pro-Confederate travesty of history

Rating: 1/10 (22 November 2004)

This move travesties the history of the war and especially of the Reconstruction, which was not at all the disaster that pro-Southern historians and their sympathizers would have us believe. This film is awash, as one would expect, in nostalgia for the ancien regime, and not even the charm of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable can make me forget that fact. Such scenes as the one in which the director has an African-American character riding along in a carriage singing Marching Through Georgia are obviously meant to inspire bitterness and resentment in the viewer, and the Federal troops are uniformly portrayed as brutes. This is nothing but polite version of Birth of a Nation--at least so far as its politics go.