Andersonville (1996) (TV)

User Rating:

7.6/10   

Director:

John Frankenheimer

Writer (WGA):

David W. Rintels (written by)

Release Date:

3 March 1996 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | History | War | Western

Plot:

The story of the most notorious Confederate prisoner of war camp in the American Civil War.

Plot Keywords:

Prisoner Of War | Civil War | Water | Food | Light

Awards:

Won Primetime Emmy. Another 2 wins & 10 nominations

Cast

Jarrod Emick	...	Josiah Day
Frederic Forrest	...	Sgt. McSpadden
Ted Marcoux	...	Martin Blackburn
Carmen Argenziano	...	Hopkins
Jayce Bartok	...	Billy
Frederick Coffin	...	Collins
Cliff De Young	...	Sgt. John Gleason
Denis Forest	...	Mad Matthew
Justin Henry	...	Tyce
Tony Higgins	...	Tucker
Kris Kamm	...	2nd Wisconsin soldier
Andrew Kavovit	...	Tobias
Olek Krupa	...	Olek Wisnovsky
William H. Macy	...	Col. Chandler
Matt McGrath	...	Ethan

Runtime:

167 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Stereo

Certification:

Iceland:12

Filming Locations:

Turin, Georgia, USA

Company:

Turner Pictures (I)

Trivia:

At some point during production, several reels of film were lost on the way from location in Georgia, to printing in California. Director John Frankenheimer had to reshoot the lost footage, which was about 40% of the trial sequence, in a new location in North Carolina, rebuilding parts of the original set to the last detail in order to match the coinciding Georgia scenes.

Quotes:

Sgt. McSpadden: And what do you call this little piece of heaven?
Capt. Wirz: That? This is Andersonville.

Another name for Hell

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 dramatisation 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 civilisation.' 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.