Civil War fantasy

Some time back I picked up a DVD of Shenandoah. With my previous DVR having died, forcing me to watch some of my DVDs, I finally put this one in the player and watched.

James Stewart plays Charlie, the patriarch of the Anderson family in western Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in 1864. Now, if you know your history you should know that this is over three years into the US Civil War, and in the Confederacy. By this time the war was already effectively lost for the South. But dammit, it looks as if the war hasn't touched the Anderson place at all. None of his six sons has gone off to fight the war, and they somehow grow or make everything they need, as all the oil lamps stay lit. Indeed, Charlie is pissed that Confederate procurement agents want his horses. (To be fair, I'd be pissed too about it. But you'd think at least one of the sons would have gone off to fight.)

In addition to having six sons, he's got a daughter Jennie (Rosemary Forsyth) and daughter-in-law Ann (Katharine Ross in her movie debut), the latter of whom is married to son James (Patrick Wayne) and pregnant. Somehow, all of these people are able to live a fairly idyllic life with the only real tragedy seeming to be that the matriarch died in childbirth with youngest son Boy (Philip Alford).

But we wouldn't have much of a movie if this idyllic life just kept going on. A couple of things happen. One is that Jennie gets married to Confederate officer Sam (Doug McClure) who has to go almost straight from the wedding back to the front. And then one day while Boy is out hunting, he runs into a Union ambush. Since he had stupidly put on a Confederate cap that he had found, he gets taken prisoner by the Union.

Charlie finds out, and he decides that he's just going to get up from the farm and form a search party to find Boy come hell or high water! And he and most of the remaining children are just able to go off and do the searching, barely being troubled by any of the soldiers from either army going around the area. They find a Union officer (George Kennedy) who doesn't have Boy and suggests a rail transport; there they find Sam but not Boy. Meanwhile, things aren't particularly safe back at the farm....

Shenandoah goes on like this for the entirety of its 105-minute running time. Most of that time I found maddening, since the plot not only strains credulity, it breaks it, stomps on its carcass, and demands that we respect it for having done so. OK, I'm being a bit hyperbolic. But not much. Stewart gives a good performance, and frankly there's nothing wrong with the acting from the supporting players either. It's just that plot.

Well, one other technical problem I had was that Shenandoah uses some battle footage from Raintree County. In and of itself that's no big deal, but Raintree County was in a 2:35:1 aspect ratio, while by the time of Shenandoah the 1.85:1 ratio was much more standard, so all that Raintree County footage looks grainy and out of place.

Still, many of you will probably like Shenandoah much more than I did, so get a copy and judge for yourself.