![]() At another scene, a village made up of 32 houses, a bank and a watercourse were built to provide a setting for the film. Also, 4,000 l fuel and other pyrotechnic tools were used for the sake of making it lifelike. Meanwhile shooting, among others, a 16 m deep and 27 m wide pit was dug and several hundreds of soldiers marched next to a village to faithfully illustrate the contemporary battle scenes. Shooting in Romania caused the locals many headaches but they might have been compensated by the fact that they hosted the greatest stars of Hollywood. So they still ended up with the highest rate of casualties of any Union division in the fight.The American movie Cold Mountain was shot in Transylvania in 2003. "Nobody was supposed to go into it," says Chris Calkins, chief of interpretation at Petersburg National Battlefield.īut at the last minute, Calkins says, the Union commander decided to have untrained white troops lead the assault instead.Īmong the reasons given was the fear of political repercussions in the North if things went badly and the black troops were seen as being deliberately sent to be slaughtered.Īs it happened, however, they were thrown into the battle anyway, after the tired and badly led whites - who had never been told that they were supposed to avoid the big hole - had poured into it and been pinned down. Among other things, they were to attack to the left and right of the hole created by the explosion. Colored Troops was carefully trained to lead the assault. What you need to know about the Union side of things is this: After the decision had been made to tunnel under the Confederate lines, a division of U.S. So if you're planning to see this lovingly crafted picture that does try to present an "accurate" picture of the American past, it might be just as well to understand what happened outside Petersburg on that awful July day in 1864. This brings the discussion around to what Ayers calls "the great central problem of all of American history - race and slavery."Īnd how did the filmmakers do on that one? "What's wrong with that picture?" the historian asks. "When you watch this film you have a sense that there are no white women in the Confederacy who support the Confederate war effort," Gallagher says, but this is "a grotesque distortion." Ada is supposed to be a transplanted Charleston belle, raised in the heart of the slaveholding South, yet she's skeptical about the war from the beginning, and practically the first words out of her mouth establish her anti-slavery sentiments. Jude Law gets high marks for scruffiness as well.Ī more serious topic is the movie's seeming determination to turn the "Gone With the Wind" stereotype of pro-war, pro-slavery Southern womanhood on its head. Zellweger wins Most Believable Actress, hands down. The one thing period experts seem to agree on is that even when Ada, Kidman's character, is leading a hardscrabble life, she looks far too good to be true. Let's deal with the frivolous part first. Next question: What about the way women are portrayed in "Cold Mountain"? Thus he sees the film as "illuminating something real." Yet he notes that there was considerable Union sentiment in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee (a point not made in "Cold Mountain") and that the authorities there "did prey very violently" on those deemed insufficiently loyal to the South - which helps explain the bitter conflicts that continued after the war. He would never call this or any other movie "accurate," Foner says. But "it's overdrawn in this movie, I think." Home Guardsmen, whose mission included returning escaped slaves to their masters and sending deserters back to the rebel lines, mostly didn't go around "killing people indiscriminately and torturing women." Ayers agrees, adding that "Cold Mountain" seems to conflate the Home Guard with what people at the time called "bushwhackers": violent, opportunistic outlaws with no loyalty to either side.īut Columbia University historian Eric Foner, who has also previewed the film, doesn't fully agree. "The war in western North Carolina got very, very nasty," Gallagher says. ![]() And the first question from the audience goes straight to the believability of Minghella's period evocation: Were the members of the Home Guard really as brutal as the movie shows them to be? ![]() The broad context for all this is what Ayers, a historian whose work has focused more on the home front than the battlefield, refers to as the "backwash" of the Civil War. Most of "Cold Mountain" is devoted to Inman's temptations and bloody travails on his long walk home, and to the depredations of the local posses known as the Home Guard. The Crater sequence occupies only a few minutes of the 2 1/2-hour film.
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