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Andersonville [1996] (REGION 1) (NTSC)


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Much too long and some unbelievable pieces.
Review date: 2008-01-05 Rating: 4 out of 10

The DVD cover may advertise this as "the great untold story of the civil war" but most of this you can see coming 10 minutes before it arrives.The story revolves around a group of Union soldiers interned in a Confederate Prison Camp where they have to survive in tents,living open to the elements with no sanitation,water provided from a fetid source so they have to wring rainwater from their clothing. They are constantly under threat from a group known as "Raiders" who attack,rob and murder anyone to enrich themselves.Presumably the group we follow in the film and the ones they befriend do NOT suffer enough through the film from the ill-treatment the "Raiders" dish out to them for them to lose their own humanity for after the full scale riot in the camp and the "Raiders" are captured, they are given a fair legal jury trial?? The acting I thought generally was poor.And I don't think it's necessary to take 43 lines to review this film either.

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Another name for Hell
Review date: 2007-11-10 Rating: 8 out of 10

In the wake of the critical and commercial success of A Man For All Seasons, Fred Zinnemann unsuccessfully attempted to use his post-Oscar clout to make a film about the atrocities at the infamous Confederate Civil War prison camp where 12,912 Union prisoners of war died of starvation and disease, but as many others had found out before him, studio chiefs didn't think it was the sort of thing to reverse declining cinema attendance and pulled the plug before a frame was shot. There had been a small-scale early TV play about the post-war trial of the officer in charge but it wasn't until Ted Turner's success with Gettysburg that a full-scale dramatization of life inside the stockade made it to the screen, and then only on the small one. The biggest name on the credits of Andersonville is director John Frankenheimer, then going through something of a critical comeback returning to the medium that first brought him to prominence: the cast is good, but it's more a case of a few familiar faces rather than big stars - Frederic Forrest, Cliff de Young, William Sanderson, William H. Macey - among a cast largely made up of little-known actors. Yet it's very clear that a lot of money has been spent, and that it's been made on a truly epic scale. Rarely has the old copywriters' pitch `a cast of thousands' seemed more appropriate as almost every scene boasts swathes of re-enactors to fill out the overcrowded prison.

Despite being made for television it never looks threadbare and it never feels like its playing down the ugliness of the situation in the name of taste or network censorship even if it doesn't dwell on the details as much as it could. Built for 8000 but ending up housing 45,000, Andersonville itself was little more than a cattle pen: no barracks, a fetid stream, a lot of mud and far too many inmates surrounded by a wall and watchtowers, it didn't take much to turn it into a festering hellhole, with rations often withheld by the commander, water so rancid that inmates had to wring rainwater from their clothes to avoid fever, child guards daring prisoners to cross the `dead line' so they could kill them for a bounty and prisoners forming gangs to prey on and often kill each other. Even Confederate officials regarded it as `a disgrace to civilization.' In a war as ugly as the one between the States, it's some measure of how bad things were that the only man convicted and executed for war crimes in the entire Civil War was the commander of Andersonville.

As drama it's fairly straightforward, following a group of new arrivals through their first days in the camp to the time those few who survive leave, taking in many of the expected conventions of the prison movie en route - escape attempts, futile deaths, dashed hopes and a near-riot. At times it does threaten to turn into a Civil War version of a WW2 P.O.W. movie, but it's held back from the pitfalls of great escapism by the fact that where many of those films often naively showed German prison camps as virtual holiday camps where the inmates tried to escape almost as a game, Andersonville makes it clear that here attempting to escape is seen as the only alternative to dying in squalor and pain. While there are few surprises, it's executed with real conviction, Frankenheimer's superb direction complemented by excellent photography from Ric Waite and production design by Michael Z. Hanan. That said, it is annoying that Warners' DVD has been needlessly cropped from fullframe into 1.85:1 widescreen, a reverse cropping that is just as bad as panning-and-scanning widescreen films into fullframe. While most of the 167 minutes it's not too damaging, there are some close-ups that become way too tight at times, although it's generally only a momentary distraction.

Product Details/Specifications


Actor(s):
Jarrod Emick
Ted Marcoux
Jayce Bartok
Carmen Argenziano
Frederic Forrest

Creators:
Jarrod Emick (Primary Contributor)
Frederic Forrest (Primary Contributor)
Ric Waite (Cinematographer)
John Frankenheimer (Producer)
David W. Rintels (Producer)
David W. Rintels (Writer)
Diane Batson-Smith (Producer)
Ethel Winant (Producer)
Lansing L. Smith (Producer)

Director(s):

Recording label: Warner Home Video
Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
EAN: 9780780639867
Binding: DVD
ISBN: 0780639863
Number of items: 1
Format: Closed-captioned, Colour, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC,
Release date: 2003-07-15
Universal product code (UPC): 053939636420
Region code: 1
Running time: 167 minutes
Theatrical release date: 1996-03-03
Language: English (Original Language)
Language: English (Subtitled)
Language: French (Subtitled)
Language: Spanish (Subtitled)
Language: French (Dubbed)

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