Hollywood’s Long Civil War

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This study of films relating to the American Civil War extends beyond the four-year military phase of the war, looking forward to the cinema of the twentieth-century Civil Rights period and backward to films about the pre-war years in which the origins and causes of the conflict are also reflected. This is the long Civil War of the book’s title, underpinning its originality as a discussion of Hollywood’s concern with the unresolved racial tensions that led to the war and which persist in different but related forms long after its ending. All the major films about the Civil War and a large number of lesser known films are discussed here. There are separate chapters on the two most famous and controversial films of the genre, the 1915 work The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, and on the Civil War Western that helps to perpetuate the memory of the United States’ most costly and nation-forming armed struggle. The film industry’s reluctance during the silent era to portray the realities of slavery and its exclusion of African American actors from major screen roles are also important themes, and cinema’s eventual self-emancipation in the wake of liberating Civil Rights films is presented as a final Hollywood success story.