Cold Mountain

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Cold Mountain from Miramax Films (2003), directed by Anthony Minghella

In 1961 the Library of Congress published a filmography of nearly nine hundred motion pictures produced since 1897 and set during the Civil War. It is not surprising that they overwhelmingly fall within "traditional" storylines, with Gone With the Wind (1939) being the most familiar and extreme example. Any other approaches to the subject were far more akin to westerns in blue and gray--with Dark Command (1940), set in Bleeding Kansas, or Virginia City (1949) being prime examples. And at best most were second tier, "B" pictures.

More recently, with productions such as Glory (1989) and even Ride With the Devil (1999), filmmakers have taken significantly more risks and considerably broadened the view of the war to include African Americans as primary characters, a more realistic view of massed combat as well as irregular warfare, and an often stark and …