Heroic Rebels and Virtuous Patriots: The American Revolutionary Period in Feature Films

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Heroic Rebels and Virtuous Patriots:

The American Revolutionary Period in Feature Films

MA Thesis American Studies Name: Sophie Welling Student Number: 1751719 Course Code: LAX999M20 Credits: 20 ECTS

Supervisor: Dr. M.L. Thompson

Second Reader: Prof. dr. W.M. Verhoeven Date: 22 July 2013

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While historical films have become central to popular understanding of American history, historical dramas about the Revolution or the Founding Fathers, in contrast to documentaries and bestsellers, have not. Throughout a century of American historical filmmaking no more than twenty-four films have been produced that depict the events of the 1770s and 80s in a meaningful way, and the majority of these films have been unsuccessful at the box-office.5

1 _{Frank Nugent, “John Ford’s Film of Drums Along the Mohawk Opens at the Roxy,” review of Drums}

Along the Mohawk, New York Times, November 4, 1939, national edition, sec. A.

2 _{Lawrence L. Murray, “History at the Movies During the Sesquicentennial: D.W. Griffith’s America,”}

Historian 41 3 (May 1979): 450.

3 _{John E. O’Connor, “The American Revolution on the Screen: Drums Along the Mohawk and The Patriot,”}

in Why We Fought: America’s Wars in Film and History, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2008), 41.

4

Mark Glancy, “The War of Independence in Feature Films: The Patriot (2000) and the ‘Special Relationship’ between Hollywood and Britain,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 25 4 (October 2005): 523.

5

Alan Kulikoff, “The Founding Fathers: TV Best Sellers, TV Stars! Punctual Plumbers,” Journal of the

Historical Society 5 2 (Spring, 2005): 156, writes that directors produced just twenty-one films on the Revolution

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4 Historians have proposed a variety of explanations for the scarcity of films on the Revolutionary period. Gordon S. Wood emphasized that the American Revolution was a revolution based on ideas, not social wrongs, class conflict, and inequitable distributions of wealth; that “they made speeches, not bombs,”6

and that the history of the American Revolutionary era therefore has not presented a very (re)usable past for exciting historical filmmaking. Cotten Seiler proposed two alternative explanations. He argued that whereas in many ways the (racial and regional) issues surrounding the Civil War remain unresolved, the issues surrounding the Revolution are perceived by many Americans as over, as “a finished product: independence declared, British expelled, freedom enshrined—end of story,”7 and that the Revolution therefore, as opposed to the Civil War, does not need a significant place in American popular culture. He also suggested that given the power of the Revolution to symbolize American ideals, the subject may have been marked as off-limits for revision and reconstruction in film.8 British film historian Mark Glancy provided yet another explanation. He holds Hollywood’s cinematic “special relationship”9 with Britain responsible for the lack of films on the subject. Hollywood’s reliance on Britain as the source of a large part of its foreign earnings, he argues, would explain the general reluctance to produce films on a subject where the British would naturally appear as villains.10

There is not one simple answer to the question why the American Revolution or the Founding Fathers have not been used as subjects for historical filmmaking more often. However,

6 _{Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993), 3.}

7 _{Cotten Seiler, “The American Revolution,” in The Columbia Companion to American History on Film:}

How the Movies Have Portrayed the American Past, ed. Peter C. Rollins (New York: Columbia University Press,

2003), 50.

8 _{Ibid., 56.}

9 _{The term “special relationship” in a US – Britain context was first used by Winston Churchill in his famous}

1946 speech and used to emphasize the close diplomatic, economic, historic, and cultural relations between the two nations. Glancy uses the term to argue that a cinematic special relationship already existed between the two nations long before a military and political one did.

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5 an analysis of the few key films that have been made on the subject reveals much about how Americans at particular moments in time engaged with the Revolutionary past. The Revolution and the Founding Fathers remain a continuous presence in almost all aspects of American culture, and as McCrisken and Pepper point out, “the story of the founding of the nation may not have featured in many Hollywood films but its trace ‒ virtuous rebels overcoming tyrannical colonial oppressors ‒ haunts all national myths,”11 and these national myths are deeply embedded in films on the Revolution.12 These films have much to tell us about how the Revolutionary period at particular moments in American history was used to reinforce national myth and identity.

National identity is a contested concept, and it has been used and defined in many ways. In historical film studies it is nearly always used to describe “the processes by which individuals connect themselves with, or place themselves in, socially constructed ‘national’ categories.”13 Titles like America, Revolution, and Patriot, especially when combined with visual images like American flags and recognizably American locations, directly present the texts they name as operating in the specific, socially constructed American national category. Not coincidentally,

America, Revolution, and The Patriot are the titles of three Hollywood productions on the

Revolutionary period. Their titles directly instruct their largely American audiences that they will be experiencing not only a fictional story set in the eighteenth century, but an instruction in “American-ness.” They help to construct what Benedict Arnold called an “imagined community”14

that a provides sense of unity and peculiarity, and they reinforce a national

11

Trevor McCrisken and Andrew Pepper, American History and Contemporary Hollywood Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 17.

12 _{Nancy L. Rhoden, “Patriots, Villains, and the Quest for Liberty: How American Film has Depicted the}

American Revolution,” Canadian Review of American Studies 37 2 (2007): 206.

13 _{Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film (London and New}

York: Routledge, 2007), 80.

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6 ideology of “ideal American-ness” as a set of distinctive values derived from the Revolution’s history of heroic rebels and great minds who fostered American independence.

In order to preserve and reinforce this national ideology of “ideal American-ness” events that supposedly determined and shaped national values and identity have to be continuously reproduced and represented. In analyzing how films about the Revolution participate in this process of reproducing and representing the Revolution “cultural memory”15 is a useful concept. The cultural memory of the American Revolution is the perceived collective relation to this historical event, a memory that, like biological memories, is not a direct insight into the past, but an unstable, culturally mediated representation. Partly fictional, partly historical, the six films I will address in this thesis participate in this process of (re)constructing the cultural memory of the Revolution, and mediate between history and cultural memory by reasserting which aspects of the history of the Revolution Americans need to remember as essential to “American-ness” (independence, liberty, equality) and which can be “forgotten” (defeat, class boundaries, minority experiences). By recycling stories like Paul Revere’s midnight ride, the events of the Boston Tea Party, and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, over and over again, these films help preserve and reinforce this cultural memory.

This thesis aims to investigate how throughout American film history filmmakers have presented and interpreted the era of the American Revolution. I will focus primarily on six key

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The term “cultural memory” was first introduced by Jan Assmann. He defined it as “the outer dimension of human memory” (Jan Assmann, Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und Politische Identität in frühen

Hochkulturen (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1992), 19.) Later, more definitions were proposed. Marita Sturken, for

instance, defined cultural memory as “memory that is shared outside the avenues of formal historical discourse yet is entangled with cultural products and imbued with cultural meaning.” (Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The

Vietnam War, the Aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University

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7 films about the period, produced between 1924 and 2000, and address how these films in their respective times of production actively engaged in influencing and reshaping the cultural memory of the Revolution and conceptions of national identity. The central argument of this thesis is guided by the idea that filmmakers rarely challenged dominant cultural attitudes about the Revolution. These films all represent what Robert Sklar has called Hollywood’s “cinema of affirmation.”16 From the earliest full-length feature film on the subject, America, to the most recent, The Patriot, these films all reinforce the national myth that the Revolution was a glorious event marking the beginning of a great nation based on liberty and equality. Screen writers, directors, and production companies obsessively insisted on the historical authenticity of their films, but in essence reinvented the Revolution in their own ways that included direct political messages relevant to their own times rather than those of the nation’s founding period. By depicting stereotypically heroic rebels and virtuous patriots filmmakers could reinforce superficial notions of patriotism, without the need to engage critically with the contested meaning of the ideas and politics of the period.

The first chapter will look at three early and mid-twentieth century films. D.W. Griffith’s

America (1924) is a silent-era film, John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) a studio-era

production, and Johnny Tremain (1957) a Disney creation during the Cold War. These early films on the Revolution reveal similar ideological agendas and simple narratives that present the Revolution as a universal quest for liberty. What is remarkable in these films is that they all portray loyalists and Native Americans as the enemies, not the British. To a modern audience this might seem strange, but this absence of British villainy can be explained by the military and political alliances between the US and Great Britain at the time when these films were produced.

16 _{Robert Sklar, ed. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage,}

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1776 (1972), a film adaptation of a 1969 Broadway musical by the same title, deserves a

chapter of its own because of its unique format and content. 1776 was the first and so far the only feature film to present the Founding Fathers as flesh-and-blood main characters and to focus directly on the proceedings of the Second Continental Congress and the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. While singing and dancing their way through the Congress, the (caricatures of the) founders debate the issue of independence and show that there was nothing inherently inevitable about the outcome of the debates that summer. In line with the spirit of American popular culture in the early 1970s, 1776’s founders are human beings, not demigods. The film offers a Revolution that celebrates American independence as an accomplishment by men who were willing to compromise in order to secure an American future. In doing so, the film once again reinforces the idea that the Revolution was fundamental to American identity. However, it does so in a uniquely self-critical way that reminds us of the constructedness of both audience and history itself.

The third and last chapter will present a discussion of Hugh Hudson’s Revolution (1985) and Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot (2000). Apart from two low-budget, made-for-television films, Revolution and The Patriot were the only post-bicentennial feature films set in the Revolutionary period.17 While produced several decades after the films discussed in the first chapter, these films still present similar, seemingly apolitical narratives based on representative heroes who embody an American spirit of self-reliance and family loyalty. However, these films do break with the earlier tradition of protecting the special relationship with Britain and portray the British as the villainous other in order to heroicize their American protagonists. Revolution,

17 _{The two made-for-television films are The Crossing (2000) and Benedict Arnold: A Question of Honor}

(2003). The Crossing is a film about Washington’s decision to cross the Delaware and about the Battle of Trenton.

Benedict Arnold tells the story of the infamous general Benedict Arnold who defected to the British. Two

post-bicentennial films that feature the Founding Fathers are Jefferson in Paris (1995) and Sally Hemings: An American

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9 following the revival of conservative ideology and “new willingness to feel good about America again”18

during the Reagan administration, centers on the experiences of a poor fur trader, who after an endless string of misfortunes, eventually becomes the all-American patriot. The Patriot was released in 2000, at the threshold of the new millennium, and presents a simple and direct action-hero narrative that uses the Revolution to reinforce a mainstream conservative ideology that supports the idea that when American homes, families, and values are under attack, any response in defense of those values is justifiable.

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I. A Universal Quest for Liberty: America, Drums Along the Mohawk, and Johnny Tremain

At first sight D.W. Griffith’s America (1924), John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), and Disney’s Johnny Tremain (1957) do not seem to have much more in common than the setting of their stories during the Revolution. The three films represent different stages in film history:

America is a late silent-era black-and-white film, Drums is a 1939 studio-era sound and color

production, and Johnny Tremain is a youth-oriented film from the late 1950s. Yet, the three films are remarkably similar when it comes to their depictions of the Revolutionary period, and illustrate how pre-1970s films on the subject generally 1) presented simple narratives that focused on a universal (yet essentially American) quest for liberty that audiences could relate to, and 2) protected the “special relationship” between Hollywood and Britain by presenting loyalists and Indians, instead of the British, as the enemies in the conflict. The main plots of the three stories do not revolve around the Revolution itself, but about a greater quest for love and liberty, which at their respective times of production reinforced the cultural memory of the Revolution and strengthened confidence in American ideals.

America

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11 millions of Americans about the country’s antecedents.”19 Griffith’s critical reputation had been damaged by the reception to Birth of a Nation (1915), and his commercial success had faded after Intolerance (1916) and Broken Blossoms (1919). With the American Sesquicentennial less than three years away, Griffith was now “convinced that a spectacular representation of the American Revolution would revitalize his fortunes and floundering reputation.”20

He spent almost a million dollars on production and promotional costs in order to ensure that America would be “the ultimate in entertainment and that the history would be definitive.”21

In its time the film drew large audiences.22 Yet, despite Griffith’s efforts the film failed to earn back its enormous production costs. It was his last silent film, and its commercial failure forced him to close his studio, leaving America to become a forgotten classic.

Like Birth of a Nation, America is a historical war film that centers on family drama. The plotline follows the story of Nathan Holden, a “poor young farmer” and “noted express rider of the day,” who was a “comrade of Paul Revere.”23

He lives “some distance from Lexington, on the road to Boston”24

and is deeply in love with Nancy Montague, the daughter of a rich loyalist judge from Virginia. Part I of the film depicts the events starting with the first shots at Lexington up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Part II focuses entirely on the war and consists almost exclusively of battle scenes, where we see British Captain Walter Butler and his Indian fighters slaughter brave but disorganized rebels until he is finally killed in an assault against the Americans at the fictional “Fort Sacrifice.”

19 _{Lawrence L. Murray, “History at the Movies During the Sesquicentennial: D.W. Griffith’s America,”}

Historian 41 3 (May 1979): 451.

20 _{Ibid., 450.} 21 _{Ibid., 451.} 22

George J. Mitchell, “America: 1924’s Forgotten Classic,” American Cinematographer 71 (Oct 1990): 34.

23 _{America, DVD, Directed by D.W. Griffith (1924; Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 1999), Title card}

6.

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12 Griffith spent a large sum in the pursuit of accuracy, but “in his mind and those of his subordinates, historical accuracy was defined as exactness of all details, or minutiae.”25

Genuine Revolutionary War artifacts were used and many of the scenes were shot at the exact locations where they took place. Yet, the film’s attention to detail has little to do with the interpretation of the history itself and the politics represented. History is translated into myth, and the “complexities of social and historical experiences are simplified and compressed into the actions of a representative individual or ‘hero.’”26 Nathan Holden is America’s “hero,” and he is the ideal and virtuous lover of humble station, willing to fight for love of woman and, eventually, country. Setting a precedent for later Revolutionary War heroes in film, however, it is not until

after Holden experiences a traumatic event when he almost dies in a duel with Nancy’s brother

Charles, that he comes to realize that his nation and the patriot cause need him. By the end of the film Charles has turned rebel, Justice Montague has died, the war is won, and Nathan Holden and his Nancy get married to live happily ever after.

The film evidently celebrates the American victory against the British in the war. Therefore, at first sight, it appears very curious that there are no British villains in the film to contrast against Holden, the American hero. However, in the context of the 1920s, when the two nations had recently fought together in the Great War and shared close diplomatic relations, it may not be too surprising. Griffith was also heavily in debt and desperately needed the film to succeed in England, Hollywood’s largest foreign market. Yet, despite a trip to London to convince the British Board of Film Censors that the film was not anti-British, but pro-democracy, America was initially banned in the UK, because it was considered to be “likely to

25 _{Murray, “D.W. Griffith’s America,” 455.}

26 _{Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Frontier Myth in Twentieth Century America (New York:}

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13 cause ‘bad relations.’”27

To get the ban lifted, Griffith cut the film from fourteen to nine reels and deleted everything that might be objectionable to the British. The film’s full title originally had read America: The Sacrifice for Freedom.28 He now retitled it America: Love and Sacrifice, replacing “freedom,” and its American connotations, with the more neutral and universal “love.” Only after all the British characters were made into basically decent human beings was the ban lifted.

The result of Griffith’s extensive re-editing was a film that repeatedly emphasized that Americans and Englishmen shared a common cultural identity. America’s opening screen informs us that “The story of the sacrifice made for freedom in the American Revolution is that of a civil war between two groups of English people; one group, the Americans, being merely Englishmen who settled on the American continent.” We see Charles Montague slowly shift from loyalist to rebel, and the title cards explain that he could simply no longer be true to England without being disloyal to America, even though he was still essentially British. “I am not fighting the King – I am fighting injustice – it is my duty,”29 he says. Furthermore, a scene in Part II depicting the signing of the Declaration of Independence is accompanied by a title card that identifies it as “the beginning of a new English speaking nation.”30 Apart from the fact that this event never took place, this title card is significant for its emphasis on an “English speaking nation,” which does not directly seem relevant to the event as such. These and many other examples show how Griffith tried to remind the audience of the essential ties between the two

27 _{Mark Glancy, “The War of Independence in Feature Films: The Patriot (2000) and the ‘Special}

Relationship’ between Hollywood and Britain,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 25 4 (October 2005): 528.

28 _{Unfortunately, no copies of this original version of the film have survived. Copies of America today come}

from a 35mm master held by the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, made from the British version, Love and

Sacrifice. It would have been very interesting to compare the two versions and see exactly how much was deleted or

changed.

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14 nations. Consequently, the film depicts Native Americans and loyalists as enemies, rather than the British. Captain Butler is the story’s only villain, and he is an American “renegade, not acting under orders, and his troops are neither colonists nor Redcoats, but Native Americans.”31 When the British are mentioned at all, the film continuously stresses that they fought fairly. Overall, the film depicts heroic American rebels and hardly any British characters. Everything in the war that did not suit an Anglo-American notion of common decency is caused by traitors and savages.

Drums Along the Mohawk

In 1939, a decade and a half after America’s original release, Drums Along The Mohawk, John Ford’s film adaptation of Walter D. Edmond’s popular 1936 novel by the same title, became Hollywood’s second big-budget production on the Revolutionary period. Since the mid-1920s the film industry had changed drastically. Sound and Technicolor were now well-established and Hollywood thrived in the heyday of the Studio Era. Public faith in the nation, however, was at a low point. “Americans who had grown up in the freewheeling 1920s and felt that they had every reason to look forward to success in life were forced to reshape their images of America and of themselves,”32

and even though the economy had now finally started to recover, the majority of Americans were still unsure of their own and the nation’s future. Drums came at the right time. When “dreams of democracy and individual success seemed unrealistic in a crisis-ridden world,”33

and it was likely that America would soon be drawn into World War II, Drums allowed

31 _{Glancy, “War of Independence in Feature Films,” 527.}

32 _{Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, Why We Fought: America’s Wars in Film and History (Lexington,}

KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2008), 44.

33 _{John E. O’Connor, “A Reaffirmation of American Ideals: Drums Along the Mohawk (1939),” in American}

History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image, ed. John E. O’Connor and Martin A. Jackson (New

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15 its audience to escape from the daily economic and political realities and encouraged viewers to keep faith in traditional American ideals. Drums was not unique in that respect. 1939 was arguably the most successful year in Hollywood history, and many patriotic historical films were released. Like Gone With The Wind, that year’s and America’s all-time box office favorite,

Drums was not only meant to entertain, but also to convince people that Americans had faced

hardships before and could overcome them again.

Director John Ford, who would later direct blockbuster after blockbuster, had a “special talent for portraying ordinary people who struggle to preserve significant human values challenged by forces far more powerful than themselves.”34

Drums, Ford’s first color feature, tells the story of Gilbert and Lana Martin (Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert), an ordinary couple, settling on a small farm on the frontier of New York’s Mohawk Valley. They seem to be living the ideal frontier life, until barbarous British-allied Indians and Tories disturb their peace. Their farm is attacked, and they seem to lose everything they ever dreamed of and worked for. They are forced to move in with an elderly widow and work for her, but are determined to make the best of it. Gilbert joins a local militia, and, after several more Indian attacks, Lana and the local settlers take refuge in the nearby fort. After another heroic defense of a fort, a regular division marches by and informs the settlers that the war was already over and Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown the week before. A sudden patriotic unity comes over the valley. “So, that’s our new flag. The thing we’ve been fighting for. Thirteen stripes for the colonies and thirteen stars in a circle for union,” a local churchman comments. “It’s a pretty flag, isn’t it?” Lana responds. Gilbert nods and while the closing music starts he turns to Lana and says “I

34 _{John E. O’Connor, “The American Revolution on the Screen: Drums Along the Mohawk and The Patriot,”}

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16 reckon we’d better be gettin’ back to work; there’s gonna be a heap to do from here on,”35

a comment that clearly had both eighteenth- and twentieth-century meanings.

Unlike in America the textbook historical events of the Revolution are not directly depicted in Drums and the story takes place far away from the revolutionary centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Notes from a script conference at Twentieth-Century Fox in 1937 reveal that producer Darryl F. Zanuck ordered that they “must discard completely all episodes dealing with war campaigns, revolutionary politics, and everything that does not directly include and have intimate bearing on our two leading characters. […] We do not want to make a picture portraying the revolution in the Mohawk Valley. We want to tell a story about a pioneer boy who took a city girl to the Mohawk Valley to live,”36 added that “whatever patriotism comes through should come from inference – let the audience write in the flag-waving for themselves.”37 He noted that “for some reason or other, pictures that wave the flag are poison at the box-office,”38 perhaps referring to the limited financial success of Griffith’s America. In the film none of the settlers in the valley seem to be interested in the politics of the war. For instance, when the Martins move into Mrs. McKlennar’s old house, Gilbert hesitantly asks her “Well, do you belong to the right party?”39 to which she answers “Party? I run this farm to suit myself.” Only when their homes are attacked do these frontiersmen stand up and fight. Without any help from the Continental Army or Congress, they survive. More than a story about the Revolution, Drums

Along the Mohawk is a timeless American story about how “a man must stand up to live.”40

35 _{Drums Along the Mohawk, DVD, Directed by John Ford (1939; Los Angeles: Twentieth-Century Fox,}

2005), 1:38-39.

36

Kenneth R.M. Short, “Colonial History and Anglo-American Tension: Allegheny Uprising & Drums Along

the Mohawk” Film Historian 6 1 (1996), 7.

37 _{Ibid., 7.} 38

Ibid., 7.

39 _{Drums Along the Mohawk, 0:40:52.}

40 _{Frank Bergmann, introduction to Drums Along the Mohawk by Walter D. Edmonds. (1936; Syracuse, NY:}

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17 According to John E. O’Connor, “The huge investments required to make such movies as

Drums influenced producers into taking liberties with the facts in their striving for universal

audience appeal.”41 Drums, like Griffith’s America, was widely praised for its attention to historical fact and detail, but the liberties with the facts are numerous. Where Walter D. Edmonds in his novel thoroughly explains the historical background of the events in the story, the film leaves out all explanations of the attacks on the frontier settlements. The Mohawk Valley was of major strategic importance in the war; the British planned to cut the northern colonies in two, isolating the southern colonies, and by clearing the Americans out of the Mohawk Valley they wanted to deprive the Continental Army of one of its major sources of food and supplies.42 In the film, however, it seems as if the frontiersmen are completely outside of the conflict and are attacked by Indians simply because they are savages, not because of any strategic significance in the war. And where the novel ends with the Martins returning to their burned-down log cabin after the state has confiscated Mrs. McKlennar’s farm for nonpayment of taxes, in the film the two and their son live happily in Mrs. McKlennar’s stone house, which she leaves for them after she is killed in the heroic defense of the fort. Presumably, the Depression-minded audience needed a happy ending and the promise that as long as they would stand up and fight like these frontiersmen, they would get by.

The special relationship with Britain in Drums is even more direct than in Griffith’s

America. Without any pre-existing knowledge about America’s Revolutionary War, it is

perfectly possible to watch the film and not notice that the British were the enemy in the conflict. Only one British general, General Caldwell, has a significant role. Even though he is the one who commands the Indians in their destruction of the Mohawk Valley, he looks at them as

41 _{O’Connor, “Reaffirmation of American Ideals,” 111.}

42 _{Anthony F.C. Wallace, “Drums Along the Mohawk,” in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies,}

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18 creatures of pure evil, while as a general he is merely doing his wartime duty. This reluctance to present the British as villains, or even the enemy, is again not very surprising given the delicate European situation in 1939. Hollywood had always been reluctant to offend the British, but now that America was about to be drawn into World War II as Britain’s ally, it was out of the question. As O’Connor explains, in “normal times, had the British enemy been featured, it might have been considered innocuous, but in 1939, as one interoffice memo took pains to explain, ‘the international situation is so delicately balanced, that the powers to be in England weigh feathers and might find the picture injudicious.’”43 The filmmakers argued that the film would help Americans prepare for the approaching war, and that as long as they made American Loyalists and Indians the enemies, rather than British regulars, it would not compromise America’s resolve to support Great Britain.44 It worked. Ford had been smarter than Griffith, and by using the frontier myth while inventing a history of the Revolution that involved neither a revolution nor the British, Drums became a box office success and received two nominations for an Academy Award.

Johnny Tremain

Johnny Tremain is a 1957 Disney picture. It is the story of how Johnny Tremain, a young

silversmith’s apprentice, becomes involved in the struggle for Independence, and, after going through a process of personal growth, comes to realize how important the fight for liberty is. Originally, Johnny Tremain was a very popular 1943 children’s novel by Esther Forbes, who had

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19 stated that she looked upon him as her “great war effort.”45_{By the end of the 1950s Cold-War}

anxieties troubled America, and Disney saw in Johnny Tremain an excellent opportunity to restate Forbes’s message: that in times of war, boys like Johnny Tremain need to become men and fight to protect freedom. Because Johnny Tremain aims at a much younger audience than either America or Drums, its morals are far more explicit. The opening title screen immediately instructs the audience to interpret Johnny Tremain’s story as an example that young men should follow. It reads: “To the youth of the world, in whose spirit and courage rests the hope of eventual freedom for all mankind.” Johnny Tremain’s story is mostly fictitious, but during his transformation from clueless silversmith’s apprentice to Revolutionary War soldier, we meet almost all famous historical characters of Revolutionary Boston.

Throughout the film, the character of Johnny is used to explain in simple terms why it is that Americans had to stand up against the British and why they should stand up again against those who deny people the rights won in the Revolution. For instance, there is a scene when Johnny walks into a house where Rab, Paul Revere’s apprentice, is printing pamphlets. Johnny picks one up. He does not know what it is or what it is about. “What’s this?” he asks. “The most important news in Boston,” Rab responds. “Tea? But I like tea,” Johnny says. “Almost everyone does. The English Ministry has already collected a tax on this tea and added it to the price. Now, if we let that stuff in, every time we buy a pound of it, we’ll be paying a tax we haven’t voted for. That’s why we’re printing these, to warn every one of the real truth,” 46

Rab explains. The scene shows how Johnny, like many young Americans of the 1950s, is initially clueless and not

45

Quoted in Neil L. York, “Son of Liberty: Johnny Tremain and the Art of Making American Patriots” Early

American Studies 6 2 (Fall 2008), 426.

46

Johnny Tremain, DVD, Directed by Robert Stevenson (1957; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Home

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20 interested in politics. The audience, however, will immediately suspect that he is about to change his mind and become involved in the Revolution.

When the politics of the Revolution directly come to affect Johnny, he slowly starts to understand what it is all about and he becomes willing to fight for this concept called “liberty.” Individualism and self-making are the values that ultimately guide him towards realizing that he must support the patriot cause. Drums’s had expressed a similar emphasis on self-reliance and perseverance on the frontier, but in Johnny’s case it is what directly leads him to join the fight. In an attempt to fix a teapot, he burns his hand so severely that his fingers melt together. Like

Drums’s Martins when they lose their farm, he does not accept his fate and is determined to

overcome his problem. He finds a new trade. He becomes an express rider for the Boston

Observer, the local patriot newspaper. Merely working for the Boston Observer does not mean

that Johnny has become a patriot. By the end of the film, however, it is clear that he has changed. When a loyalist offers to take him back to England, Johnny refuses. “We can’t give up our principles,”47

he explains. He has become part of the “we,” and he has “principles.”

In a later scene Johnny’s change of heart becomes even more clear. The scene is also a good example of how the film attempts to make the audience see the American quest for liberty in a global context, which can be linked to a Cold War strategy of presenting American values as universal. Johnny walks in on a meeting of The Observers Club. “For what do we fight? Tell me that,”48

James Otis asks. “For the rights of Englishmen!” Johnny answers. “Rights, yes, but why stop with Englishmen? Is the earth so small that there can be room for only one people? Wherever the sun shines, a man shall choose who shall rule over him. Even if we will be shooting down British soldiers, we will be winning rights their children shall enjoy forever. And

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21 the peoples of the world, the peasants of France and the serfs of Russia shall see freedom rising like a new sun in the west. For this we fight. Those natural rights God has given every man. No matter how humble, or crazy,” 49

Otis adds.

Johnny Tremain’s Britain and America are only estranged friends who would inevitably

reunite. The final scene of the film portrays the British general Thomas Gage, defeated, looking at Boston, admitting that “we (the British) experienced more than a defeat, more than a mere misfortune of war. We have been vanquished by an idea, a belief in human rights.”50 This comment is not only remarkable for reflecting a twentieth-century concern for human rights, but also for making it seem as if the British admired America’s accomplishment. The comment seems out of place, but it makes perfect sense when we consider that Johnny Tremain was written during World War II and filmed during the era of the Cold War, when Great Britain and the US were allies. Mr. Lyte, a loyalist, is the villain of the story, not General Gage. Gage is a likable, reasonable man, who unfortunately happened to fight on the wrong side of the conflict and like Drums’s General Caldwell is merely doing his duty. He is a decent man who prefers peace over war and tells his men that no blood has been shed under his command, and that none shall be shed. Before the first encounter at Lexington both sides tell their men not to shoot unless the others shoot first. “We stand upon our rights, not upon the force of arms,”51

the American officer reminds his men. A shot is fired, and the war begins. “Who fired that shot, sir? The first one?” a British soldier asks. “One of them, one of us, someone in one of those houses over there, I don’t know. What difference does it make now?”52

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22 was perhaps meant to show that even though the two nations fought against each other in the Revolution, it made no difference now. Now they shared their beliefs in human rights and stood together in a universal quest for liberty.

Conclusion

America, Drums Along the Mohawk, and Johnny Tremain present very different, yet essentially

similar depictions of the American Revolution. Guided by the “‘benign meta-narrative’ which sees the US as a leading force for forwarding human progress”53 filmmakers “looked back to the Revolution in order to come to grips with their own America.”54 In D.W. Griffith’s 1924 attempt to duplicate Birth of a Nation’s commercial success and to avoid English criticism, America set an interesting precedent for the next forty years to come. John Ford learned from Griffith’s ban in England and made sure that his Drums Along the Mohawk would leave all revolutionary politics in Philadelphia. By focusing on a story of ordinary frontiersmen and women, his film convinced Americans still caught up in the Depression that America could prosper again. Where the peace of the Mohawk Valley is disturbed by savage Indians in Drums, Johnny Tremain is troubled by rich Tories. In each of the three films the British are portrayed as friends that merely walked a different path, whereas loyalists and Native Americans are the un-American enemies that need to be conquered. The simple, accessible narratives catered to popular audiences permitted them to recognize the events that were portrayed. During times when faith in American ideals was tested the makers of America, Drums Along the Mohawk, and Johnny

53

Trevor McCrisken and Andrew Pepper, American History and Contemporary Hollywood Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 7.

54 _{Steven H Jaffe, Who Were the Founding Fathers? Two Hundred Years of Reinventing American History}

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Tremain reinforced the cultural memory of the Revolution in ways that assured Americans that

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24

II. 1776’s Caricature of the Congress

1776 (1972) is a feature film adaptation of Peter Stone’s and Sherman Edwards’s Tony

Award-winning 1969 Broadway musical by the same title. The film is set entirely in Philadelphia and follows the proceedings of the Second Continental Congress during the summer of 1776. To most critics at the time the idea of making a musical about the Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers seemed absurd and unlikely to succeed. Yet, against all expectations 1776 became a great success on Broadway. The film version, however, was not nearly as successful, and became subject to controversy. The “generation of political leaders customarily deified and capitalized as the Founding Fathers”55 had never been at the center of a commercial feature film before, let alone a musical film. Earlier films set during the revolutionary period, like Griffith’s

America and Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk, all centered on fictional main characters and

their involvement in the military events of the war, while carefully avoiding critical engagement with the political principles of the conflict. Washington, Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson had appeared and were mentioned here and there, but always as “rarified unknowable beings”56 rather than the great minds of liberty and symbols of American identity they became. 1776 was the first feature film to deal with the Founding Fathers and the debates on declaring independence directly, and not only are the founders “in the front and center of the film as its main characters, but they sing and dance their way through the Second Continental Congress.”57

The often hilarious comments and lyrics of the songs make it hard to see the film’s contents as particularly factual. Yet, even though every character in the film is a caricature, the

55 _{Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), ix.} 56

Mark Glancy, “The War of Independence in Feature Films: The Patriot (2000) and the ‘Special Relationship’ between Hollywood and Britain,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 25 4 (October 2005): 530.

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25 filmmakers also attempted to present the “historical truth of the characters, the times, and the events of American independence.”58

The filmmakers did extensive research and a substantial amount of the lines and lyrics are based on the actual writings of the founders. Unlike earlier films on the subject, however, the film does not make declaring independence into an obviously celebratory event. 1776 humanizes the founders and emphasizes the uncertainty of the outcome of the debates. The film suggests, in fact, that Congress was not the place where the real Revolution occurred. It reveals that the creation of an independent American nation was not predestined, but the result of hard bargaining and compromise. At the same time, however, the film still reinforces the idea that the nation was founded by great and remarkable men who got “a nation started against greater odds than a more generous God would have allowed.”59

Caricatures

1776 is unique in the way it depicts the proceedings and the members of the Second Continental

Congress. Instead of employing the traditional filmmaking approach that made the Founding Fathers appear as demigods, 1776 presents thoughtful, humanized caricatures. The story of the American Revolution in film had always presented “a narrative of men and women of unassailable character and vision inhabiting a utopia of American righteousness in conflict with British tyranny.”60 1776’s characters are heroes in their own way, but they are nothing like the distant and static secondary characters we meet in films like America and Johnny Tremain. 1776

58

Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards, 1776: A Musical Play (New York: Penguin, 1976), 158.

59 _{Benjamin Franklin’s words in the film when he reassures John Adams that they will be long gone by the}

time posterity would be upset about the removal of the slavery clause from the Declaration. He points out that the fact that they got the nation started is probably what they would be remembered for, not how.

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26 does not focus on fictional characters, but goes straight into Independence Hall. And not only are the Founding Fathers talking and singing, but they are also deeply flawed human beings. John Adams is vain, grumpy, “obnoxious and disliked” (his own words from an unfinished autobiography), and no one listens to him. Benjamin Franklin continuously lectures Adams and does not take the Congress, and life in general, very seriously; Jefferson is love-sick and does not utter more than three sentences together; some of the delegates are permanently drunk, others half-asleep; Dickinson and Jefferson get into a fist fight; and all the delegates are more concerned with the weather and their private interests than with the debate on independence, which in the end comes down to one Pennsylvania delegate who finally decides to betray John Dickinson and votes for independence because he does not want to be remembered as the one who prevented the US from gaining independence.

In the first scene it immediately becomes clear that the emphasis in 1776 is on the difficulty these men faced in coming to a compromise that would found a new nation. In the opening scene we meet John Adams in the attic of the Pennsylvania State House. The secretary of the Congress, Mr. McNair, comes up to call Adams back to the Congress because they could not possibly decide on an important issue without Massachusetts. “What burning issue are we voting on this time?” Adams asks. “On whether or not to grant General Washington’s request that all members of the Rhode Island militia be required to wear matching uniforms,”61

McNair answers. “Oh Good God,” Adams sighs. He rushes down to the Congress where most delegates are either asleep or playing games and tells them that he has come to the conclusion that “one useless man is called a disgrace, that two are called a law firm and that three or more become a

61 _{1776, DVD, Directed by Peter H. Hunt (1972; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2002),}

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27 Congress.”62

The Congress responds by singing a song called “Sit down, John” that deals with how no one is interested in Adams’s talk of independence and how the Congress cannot agree on anything. “Nothing’s ever solved in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia,”63

Adams complains. The audience knows that eventually something important will be solved that summer in Philadelphia, but this first scene immediately encourages viewers to rethink their ideas of how certain that outcome really was.

Unlike Adams, Benjamin Franklin is the fun, easy-going practical fix-it-all and he counters Adams’s frustrations by pointing out that it is not what actually happened in the Congress that mattered, but what posterity would come to think of it. When Adams, once again, complains to Franklin about Congress’s indecisiveness and Jefferson’s indecency, Franklin reassures him “don’t worry John, the history books will clean it up,”64

pointing at the way popular history has often passed over or minimized the messiness of the proceedings that summer. Adams answers:

“Well, it doesn’t matter. I’ll not appear in the history books anyway, only you. Franklin did this, and Franklin did that, and Franklin did some other damned thing. Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington fully grown and on his horse. Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightening rod. Then the three of them, Franklin, Washington, and the horse conducted the entire revolution all by themselves.”65

This comment brilliantly satirizes the culture of heroification that still surrounds Franklin and to a lesser extent Jefferson and Washington, but overlooked Adams and most other delegates of the

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28 Congress.66 The dialogue shows how 1776 comments on previous depictions and commonly held attitudes towards the founding, and offers its own version instead.

The film plays with the cultural memory of the history represented in 1776. An example of this is that in one scene at first a tune starts in a way similar to the Star Spangled Banner, but then after about eight bars suddenly changes into something different. The Star Spangled Banner did not exist yet in 1776. It is as if the filmmakers remind the audience that they are not looking at a direct representation of the events, but at a mediated, modern interpretation, made long after the US and national symbols like the national anthem became central to national identity. In a similar way Franklin’s character seems to be able to look into the future to reassure Adams over and over again that even though their actions might not have been as glorious as future American admirers would be led to believe, the actions themselves, however they took place, were what made the nation. “You talk as if independence were the rule. It’s never been done before. No colony has ever broken from the parent stem in the history of the world,”67 Franklin tells Adams. Here Franklin’s character seems to suggest to Adams, and to the American people, that they should not expect to get it entirely right the first time. Unlike Adams, 1776’s Franklin is ready to take on the role of a more realistic hero, whereas Adams is still caught up in a traditional belief in heroes of unassailable character who perform great and selfless deeds. 1776’s America needed pragmatism, not idealism, it appears.

66 _{Until David McCullough’s 2001 biography and the 2008 HBO series based on that biography can be said to}

have ‘repopularized’ Adams.

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No Revolutionaries

Even though the camera never leaves Philadelphia, 1776 also hints at the fact that whereas the Congressmen and the Declaration of Independence became the public icons of the American Revolution, the Revolution did not so much take place through the actions of the Founding Fathers. In the film Franklin warns Adams that the Congress wants to effect a reconciliation with England and that his dream of independence might never come true. “The people want independence,” Adams insists. “The people have read Mr. Paine’s Common Sense. I doubt very much that Congress has,”68

Franklin answers. The dialogue is representative of the way the film suggests the Revolution took place among the people, in the streets, and on the battlefields, not in the debates in Philadelphia. And when we think back to Drums Along the Mohawk, where we saw a frontier community fighting for their farms and homesteads, we also realize that the Congressmen in 1776 were acting on a very different stage from “The People.” In a song called “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men” Dickinson and his conservatives sing how they do not see the benefits of independence, because they are not the ones who would win anything by it: “We have land. Cash in hand, self-command, future planned. And we’ll hold to our gold.”69 Dickinson asks, “Why should we risk losing?” leaving it unclear whether with we he means all Americans or merely the upper-class American gentry. Nor is it clear whether by losing he means losing a war with England or losing their own wealth (including their slaves). And when the Congress bickers about removing offending phrases in the Declaration, such as calling the British king a tyrant, Adams shouts “This is a revolution, damn it! We’re gonna have to offend somebody!”70 Implicit is the suggestion that some of Congressmen were not really revolutionaries and were

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30 reluctant to write anything that did not suit their aristocratic pretentions. America’s public heroes Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, however, do not take part in this scene, because they, of course, argued on the right side of the debate.

History and Myth

“The demands of cinema and the centrality of narrative fundamentally make it impossible for a historical film to tell the ‘past as it actually happened.’”71

And for a musical film like 1776 it was even more logical that “plot and character development require[d] historical exaggeration or even fabrication”72 if only because the founders did not sing and dance their way through Congress. However, the first lines of the historical note by the authors in the back of the script book, reads: “The first question we are asked by those who have seen or read 1776 is invariably: ‘Is it true? Did it really happen that way?’ The answer is: Yes.”73

The authors then continue to list and explain facts in the script that are “true,” “altered,” “surmised,” “added,”’ and “deleted,” and conclude that overall, their representation is historically authentic. Caricatures, by definition, carry a critical undertone, and they are often used to point at a certain truth that is perceived as undervalued, or not commonly recognized. It would therefore seem that the film, by choosing the musical format and caricaturizing the founders, deliberately chose not to present a very factual or historically truthful representation, but to show, through exaggeration, how the events of 1776 have often been misrepresented. However, by noting that the film includes phrases from letters

71 _{Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA:}

Harvard University Press, 1996), 19.

72 _{Bryan Rommel-Ruiz, American History Goes to the Movies: Hollywood and the American Experience}

(New York: Routledge, 2011), 6.

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31 written by the founders and that many details were historically accurate, the filmmakers tried to make the audience accept the film’s message and unconventional format.

Despite its ambitions, 1776 was still a commercial film. As such, it was supposed to attract a large audience, and it could not stray too far from what American audiences understood about their nation’s founding myth. Although 1776 satirizes the Founding Fathers, they are still likable characters, and the film encourages the audience to laugh with them, not at them. And even though many historical details were included in the film, they are just that: details. Jefferson, for instance, was indeed entrusted with the daily weather report and Caesar Rodney’s scarf was indeed green. However, when it comes to the events in Philadelphia that summer, the filmmakers are still keen to embrace national myths and reinforce popular accounts. The best example of this appears at the end of the film. During the grand finale where independence is finally approved, the delegates sign the Declaration of Independence one by one on July 4, 1776. Culturally, the Fourth of July has come to be remembered as the day that independence was declared and the day that the Declaration was signed. That Congress had already voted in favor of independence on July 2, and that the Declaration was merely approved, not signed on July 4 (when half of the delegates were no longer even in Philadelphia) has slipped from the nation’s collective memory.74 Not a single reviewer objected to the inclusion of this non-event. “This dramatic license is hardly objectionable,”75

according to film scholar Mark C. Carnes. This dramatic license, however, is not coincidental. It is a reflection of national myth. It shows how the events surrounding the signing of the Declaration have been remembered in American

74 _{Interestingly, in a scene of the 2008 HBO miniseries John Adams we see Adams (Paul Giamatti) comment}

on this very practice of remembering a July 4 signing. In the scene we see him address John Trumbull, painter of the famous Declaration of Independence. He tells him his painting is an insult to history, because “no scene as such depicted here ever took place, there was not one moment, or one day when all the delegates of the Congress gathered to record their signatures.”

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32 culture, and it suggests that the film’s writers consciously decided to balance their desire to represent the “historical truth of the characters, the times, and the events of American independence” with what a mainstream American audience would accept. Popular beliefs about the Revolution demanded likeable heroes and the signing of the Declaration on the Fourth of July, and thus they were included.

Conclusion

In the early 1970s as the bicentennial celebrations approached, people on all sides of the political spectrum took up the history of the American Revolution to further their own causes. 1776 was no different. By making the founders appear as human beings who (despite their character flaws) managed to lay the foundations for the American experiment, the film actively engaged in the contemporary discourse about the nation’s founding history. It challenged traditional depictions of the congressmen as demigods, while at the same time it upheld the grand narrative that declaring independence was a great and heroic deed. The film’s mission and format was risky, and indeed the five-million-dollar film turned out to be a “resounding critical and commercial failure.”76

Reviewers criticized the film in particular for not showing the proper reverence for America’s founding heroes. Yet it may be more accurate to say that 1776 showed a different kind of admiration for the founders than Americans were previously used to. It emphasized their humanity and showed how they overcame their differences to lay the foundations for a new nation and national identity. Not yet four years old at the time of the 1976 Bicentennial, the film would have seemed to have been perfect to air on television. Yet no network broadcasted it, presumably because of its supposed lack of reverence for the Founders. 1776 was the first film to

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34

III. The American Revolution in Post-Bicentennial Hollywood: Revolution and The Patriot

Revolution (1985) and The Patriot (2000) were the only two post-bicentennial attempts at producing a blockbuster that featured the American Revolution and were (partly) financed by Hollywood. Both films had celebrity actors playing the lead roles (Al Pacino as Tom Dobb in

Revolution and Mel Gibson as Benjamin Martin in The Patriot) and the two films’ plotlines are

remarkably similar. They each center on the story of a widower who ends up fighting for the Continental Army to save the only family he has left, although neither explicitly believes in the cause for independence. Aside from 1776, all of the earlier films on the period had focused on family narratives and American heroes who fought for seemingly apolitical reasons. Revolution and The Patriot are in many respects modern versions of these earlier productions. But where

America, Drums Along the Mohawk, and Johnny Tremain all depicted the British as flawed

friends rather than as the enemy in the conflict, Revolution and The Patriot broke with the cinematic special relationship between Hollywood and Britain. They present the British, and higher-ranking officers in particular, as cruel, murderous villains. Furthermore, Revolution, is told entirely from a working-class man’s perspective. America’s Nathan Holden was poor, but his ultimate goal in life was to climb the social ladder. Revolution’s Tom Dobb is not interested in class mobility; he just wants to be free and independent. Following the conservative revival of flag-waving patriotism that began in the 1990s and peaked at the turn of the century,The Patriot

offers an accessible action film that defends the idea that an attack on American ideals justifies any response. At the same time it represents the Revolution as an essential marker of American and universal progress.77

77 _{Alan Kulikoff, “The Founding Fathers: TV Best Sellers, TV Stars! Punctual Plumbers,” Journal of the}

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Revolution

“The resurgence of the American economy in the 1980s and the politics of the Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush administrations spurred a revival of conservative ideology and a new willingness to ‘feel good about America again.’”78

When looking at Revolution’s official promotional materials we might easily mistake the film to “reflect a traditional preoccupation with celebrating an uncomplicated ‘American-ness.’”79 These include a film poster that shows an American flag and the description “Revolution: an American epic.” It will, however, not take a viewer more than ten seconds to realize that Revolution will not present a traditional glorification of the Revolution. The opening scene shows the New York harbor, where a mob is tearing down a statue of King George in the rain, while shouting “hang the King” and “liberty or death!” We see Loyalists being thrown into the river and freshly printed copies of the Declaration of Independence handed out on the streets. The scene is dark and chaotic. And when we first meet our protagonist Tom Dobb and his son Ned, we are not introduced to traditional war heroes. Returning from a fur trapping trip, we see them sail into the harbor in a little boat; they look cold, dirty, and worried. It is immediately clear that Revolution will focus on the sacrifices ordinary men had to make to secure American liberties.

Like many of his predecessors Dobb is initially not much of a patriot, and only comes to realize the value of liberty after a string of traumatic experiences. When we see him working on his boat in the New York harbor at the beginning of the film, he appears completely unaffected

2003), 54.

79 _{Trevor McCrisken and Andrew Pepper, American History and Contemporary Hollywood Film (Edinburgh:}

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36 by the loud and chaotic scene that is taking place on the shore. It is not until a woman yells at him that the army needs his boat and that it is his duty and responsibility as a patriot to give it to them, that he even looks up. He calmly answers that he cannot give it to her, implying he is not interested in being a patriot. His boat is seized without his consent and he is left with a note that entitles him to seventy dollars in compensation. But when he goes to the provisional commissary to collect it, he is told that all the money has gone to war. From that moment the Revolution directly affects him, as it leaves him and his son without a livelihood. Dobb’s involvement in the war starts without a hint of patriotism. His son enlists as a drummer boy without his permission, lured by five shillings and a promise of 150 acres of land after the war. Dobb tries to tell the officers it is a mistake. They refuse to listen and tell him that if he ever wishes to see his son again he needs to join as well. Reluctantly he becomes a soldier in the Continental Army, but he is not the least bit interested in the principles behind the war or in being a good soldier. In fact, at the first opportunity he grabs his son and runs from battlefield, and defends his breach of duty by repeating “It ain’t my fight. It ain’t my fight.”80

Dobb eventually comes to realize the necessity of the war and the value of liberty, and becomes a kind of working-class hero. And while patriotism did not initially motivate him, Dobb eventually becomes a dedicated rebel. By the end of the film we hear him say: “We’re gonna find us a place where there ain’t no one to bow down to, where there ain’t no lord or lady better than you, where you can say what you like and climb as high as you want and there no one ain’t gonna treat no one like a dog in the dirt. I look around in it and I see all kinds of people, men and women, and they got families like mine. And we stand together like brothers and sisters, and we make for ourselves a place where our babies can sleep safe through the night.”81

These words

Heroic Rebels and Virtuous Patriots: The American Revolutionary Period in Feature Films

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