Man's Favorite Short: "The Civil War"

Almost the only John Ford film dealing with the War between the States, together with The Horse Soldiers (1959), this 21-minute segment of the Cinerama epic How The West Was Won (1962) remains, in the midst of an interesting but long and sprawling blockbuster, almost ignored or, when seen, immediately dismissed or forgotten because of its very short duration. It seems an absurdly quantitative criterion which no critic, I think, would acknowledge, but which certainly and surreptitiously works against a fair consideration of shorts, thereby limiting yet more their attractiveness as a feasible narrative format, the best when a story can be briefly told, instead of inflating a paper-thin anecdote into a standard-length screenplay, as happens so often today.

By 1962, John Ford had fully developed a sort of cinematic shorthand which allowed him, on a studio backlot despite the theoretical spectacular Cinerama show to which he had accepted to contribute (the producer was Bernard Smith, who later hired Ford for Cheyenne Autumn and 7 Women), to synthesize the meaning and the taste of the Civil War, perhaps of war in general, surely of most civil wars, in a little more than twenty minutes which I regard among the best, most purely cinematic he ever directed.

It is a very simple, wholly elliptical short, built with the naked evidence of logic. Abraham Lincoln (Raymond Massey) foresees that there will be a war between the States. The former mailman, now Corporal Peterson (Andy Devine) of the Ohio Volunteers militia, brings to the aging Mrs. Eve Rawlings (Carroll Baker) a letter about her son Zeb (George Peppard) from her sister Lilith in California. But the boy doesn’t want to go there or to work in the family farm, but rather wishes to follow his father’s steps and go to war. Like so many others, including Peterson, Zeb seems to believe that the war is a great adventure, a promise of glory and fun, and that it won’t last for long. In another beautiful porch scene, with both sitting on the steps, the tired mother, hurt but helpless, gives in to her son’s youthful delusions. As he sets off to war along the dirt road, she prays and talks to her father’s tomb. But war is no fun. Rather a nightmarish mess. Captain Rawlings has been killed in the battle of Shiloh. Nearby, unaware of that, a lost and haggard Zeb meets another disappointed and frightened young recruit, a nameless rebel without a cause (Russ Tamblyn), both equally terrified, disgusted, exhausted, and feeling so cheated they are on the verge of desertion. Though chaos is so general that no one would know if they did. In the night, sitting thirsty by the riverside whose bloody water they cannot drink, both overhear the bitter, disheartened talk of two generals, Grant (Harry Morgan) and Sherman (John Wayne). The Texan deserter is tempted by this chance to become famous as the man who killed Grant, so Zeb has to bayonet him to death. Nobody realizes or understands either what’s happened or what might have happened otherwise. After some more brief battle shots, Zeb returns home only to find two new tombs in the family plot: both his parents are now dead. He leaves for the West, in search of a more adventurous life than farming.

It’s that simple. But it breathes in a serene and beautiful way, unhurried but to the point, with an economy of trait and gesture that brings to mind Griffith and Chaplin, and now (we were not familiar with the Japanese master in 1962) seems curiously close to Ozu. No more need be said. Why, when you can see it? And fully understand it without any stress, with very little, sparse, laconic dialogue. Part of its beauty comes from the hallucinated pictorial quality of day-for-night sets composed for widescreen that recall Goya’s firing squad or David’s cavalry charges. But most of it comes rather from the dead leaves silent dropping quality of the shots which quietly let things simply happen, at a certain distance, without stressing the horror or the self-evident loss.

© FIPRESCI 2006