Without period accuracy the movie can't really have historical depth, and for all the movieishness it plays out as a peculiarly muted version of the simplest of quests: homecoming (from the Odyssey, Xenophon's Anabasis, and the Book of Exodus to The Wizard of Oz (1939)). The air of tragedy just makes you want to fast forward to the no-good you know is coming. To keep things violent enough for the men in the audience, two sections of Home Guard and a passel of Union soldiers come on by turns for some melodramatic attacks, which only have the effect of making all the likeable characters into victims. The movie might as well be projected on a wet blanket.

There is a superb battle sequence at the beginning, which opens with an explosion of mines under the Southern encampment at Petersburg. We see one soldier puzzling as the ground slowly lifts upward beneath him and you feel that the moviemakers have really got how disorienting a surprise attack must be. The ensuing hand-to-hand combat is the muddle that many battles must have turned into before modern weaponry, but I don't see how this makes the movie anti-war. What makes it anti-war is that the hero is fighting for the Confederacy and the movie was made for an audience that is not expected to root for the Southern cause. In other words, it's anti-war only from the Southern perspective.

In her letters we hear Ada encouraging her beloved to desert, though the movie stops short of making her an abolitionist or a Union sympathizer. She has no political opinions that we hear of at all, which deprives her exhortations of context. They're a little odd if we're to take them as general principles. Would the moviemakers expect our spirits to soar if a Union enlistee deserted before Appomattox Court House and his lady love kept writing him letters begging him to abandon his fellow soldiers so he could come home and screw her?

You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.

Alan Dale is author of Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.