Description
Assesses the ways in which movies about the Civil War have distorted the facts about America's most destructive and divisive war, explaining how film helped promote racism and segregation until the advent of the civil rights movement.
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Arguing that film consistently distorts and sanitizes the past, Chadwick (history and film, Rutgers U.) details the distortions and myths purveyed by film from the KKK-celebrating Birth of a Nation to the 1993 film Sommersby , in which actor Richard Gere plays a former slave-owner who is miraculously transformed into a populist who heroically drives off the KKK from a racially integrated community. For the bulk of film's history, myths have portrayed a myth of the underdog Southerner and demeaned African Americans, but new "politically correct," yet still sanitized, versions have begun to crop up in Hollywood productions. In the end, Chadwick seems to believe, despite changes in the treatment of the Civil war on screen, the "reel" still fails to be "real." Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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