More Civil War Oddities

"I think I’ll try to tell him the war is over…"
"I reckon so. I guess we all died a little in that damn war."
"The Outlaw Josey Wales" (1976)



A singularly peculiar take on the Civil War was presented in director Sergio Leone’s classic Spaghetti Western "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" (1966). Movie page ads blared, "For three men the Civil War wasn’t hell. It was practice!" Actually, in the film’s convoluted script, rife with twists and double-crosses, the Civil War was more of a distraction, as three treasure-hunting adventurers - a bounty hunter (Clint Eastwood), a hired killer (Lee Van Cleef) and a Mexican thief (Eli Wallach) - search for a stolen cache of Confederate gold during Southern Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley’s incursion into New Mexico Territory.

Historically, Sibley (above) led the Confederate States Army into the region in an attempt to secure trails to California, where the South hoped to capture and control gold and silver mines and shipping ports. (The general’s distant cousin, Henry Hastings Sibley, became the first governor of Minnesota and later served in the Union army as a colonel and brigadier general.) In March 1862, Sibley, leading 1100 troops, was defeated by Union Colonel Edward Canby (below), commanding 1300 men, at the Battle of Glorietta Pass in New Mexico Territory. The Confederates were forced to retreat to Santa Fe after their supply lines were destroyed by Union forces. Their exit dashed any dreams of a Confederate stronghold in the Southwest.


On the one hand, Leone and his screenwriters deserve credit for doing their historical homework. General Sibley is actually depicted in one brief scene, and the extended cut of the film on DVD includes onscreen references to Canby and the Battle of Glorietta Pass (depicted below).


On the other hand, Leone’s regard for historical accuracy reflects what biographer Christopher Frayling referred to as a "peep show attitude." Most of the Civil War uniforms are wrong, the metallic-cartridge Gatling Gun used by Federal soldiers had not yet been developed, Eastwood shoots a Sharps 1874 rifle a decade before it was invented. Frayling attributed the filmmaker’s "deliberate anachronisms" to a "neo-realist attitude toward decors and details (of which firearms are perhaps the most striking example)."

According to Frayling, Sergio Leone crammed all his films with "peep-show" details and took "great pleasure in photographing…a stockpile of archaic destructive technology." He "is not really concerned about accuracy of detail at all…His interest in firearms is as much aesthetic as technical or historical." Eastwood uses a .36 caliber Colt Navy revolver but wears .45 cartridges on his gunbelt. Frayling noted, "If he looks good, it does not matter that the details are wrong, even if the details are…emphasized."

Two major Civil War set pieces in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," the brutal Union prisoner-of-war camp, ironically called Betterville (above), and the spectacular battle at Langstone Bridge, both historical fantasies (for instance, the closest Federal prison camp to Western territories was Gratiot Street Prison in St. Louis, Missouri), were undoubtedly derived by Leone from more recent conflicts in which Italy was involved. Concentration camps of World War II inspired Betterville, while the Union embankment at Langstone Bridge mirrors the soldier-lined trenches of the first World War.

Observing the futility of the battle for the bridge (above), Eastwood’s character says, "I’ve never seen so many men wasted so badly." Most of the military extras in the Langstone Bridge sequence were Spanish army soldiers ("The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" was shot in Spain with an international cast, each speaking their native language with no idea what the whole thing was about.) Italian comedic actor Aldo Giuffré (below) is outstanding as the alcoholic Union captain who declares that whiskey is "the most potent weapon in war." The uniform may be all wrong, and his dialogue is actually dubbed by veteran voice actor Paul Frees, but the drunken bravado and the tragicomic twinkle in his eyes shine through.

For Civil War history buffs (count us in at the moviehouse!) who weren’t aware of Shirley Temple’s participation in winning the war and healing the wounds of Reconstruction, we recommend "The Littlest Rebel" and "The Little Colonel," both directed by David Butler in 1935.

We will start with "The Little Colonel," since it was filmed first, even though it is set during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. Critic Leonard Maltin said, "Even non-fans should like this, one of Shirley’s best, as she mends broken ties between" her grandfather (Lionel Barrymore, Drew Barrymore’s great-uncle), a crusty Southerner, and her mother, who married a Northerner.

In her 1988 autobiography, Child Star, Temple recalled ruffling Barrymore’s feathers when she dared to prompt him for a line. Temple later endeared herself to him by calling him the best actor in the world and asking for his autograph. The end result was what the March 22, 1935, New York Times described as "all adrip with magnolia whimsy and vast, unashamed portions of synthetic Dixie atmosphere."

This is the film that features the famous tap dancing duet on the staircase of a mansion with Temple and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, who returned to costar with Temple in "The Littlest Rebel." "The Littlest Rebel" is the film that features Shirley in blackface. The shameless spectacle has to be seen to be believed as the feisty moppet smears shoe polish on her mini-mug to fool looting Union troops.

According to the December 25, 1935, review in Variety, "All bitterness and cruelty have been rigorously cut out and the Civil War emerges as a misunderstanding between kindly gentlemen with eminently happy slaves and a cute little girl who sings and dances through the story."

The reviewer for The New York Times stated, "Shirley Temple climbs up on President Lincoln’s lap, rescues (dad) from a (Union) firing squad and sings a song called ‘Polly-Wolly-Doodle’…You may have gotten the mistaken notion…that the War Between the States was filled with ruin, death, rebellious slaves and horrid Yankee barbarism. ‘The Littlest Rebel’ corrects that unhappy thought and presents the conflict as a decidedly chummy little war."

Abraham Lincoln was played by an actor named Frank McGlynn Jr. (above), who portrayed the President onscreen at least a dozen times, beginning in 1915.

Lincoln has had to endure more embarrassing predicaments than entertaining Hollywood’s darling tike on his lap. In the pages of comic books, Honest Abe has encountered a number of time-traveling superheroes, including Spider-Man, Flash, Superboy, and, appropriately, Captain America.


Lincoln was a participant in the 1989 sci-fi comedy "Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure," and the recent novel (and coming-soon motion picture) Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, from the best-selling author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, should be self-explanatory.

Abe even put in an appearance on the original "Star Trek" TV series, in the third season episode "The Savage Curtain." On an alien planet - a soundstage landscaped with the papier-mâché and Styrofoam rocks typical of the show - a molten-rock baddie, wishing to determine which human philosophy of good or evil is stronger, forces Captain Kirk, First Officer Spock, Abraham Lincoln (who also happens to be Kirk’s personal hero) and Surak ("father of Vulcan civilization") to battle a tag team of villains, consisting of 21st century genocidal warlord Colonel Green, Kahless the Unforgettable (the first Klingon emperor), generic wild woman Zora and Genghis Khan.

Lincoln was portrayed by Lee Bergere (above), who played Blake Carrington’s head household staffer Joseph Anders on the prime time soap opera "Dynasty." "There is nothing good in war except its ending," his Lincoln solemnly intones. He actually keeps a straight face handling such dialogue as this exchange with actress Nichelle Nichols as Communications Officer Uhura…

Lincoln: "What a charming Negress. Oh, forgive me, my dear, I know in my time some used that term as a description of property."
Uhura: "But why should I object to that term, sir? In our century, we’ve learned not to fear words."

Or this conversation with William Shatner as Kirk…

Lincoln: "Tell me, James, do you drink whiskey?"
Kirk: "Upon occasion, yes."
Lincoln: "Because you remind me of another man who drank whiskey. A man I admired very much…General Grant."

In the 1969 short story "Downwind from Gettysburg," written by the iconic master of the fantastic, Ray Bradbury, an inventor creates a robotic Lincoln for an exhibit to inspire the American public to return to the nation’s idealistic foundations. Just before its unveiling, a publicity-hungry madman named Booth shoots the automaton. Unlike the first Booth, however, this one is justly denied any chance of notoriety.


The story was adapted for a 1992 episode of "The Ray Bradbury Theater" (above), featuring Howard Hesseman ("WKRP in Cincinnati") as the inventor and Robert Joy ("Land of the Dead") as Booth.

Ray Bradbury was inspired by the "Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln" attraction at Disneyland (above), featuring an audio-animatronic replica of the President, which was originally showcased at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. (In December 2009, the hydraulic-powered figure was replaced by an electronic autonomatronic model, which broadened Lincoln’s emotional range.) Lincoln is still voiced by recordings of the late actor Royal Dano (below). Dano’s angular features and sonorous timbre made him a natural to portray Lincoln a number of times on television, including a 1961 episode of the Chuck Connors western series "The Rifleman."

As a Frenchman, Jules Verne (the "Father of Science Fiction" who imagined space and undersea exploration long before they became reality) may have been curious about the American Civil War, but his historical savvy was sorely lacking. In 1887, shortly after Ambrose Bierce, a veteran of some of the bloodiest battles of the conflict, started writing his Civil War stories across the Atlantic, Verne published Texar’s Revenge, or North Against South.

In The Jules Verne Encyclopedia by Brian Taver and Stephen Michaluk Jr., the novel was described as "a very thin streak of narrative…padded to almost unwielding proportions by a quantity of remarkably inaccurate information about the rebellion…it would be easy to point out the various comical inaccuracies in the historical part of the story…"

The Mysterious Island, written in 1874 by Jules Verne as a follow-up to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and In Search of the Castaways, begins in March of 1865, one month before General Lee’s surrender. A Union prisoner-of-war plots an escape from a Confederate compound in Richmond, Virginia, commandeering an observation balloon, along with his former slave, a Northern newspaper reporter, a sailor and a 15-year-old orphaned boy. An inopportune hurricane sweeps ashore and carries the balloon to an unknown island. The marooned protagonists eventually become aware of an unseen presence aiding their survival. In the end, the benevolent spirit turns out to be Captain Nemo, whom Verne’s readers had taken for lost, presumably going down with his beloved submarine the Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

The Mysterious Island has been adapted for the screen many times, including a 1916 silent film, a 1929 version, starring Lionel Barrymore, a 1941 Russian production, a 1951 fifteen-chapter serial (which threw in ray gun-armed aliens from Mercury) and most recently a 2005 TV movie for the Hallmark Channel, starring Patrick Stewart as Nemo. Most every version features the harrowing balloon escape from the Confederate prison, including the slam-bang opening sequence of 1961’s "Mysterious Island," punctuated with a thunderous music score by the incomparable Bernard Herrmann.


Ray Harryhausen, the renowned stop-motion animation special effects wizard who co-produced "Mysterious Island" with his longtime filmmaking partner Charles H. Schneer, noted, "The original Mysterious Island was basically ‘How to Survive on a Desert Island.’ So we had to take great liberties. Not that we were trying to out-write Verne, but we felt that as a screenplay, it wouldn’t hold an audience. So we had to get the bizarre and the extremes into it…going to giantism and that sort of thing." That sort of thing included gigantic bees, a gargantuan crab, a monstrous nautiloid octopus and, for comic relief, a huge prehistoric phororhacos, which many viewers mistook for an oversized chicken - all revealed to be the results of Captain Nemo’s experiments to improve the world’s food supply.


(For audiences fond of James Mason’s depiction of Nemo in the popular 1954 Disney production of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," Herbert Lom, best known for his portrayal of the long-suffering Chief Inspector Dreyfus in "Pink Panther" films, makes a dignified, if all too brief, impression here as Nemo.)


This being the ‘60s, the filmmakers were obligated to add a female presence in two castaways, but they also tossed in an antagonistic character not in Verne’s original novel - a Confederate soldier who stirs up Civil War animosities on the volcanic island.

It’s a short hop from science-fiction to horror, which brings us to 1964’s "Two Thousand Maniacs!" Writer-director Herschell Gordon Lewis started out in advertising and marketing. He made industrial films in Chicago, where he hooked up with producer David Friedman. Together, they cranked out a number of low-budget black-and-white exploitation films, including softcore nudie-cuties, juvenile delinquent melodramas, hick comedies, even kiddie flicks. Looking for a more profitable genre, Lewis and Friedman tapped into full-color bloodshed, ushering in so-called "splatter" horror with "Blood Feast" (1963) and earning Lewis the nickname "The Godfather of Gore."


"Two Thousand Maniacs!" starts out with two carloads of north-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line tourists purposely detoured into the small Southern hamlet of Pleasant Valley, where the all too quaint townsfolk, oozing with creepy Southern hospitality, are celebrating what appears to be the community’s centennial in 1965. All too quickly, the outsiders are forced to volunteer in twisted carnival games that result in gruesome deaths. It turns out that the citizens are actually ghouls in a ghost town which was savagely decimated by Union troops 100 years earlier during the Civil War. The film ends with the spectral residents looking forward to 2065, when Pleasant Valley will rise again to wreak more vengeance on Yankee interlopers.


Lewis got the idea for the movie (shot in two weeks on a budget of $65,000 in St. Cloud, Florida, a sleepy retirement town eventually swallowed up by Disney World) from the 1947 Lerner and Loewe musical "Brigadoon," about an enchanted Scottish village that appears for just one day every hundred years. The crimson mayhem in "Two Thousand Maniacs!" is depicted with such over-the-top, manic glee that it can’t be taken seriously, from the abrupt ax-butchering of a woman in the office of the folksy mayor, a cartoonish stereotype with the demeanor of Foghorn Leghorn (she ends up getting roasted as the evening’s ballyhooed barbecue) and the "horse race," which results in a man being drawn and quartered, to a grim take on a dunk tank involving a boulder, and (the audience’s favorite) the "barrel roll," in which the hapless victim is shoved into a barrel embedded with large nails. (The movie’s title later inspired the name of Natalie Merchant’s band 10,000 Maniacs.)


By the early 1970s, Herschell Gordon Lewis left the movie business ("I grew weary of the game…I don’t enjoy that anymore") for more lucrative work in copywriting and direct marketing, the latter a subject on which he has written several best-selling books, beginning in the ‘80s. Most recently, he published tip books on internet and email marketing. He once stated that "in the mail order business…I am making a tremendous amount of money and working less than I ever have before…I can still make a film…When they’re ready, I’m ready."

Lewis, in fact, was ready to return to filmmaking in 2002 with the straight-to-video "Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat," featuring a cameo by "trash" film auteur John Waters ("Pink Flamingos," "Hairspray"). In 2009, the 80-year-old Lewis wrote and directed "The Uh-Oh Show," a grisly twist on television game shows.

As for "Two Thousand Maniacs!" which always remained Lewis’ personal favorite among his films, it was remade in 2005 as "2001 Maniacs." The new ingredients here are the premise that the timeless village reappears annually to exact "eye for an eye" revenge against the North and the presence in the now-eight waylaid Yankees (all, of course, incredibly good-looking, hormone-fueled college kids on their way to spring break in Daytona Beach) of a black character, allowing for some heavy-handed satirical commentary on race relations lacking in the original film.

Robert Englund, forever endeared to horror fans as Freddy Krueger in the original "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchise, steals the show as the unctuous mayor of Pleasant Valley, one eye covered with a patch bearing the Battle Flag of the Confederacy.

"2001 Maniacs" was co-produced by Eli Roth. As a sometime actor, Roth made an impression as the baseball bat-swinging "Bear Jew" in "Inglourious Basterds." As a director, he was an integral contributor among a group of filmmakers called the Splat Pack, who, at a time when mainstream studios were content with PG-13 horror, strove to bring back R-ratings with cranked-up violence and dam-bursting bloodletting. In response to such pictures as Roth’s directing debut, 2002’s "Cabin Fever," about college grads, a flesh-eating virus and backwoods yokels, and his second feature, "Hostel" (2006), about college students, sadistic tourists and Slovakian yokels, New York Magazine critic David Edelstein credited Roth with creating the horror sub-genre "torture porn," also known as "gorno." Robert Englund called "2001 Maniacs" "slapstick gore," while Roth dubbed it "splatstick…Instead of someone throwing pies, they’re throwing severed heads!"

Roth appears briefly in "2001 Maniacs" as a redneck, hitchhiking with his dog "Dr. Mambo," the same roles he and the dog played in "Cabin Fever." The film also features cameos by country music star Travis Tritt, Kane Hodder, who portrayed the undying machete-wielding Jason in four "Friday the 13th" movies, and, as a cannibalistic chef, Bill McKinney, forever notorious as the backwoods sportsman who terrorizes Ned Beatty in "Deliverance." (In footage left on the cutting-room floor but viewable among the DVD extras, John Landis, director of "National Lampoon’s Animal House," "The Blues Brothers" and "An American Werewolf in London," and David Friedman, producer of the original "Two Thousand Maniacs!", who also co-produced this remake, share a tongue-in-cheek scene as over-the-top disciplinarians at the frat boys’ college.)

(In 2010, a sequel, "2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams," was made, unfortunately without the participation of Robert Englund, who was replaced by "The Devil’s Rejects" star Bill Moseley.)

The eerie notion of vengeful Confederate spirits had prevously been dug up in "The Supernaturals" (1986), when a small platoon of Army recruits, on training maneuvers in the woods of the deep South, make camp at the site of an old Civil War minefield. A century earlier, Union troops, sharing the same division number as the modern-day soldiers, forced captured Confederates to walk the gauntlet through the mines, with predictably grisly results. Now, a mysterious fog unleashes some really upset zombie Johnny Rebs, who do their best to do in, one by one, the Yankee interlopers.

The film, directed by Armand Mastroianni, supposedly an American cousin of Italian cinema superstar Marcello Mastroianni (Armand directed Tom Hanks in his screen debut, the 1980 slasher "He Knows You’re Alone," in which Tom’s date ends up with her severed head in an aquarium), stars English-born Maxwell Caulfield, for whom stardom was forcibly attempted when he appeared opposite equally baffled newcomer Michelle Pfeiffer in "Grease 2" (1982). (Caulfield, incidentally, had a featured role in 1993’s "Gettysburg" as Union Colonel Strong Vincent, who was mortally wounded in valiant defense of Little Round Top during the three-day battle.)

Nichelle Nichols, the original "Star Trek" communications officer, Uhura, portrays the sergeant in charge of the platoon, which includes Talia Balsam (daughter of distinguished character actor Martin Balsam), LeVar Burton (helmsman Geordi La Forge on "Star Trek: The Next Generation") and Bobby Di Ciccio ("1941," "The Big Red One"). "The Supernaturals" has transcended its relative obscurity with a cult following, not only among "Star Trek" fans, who cherish the sole screen pairing of two generations, as it were, of "Star Trek" stars, but also among fans of zombie horror films.

Which brings us to one of the most intriguing, if not little-known, depictions of Civil War zombies, 1993’s "Ghost Brigade," also known as "Grey Knight" and "The Killing Box." Slave traders bring back an evil African voodoo spirit, which, once unwittingly freed by the Confederate Army, possesses the bodies of dead soldiers, North and South alike, and creates a force of zombies to kill troops on both sides.

Scripted by Matt Greenberg ("The Prophecy II," "Halloween H2O," "1408"), "Ghost Brigade" was directed by George Hickenlooper, best known for "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse," an award-winning documentary about the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s "Apocalypse Now," and for the short film "Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade," featuring Billy Bob Thornton and Molly Ringwald, which was later expanded as the feature film "Sling Blade." (One of the editors on "Ghost Brigade" was Monte Hellman, who, as a director in the 1960s and early ‘70s. established a cult fan-base with a pair of low-budget westerns starring Jack Nicholson, "Ride in the Whirlwind" and "The Shooting," along with the genuinely offbeat "Cockfighter," with a mute Warren Oates in the title role, and the existential road movie, "Two-Lane Blacktop.")

Adrian Pasdar (airborne congressional candidate Nathan Petrelli on the series "Heroes") and Corbin Bernsen (onetime heartthrob on the ‘80s TV show "L.A. Law") portray Union and Confederate officers, respectively, who join forces to investigate the mysterious slaughter. The eclectic supporting cast features Billy Bob Thornton, Matt LeBlanc (the popular "Friends" costar’s screen debut), David Arquette ("Scream," "Scream 2," "Scream 3," "Scream 4"), Alexis Arquette (the cross-dressing member of the Arquette acting clan), Ray Wise ("Twin Peaks") and Martin Sheen, who, since it was the same year as his role in "Gettysburg," appears to be sporting the stage beard he wore as Robert E. Lee.

Two decades earlier, Martin Sheen starred in a Civil War drama you probably have never seen, much less heard of. In "No Drums, No Bugles," Sheen portrays Ashby Gatrell, a West Virginia farmer who, unwilling to fight against either the North or South, abandons his wife and child and hides in a cave in the nearby wilderness to live off the land for the remaining three years of the war. The movie was made in 1971 during a politically tumultuous period when the Vietnam antiwar movement compelled conscientious objectors to leave their homes and families. (Speaking of the 1970s, there’s even a scene in "No Drums, No Bugles" of Sheen partaking of some local locoweed and, enjoying what one internet wag dubbed "a Pentecostal moment," dangles naked from a tree and streaks through the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains.)

There really was an Ashby Gatrell, who became a local legend in West Virginia’s Doddridge County. Skip forward a century, and fellow West Virginian Clyde Ware, an acclaimed novelist, became a filmmaker as writer, producer and director of "No Drums, No Bugles," based on that legend of Gatrell, whose name Ware, as a boy growing up in Doddridge County, found carved on the wall of a mountain cave.

"A small first film well worth seeing," was how Judith Crist, then critic for New York Magazine, described "No Drums, No Bugles." "Martin Sheen," she wrote, "is at his best as a solitary, revealing a simple man fighting to maintain not only his body but also his sense of right; his moods are made clear in silent eloquence and in the beautifully suspenseful final segment, when he has learned of the war’s end and rushes home in a hysterical muddle of celebration and self-justification, he gives a stunning performance."

And so we, too, come to the war’s end in the moviehouse. This evening’s particular program of feature presentations ran the gamut of the unique, from inspired and embarrassing, to wondrous and bizarre, to askew and horrific.

Nothing, however, could be as horrifying as the sight - in the 1968 Universal Studios backlot Civil War cheapie "Journey to Shiloh" - of James Caan and Harrison Ford in their Prince Valiant pageboy wigs.

(Left to right: Don Stroud, Michael Sarrazin, Jan-Michael Vincent, James Caan, Paul Petersen, Michael Burns, Harrison Ford)