A Southerner’s Movie Guide, Part VI

“I was invited to preview the director’s cut of G&G in 2002 or 2003.  When several friends and I went out at the intermission, we were all streaming tears.  I was mostly deeply moved, and no less by the movie’s second half.  One scene that particularly moved me showed two slaves talking over a soldier’s coffin in camp.  One had been the slave of the now dead Confederate soldier.  The other asked him how he felt about freedom, did he plan to run away, etc.  The dialogue was precisely what you expect from slaves conflicted between love for the masters they had grown up with and desire for freedom.  Last line was the dead soldier’s slave saying, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do now, but I know this much [tapping on the coffin], this Rebel’s in heaven.’  I bawled.  Then the movie came out.  The scene that had so moved me nowhere appeared, but instead had been substituted by the wretched sequence with Donzalea Abernathy, the slave in Fredericksburg, quoting a long and not pertinent passage out of Esther.  Not possible to tell you how disappointed and disgusted I was.  Fear struck Maxwell, it appears, over the impact of that scene and its truthfulness.”

8. The War for Southern Independence (continued): Fantasy and Fraud
Scorcese’s Gangs of New York (2002)

Martin Scorcese, in an interview, candidly described his Gangsof New York, as an “opera.”  He had been asked whether the event s portrayed were true to history.  I took his reply to mean that the events of the movie were selected and organized for dramatic emphasis and were not to be taken as literal factual record.

And, indeed, as a historical record of 19th-century New York, the film has many failings.  Nevertheless, it has provoked some useful discussion of the historical context – specifically for the light it sheds on the Lincolnite mythology of the Civil War era.  It seems that the accepted idea of the gloriously united North trampling out the wrathful grapes of slavery and treason is not so sound a picture of the real thing after all.