Review by Edward Countryman Even during the war, the debates, and the internal conflicts that created the United States, creative artists were wrestling with the interpretive problems their era presented. These included chamber music, vernacular song, poetry, drama, and the novel. Yet the achievement remains spotty in comparison to what the French Revolution generated. There is no concert-hall music to compare with the Berlioz version of la Marseillaise or Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture , let alone Beethoven's third symphony, the Eroica . Unless we count the musical 1776, there is no American Revolution opera at all, which stands in contrast to productions as diverse as The Marriage of Figaro, Dialogues des Carmelites , and most recently The Ghosts of Versailles.
Feature film being a historically American form, it ought to have done better.
Ford's Drums has its points of interest, especially for the development of the director's extended work in the western genre. Most recently Roland Emerich's The Patriot realizes its central character fully, shows the problems he faces of indecision and family division, and gets at the sheer brutality of the southern phase of the Revolutionary War. Novelists have done no better. To me, Edmonds' Drums remains the best. But from James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy to the present there is nothing to match the power of Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities.