Andersonville

Starring:Jarrod Emick, Frederic Forrest, Ted Marcoux, Carmen Argenziano, Jayce Bartok, Frederick Coffin, Cliff De Young, Denis Forest, Justin Henry, Tony Higgins, Kris Kamm, Andrew Kavovit, Olek Krupa, William H. Macy, Matt McGrath, Peter Murnik, Gabriel Olds, Tim Parati, William Sanderson, Gregory Sporleder
Director: John Frankenheimer
Studio: Turner Home Ent
Product Type: DVD

Description

They left the nightmare...and entered Hell. Captured Union soilders cope with life inside the Civil War's most notorious prisoner-of-war camp. A powerful, compeling tale of war and will, with Emmy Award-winning direction by John Frankenheimer and a cast including Frederic Forrest (Apocalypse Now) and William H. Macy (ER, Fargo) Year: 1996 Director: John Frankenheimer Starring: Jarrod Emick, Frederic Forrest, Ted Marcoux

Customer Reviews:

Very informative DVD!.......2007-07-05

This DVD arrived quickly and in excellent shape. I watched this along with my husband, not personally knowing much about this time in history, and was amazed.

Andersonville.......2007-07-03

My husband and I enjoyed this movie. The only thing I could say "bad" about the movie is that it doesn't seem to play in every DVD player. My mom tried it in hers and it pixilates and or jumps around. Not very clear on hers either.

Other movies are playing just fine on her DVD but not that one. But outside of that, the movie is very good and worth watching and buying.

Civil War Prison Drama.......2007-05-27

"Andersonville" tells the story of the most infamous prison camp the Confederate Army had to offer during the Civil War. Inside prisoners had to deal with scurvy, vicious and corrupt guards, and gangs of killers and thieves, called the Raiders. Staying alive was hard, staying sane was nearly impossible. The cast can certainly be called ensemble, as there is no real primary character, though I guess Jarrod Emick as Josiah Day comes pretty close. I really liked Cliff De Young's Sgt. John Gleason, the escape mastermind. In a way this is more or less like any prison movie you've ever seen, there are the gangs, evil warden, and comraderance of the prisoners. It's "The Shawshank Redemption" for the Civil War. The film is roughly in three parts; the escape, the trial, and the survival. There is really little I can say to convey how powerful this film is, it must be experienced. The late great John Frankenheimer did an excellent job of showing how miserable the over crowded prison was, how terrible the rain and heat could have been. Sure there was a few parts that seemed to dramatic to be real, but I except that as making the movie entertaining. All in all, a great show. I recommend it.

Informative, But Very Depressing.......2007-01-03

It had no real climax or saving grace to save it from the depths of despair, but it did give insight to what Civil War prison camps were like. I wouldn't watch it again myself, simply because it was too sadistic at times for my tastes.

A disappointment: fails to live up to promise.......2006-07-26

I'm not a Civil War scholar, so I'll defer to reviewers with greater knowledge about the accuracy of what is portrayed in the film. As a film, however, this one is lacking in many ways, from hyper-melodramatic voice-overs to noticeably poor editing. When combined with inaccurate history, the disappointment is doubled. Andersonville was directed by John Frankenheimer, who created many good or great films, one of which, The Manchurian Candidate, is a masterpiece. With his resume, I have to believe that the intentions of the movie-makers were good, but the end product (a made-for-TV movie) reflects an inferior medium. A story as naturally powerful and important as Andersonville deserves a greater commitment to realism, and the drama should have been derived from historically accurate fact.
Instead, the drama was manufactured--history was dramatized. It's a film that deserves to be made again, re-written by someone with a commitment to accuracy and produced by a company more interested in the best available version of the truth than in pandering to an audience of supposed dullards with second-rate pap. When stories like Andersonville are not told with excellence, the fall into mediocrity is precipitous and leaves me feeling that the story should not have been filmed at all.

The Andersonville Trial (Broadway Theatre Archive)

Average customer rating:

When television offered great drama...
Celebrates Real Acting of Yesteryear
wow! shatner was once an actor???
Eerie Precursor to Auschwitz and The Gulag Archipelago
Faulty history but an excellent work of art!!

The Andersonville Trial (Broadway Theatre Archive)
Starring: William Shatner , Cameron Mitchell , Richard Basehart , Jack Cassidy , and Martin Sheen
Director: George C. Scott
Manufacturer: Image Entertainment
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

Period Piece | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

Drama | Military & War | Genres | DVD | Video

Civil War | Military & War | Genres | DVD | Video

Drama | Kids & Family | Genres | DVD | Video

( A ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
Similar Items:

Andersonville
The Missiles of October
Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (Broadway Theatre Archive)
Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (Broadway Theatre Archive)
Judgment at Nuremberg

ASIN: B0000A0DTC
Release Date: 2003-08-26

Customer Reviews:

When television offered great drama..........2007-06-13

I remembered watching this broadcast as a kid on television and when I saw the title from Amazon.com, I wondered if it was as good today as I remembered from then... Wow! what a relief to find the program itself has held up over thirty plus years since the original air-date in the early 1970's... plus, the quality of the DVD transfer is so great! If you have an interest in first-rate live theatre, and want to enjoy it in you home theatre, this is a great DVD for an evening's entertainment. The acting is superlative, the writing smart and the directing well-paced. The tale of America's "first war crimes trial" is a little known tale that should be seen by all those interested in contemporary concerns about morality and "civilized" behavior in times of war.

Celebrates Real Acting of Yesteryear.......2007-04-27

When was the last time you saw REAL acting?

I remembered this PBS production vividly as when I saw it, ahem, 37 years ago!! It harkens back to William Shatner's acting on The Twilight Zone, before he became almost a parody of himself (that record album) or a brand name (for Priceline).

Yes, there is real acting here, including a portrayal of post-traumatic stress disorder (before it was an official diagnosis)...the real stars are Cassidy and Shatner, but Shatner really outshines them all. When he comes to conclude that perhaps this really is a sham trial, and that soldiers following orders cannot and should not be put on trial, that the "evidence" against Wirz is flimsy at best (or at least as the trial preparation went). The young Lt. Col. J.A. realizes that he is effectively killing a man for his government as well as a musket ball could. "I was only following orders" is not offered as a defense, as it would years later for equally abhorrent war crimes. Today, "rules of engagement" have replaced direct orders as the ultimate arbiters, making such political prosecutions much easier to mount.

There is no doubt that Andersonville was a horrible place--and place confining humans in a small space will ultimately become a place of disease, demoralization, and desecration. However, the focus of this trial rings as relevant today as it did in the height of the Vietnam War. Can a soldier disobey an order as "immoral"? As John F. Kennedy said of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, "Victory has many fathers, while defeat is an orphan." One can easily see that in a room full of Generals, Colonels, in their glamorous uniforms, the Victors, one defeated Captain hardly stood a chance of exoneration in a time of bitter conflict and martial law.

No special effects, no camera shifting, no profanity or racial slurs, just excellent acting, and well worth the price of admission.

wow! shatner was once an actor???.......2007-03-25

produced for public television back in the days before they became the station of high class infomercials, this courtroom drama focuses on henry wirtz, the commandant of the infamous civil war prison camp who was executed for war crimes. played effectively by richard basehart (anybody remember him?) but as usual the stars are the two lawyers: prosecutor william shatner and defense counsel jack cassidy, both of whom get to display acting chops they usually had to hide behind their personae. not for the faint of heart, but i remembered this for over 30 years and wasnt disappointed seeing it again.

Eerie Precursor to Auschwitz and The Gulag Archipelago.......2007-02-12

Watching this fine, engrossing production (why don't they make films like this any more?) left me strangely depressed. First I will state why I think it was so good....several well-known television actors put in outstanding performances: (1) William Shatner as the prosecutor, Col. Chipman. Shatner is an uneven performer, and he indeed starts out a little shakey in this one, but towards the end, when Chipman decides to risk his own career, after being warned by Chief Judge Gen. Wallace, he decides to throw caution to the wind and directly address the defendent's (Capt. Wirz) moral culpability in carrying out immoral orders without question, Shatner comes out full force with an outstanding performance.
(2) Richard Basehart, as Capt. Wirz who at first seems to be a victim of "victor's justice", loses control of himself and emotionally destroys himself in front of the court as he hysterically describes his futile attempts to prevent the starving, abused Union prisoners from trying to burrow out of the camp "like rats". (3) Jack Cassidy as defense attorney Otis Baker. Cassidy was a truly outstanding actor, and he plays the part beautifully, knowing when to badger a weak witness, but gently probing uncertainties in the testimony of a badly traumatized young survivor of Andersonville, without abusing him. (4) Cameron Mitchell, as Chief Judge General Wallace, who initially resists any attempt to call Wirz to account for his failure to disobey orders in the name of humanity, but is painfully forced to admit that the Wirz's moral universe must be explored, even at the expense of questioning military discipline.

Director George C Scott, in a filmed introduction, alludes to "current events" in the 1970 production, which is the War in Vietnam, and more specifically, the My Lai atrocities carried out by American soldiers who were confronting an enemy who hid among the civilian population. Frankly, I don't know exactly how good the comparison between William Calley, who was charged with committing the atrocity, and Wirz was, because Wirz was in charge of enemy prisoners were were basically helpless, whereas in Vietnam, the American soldiers were confronting
an active enemy who was deliberately dragging a civilian population into the conflict.

In any event, as I stated above, I felt depressed at the end, because hearing of the horrors at Andersonville and Wirz's ultimate indifference
to the suffering he oversaw, reminded me of much more recent horrors, from the Holocaust, Stalin's Gulag, Pol Pot and Mao Tse-tung's mass terror and concentration camps, not to mention numerous others.
I kept reminding myself, that THIS WAS AMERICANS DOING THESE HORRIBLE THINGS TO EACH OTHER...people who had been part of the same nation, spoke the same language and had the same religions. How much easier was it for the Germans to dehumanize the Jews and commit unspeakable crimes against them, or for Stalin to turn on "the Kulaks" or "counterrevolutionaries" or "Trotskyites" or whatever. What hope is their for mankind if it is so easy to take a normal person and in a short period of time turn him into an either passive or active, unfeeling killing machine? Food for thought.

Faulty history but an excellent work of art!!.......2006-02-12

This fascinating drama, which has a timeless relevance for today's audiences in terms of the questions it poses, can only be seen, as others have pointed out, in the context of the times in which it was written (1959) and here produced (1970). Of course the play on which the TV production is based invites direct parallels with the Nueremberg Trials, which is what the author intended. However, with the My Lai massacre having engendered front page paroxysms of outrage in artistic-intellectual circles, George C. Scott took some risks with this work, which clearly presents Wirz as the same kind of "scapegoat" he obviously felt Calley represented.

That having been said, however, with everything we now know about the personal role Wirz really played in the horrific atrocities exemplified in Andersonville (mirrored at northern Civil War prison camps later in the war), it's difficult to watch this production without seeing it as a highly dated period piece. Andersonville and its northern counterparts, Elmira, etc., are now known to have been little more than death camps. One crucial piece of evidence brought against Wirz at trial is that he explicitly blocked an effort on the part of the local civilian population to bring food, medicine and other supplies to ease the soldiers' suffering. Although there are differing theories as to the reasons why prisoner exchanges stopped after a certain point in the war, one thing is for certain: Today it would be impossible to portray Wirz as anything other than the monster he was. This was not a man who was prosecuted for his foreign accent, as he originally tried to assert.
Also in the spirit of the times is the fact that it was Cassidy, not Shatner, who won the major awards for the production--back in the days when defense attorneys were our cultural heroes. The real artistry in the casting here was not with the leads, but with the supporting cast: The actors who play a shell-shocked young survivor of the camp, a local resident of Andersonville, and a tough, cynical professional soldier deliver flawless performances that make this piece stand out as a work of dramatic art. Watching this production, one sees how television drama has changed in the last forty years. Although "The Andersonville Trial" never takes the viewer more than a few feet from the courtroom, it still manages to convey a lingering sense of horror without a single flashback scene. This is what audiences miss today.

The Horrors at Andersonville Prison: The Trial of Henry Wirz

Average customer rating:

The Horrors at Andersonville Prison: The Trial of Henry Wirz

Manufacturer: A&E Home Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

( H ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video

Andersonville
History of Andersonville Prison
Echoes of Andersonville
Andersonville: The Last Depot (Civil War America)
The Andersonville Trial (Broadway Theatre Archive)

ASIN: B000E371ZA
Release Date: 2004-10-17

Description

In the summer of 1865, a war-ravaged but triumphant Washington D.C. rumbled with the repercussions of the arduous struggle so recently completed. As the government wrested with Reconstruction and the loss of Lincoln, the capital played host to one of America's first war-crime tribunals. The man on trial, Henry Wirz, had been the commander of the notorious prison at Andersonville, Georgia, where 13,000 Union soldiers had died in 15 months. Capturing the tense atmosphere of post Civil War Washington, examining the brief and brutal history of the prison and exposing the many people who helped make the sufferings there possible, THE HORRORS AT ANDERSONVILLE PRISON illuminates one of the Civil War's most compelling tales.

Average customer rating:

Civil War: A Concise History

Manufacturer: Finley-Holiday Film Corp.
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

DVD Extra - Interactive Menus Chapter Search
DVD Extra - Civil War Music Video Civil War Quiz
DVD Extra - Civil War Parks Today Raising the USS Cairo
DVD Extra - Historical Photo Gallery Screen Saver
DVD Extra - Internet Resources

ASIN: B000EM8Y3Y

Product Description

This is the story of America's bloody war between brothers - battle by battle - from causes to conclusion. It features the authentic Civil War music of Bobby Horton and the best collection of Civil War visuals ever assembled in one 75-minute program. A breathtaking and first-hand account of the war. Great DVD Bonuses

Average customer rating:

Andersonville/Gone With the Wind
Starring: Clark Gable , Vivien Leigh , Leslie Howard , Olivia de Havilland , and Thomas Mitchell
Director: Victor Fleming , George Cukor , and Sam Wood
Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

Classics | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

( A ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
ASIN: B0000E6FRH
Release Date: 2003-11-18

DVD:

DVD