The next movie in our Corona Virus Film Festival at home is the movie Gettysburg. Clocking in at more than four hours, we split the viewing between two days.
I saw the movie when it was released in 1993 and again early in the 2000s on DVD. I had forgotten how long it is and how didactic. Throughout the movie are speeches about why both sides are fighting the war. I think anyone who is sympathetic with the Confederate cause would find these speeches painful. I liked them and I don't like anything about the rebel cause.
In the course of the movie, the professors who take up arms are treated with respect. Learning in general is treated well. There is a strong anti-intellectual strain in American life, but in this movie the learned men like Colonel Chamberlain are treated with respect and last-in-his-West-Point-class George Pickett is the butt of jokes. The scene in which Pickett denies evolution is wonderful. The scene in which General Hancock talks to Chamberlain about his friend General Armistead is beautiful and sad.
For spectacle, the movie is just amazing. Hundreds of re-enactors line up shoulder to shoulder to attack Little Round Top. Thousands march across a mile of open fields at the end of the movie in Pickett's charge. Dozens of cannon fire rolling barrages from the Confederate guns, answered by dozens more on the Union side.
A quick search of "Lee Longstreet Gettysburg" shows the deep debate about how the double disaster of Little Round Top and Pickett's Charge happened. It also shows how the disagreement portrayed in the movie and the novel on which it is based could have unfolded between the two men.
My first visit to Gettysburg was just a year after I returned to America from three years as a tank commander on the East-West border in Germany. We spent a lot of time training at or near the border deciding where our tanks should be placed for the best field of fire. Anytime my tank was on the move in the German countryside, I was scanning for a place to get out of the line of fire of an approaching enemy and looking for where to go if an attack suddenly occurred.
With my head full of fire and maneuver, seeing the route of Pickett's attack was stunning. How anyone survived that assault, I don't know.
The movie shows Lee believing his men could cross that mile of open field sloping upward and prevail over men with cannon hiding behind a stone wall. As an American, I am glad Lee was bold to the point of foolishness. The defeat at Gettysburg was certainly not the end of the will of the slave-owning states to fight, but it was the end of any real hope for victory, and for that I am endlessly grateful.
