Posted by John on July 15, 2001 at 17:25:48:
Ben, you are very just in defending your country’s good name..... But who around here is
knocking your country? My post about an Anglophobic conspiracy more or less agreed with
you; recent (big budget- mass audience) film (last 10 or so years) hasn’t treated British history
very well at all, the epitome is Patriotheart....or was it Lethal-Patriot? ... no it was The Road-
Patriot. I haven’t heard anyone on this site defending that movie though. I’m an avid reader and
am passionate about history, and to me the movie was somewhat of a disappointment; they could
have made a great movie about Marion and Tarleton and the inherent ugliness of a guerilla
war..even in America - and they ended up with that monstrosity about the Nazi occupation of
South Carolina.
Some problems I had with that one were.....
Banaster Talterton fought ugly, seldom gave quarter and burned suspected rebel sympathizers
out of their homes. But by all accounts that I’ve ever read, he let the people out of the buildings
before he burnt them.
The movie didn’t have to, and shouldn’t have been about that the complexities and cruelty of
slavery, but to sugarcoat it like that was annoying. Most Americans are mature enough to
understand or at least appreciate that an otherwise good man could have been unable/unwilling
to overcome the evil of his own times.
“Swamp Fox”Marion did have quite a successful run of guerilla tactics against the Brits...
perhaps they could have shown some of those instead of the series of clever and amusing Mel vs
the clueless redcoat stunts.
The battles were awful and followed no historic event. How ever did you Brits get those 24
pounders in the field like that.
Speaking of bad artillery scenes and back to your original concerns with how the Redcoats faired
in LOTM, I had a bit of a problem with the siege scene, where the Frogs are shelling the fort and
what are the Brits doing? They’re running around in confused circles in their fort and clustering
around french artillery explosions for the benefit of athletic stunt men.
Also, I would have thought the Royal Infantry would have done better in”Massacre Valley”,
what with the Indians charging out in the open like that.... except, then I read some accounts and
It seems that while the Brits were allowed to march out under arms, they weren’t allowed
ammunition. (Also there is no historic evidence of that scale of massacre, Cooper and others
I’ve read have the Indians falling on the baggage train and killing a few soldiers and civilians
that got in the way.)
John