lots of exceptions.
You can get THE LAST OUTPOST here. Good color!
http://hollywoodscrapheap.com/western.php?id=27
Buster Keaton was the lead role in 1926. He played Johnnie Gray and he got the girl also. The film was loosely based on the epic chase of a commandeered locomotive, called the General. A Union spy, Virginia born and Union troops drove the train many miles, intent on damage to the Confederacy. They had seized it by force.
An engineer and other Confederates seized another locomotive called The Texas. A wild chase ensued. They halted the General and the Union men ran for cover. The Texas, when I saw it at the Cyclorama building in Atlanta was on display.
Some critics have called this silent film "One of the greatest films of all time".
I remember "The Searchers" now.
Good movie, Wayne was not always nice.
Yeah, as ‘Ethan’ Wayne he stuffed his own sleeping bag but left ‘Martin’ (Jeffrey Hunter) at the campfire as bait.
And he killed Geraldine Page’s husband in ‘Hondo’ but that guy was a skunk and deserved it.
Who’s nice all the time? Nobody.
“John Wayne: The Searchers, generally regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. True Grit seems to have Wayne as an ex-Confederate, though the book is less clear on that point. Certainly he is very Southern in the sequel, Rooster Cogburn (..and the Lady), where he rightly mistrusts the Yankee schoolmarm Katherine Hepburn.”
First Time I saw Duke as a Yankee was in How The West Was Won in 64/65 downtown Jackson Mississippi...
Even though he was playing Bill Sherman no one heckled in fact they sighed given he was sort of a cameo in that film...unexpected short role at Shiloh by Bloody Pond
It was Duke after all
This thread illustrates some south bashers=mighty young
I’m shocked aren’t you?
You got that right!
The General is one of the great films. It has even made the ‘10 Greatest’ list on occasion. There was never any criticism of the film over the fact that Keaton played a confederate. Funny how the farther we get from the Civil War, the more it seems to bother people.
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