Journey to Shiloh

Journey To Shiloh is a good TV movie for when you're home sick from work; or, can't sleep in the middle of the night. It's a good story and moves quickly (too quickly, really, for it loses a lot of possibilities in character development). Still, the dialogue isn't that cheesy - and you don't feel worse for having watched it.

James Caan is the star of this interesting but far from great movie. Off his role in El Dorado with the Duke & Mitchum I suppose he earned the role as chief Buck. It's a film about the loss of youth and growth into manhood. It's unclear just how experienced Caan is, particularly with the ladies, but clearly he is capable of Caaning his way into the best bed in Shreveport. The love scenes are handled with more romanticism and yes love, than you'd expect in a near B film.

The film does seem to reflect the unhappiness and questioning of the then ongoing Viet Nam war, yet our band of 7 from Texas for the main, soldier on until death accomplishing nothing but filling their duty and being honorable men. They come to question slavery and therefore the basis of the war but aren't able to do anything about it. In that sense the film is believable. I like Caan's performance although not his haircut. He is the strong, silent type but with plenty of charm.

It's his movie and he does alright. A great cast of actors not yet at their peak.

Journey To Shiloh has several young players in its cast who were either big names on TV already or would attain greatness on the big screen. Playing the seven who are young west Texans who are eager to join up and fight for the Confederacy are James Caan, Michael Sarrazin, Harrison Ford, Jan-Michael Vincent, Don Stroud, and Paul Petersen. A budget would be busted if you tried to get all of them in the same film a decade.

Caan leads the group of them who are bound for Virginia to join General Hood's Texas brigade. But they manage to get as far as Vicksburg where they find the war they're looking for. On the way these kids and they are really kids learn some life lessons. Most don't make it back from the Battle of Shiloh, some don't even get that far.

For one thing they're all from West Texas where the cowboys are and know nothing from slavery. Had they been raised in East Texas they would have been thoroughly familiar with the cotton culture of the Confederacy. They run into slaves trying to be free and slave catchers trying to catch them. Albert Popwell stands out here as a runaway slave.

Paul Petersen is a revelation. He plays a young fast gun with a hair trigger temper. Totally unlike all American Jeff Stone on the Donna Reed Show.

John Doucette plays General Braxton Bragg whose performance does not ring true in terms of what I know of Bragg. In fact the whole ending does not ring true because of the character of Bragg for the film.

Still this is a pretty good film and timely in terms of the Vietnam War and people being disillusioned with war and what it brings.

1968's "Journey to Shiloh" was made a couple years too early to be classified as a "counterculture antiwar" film, it was about the same time as John Wayne's "Green Berets", while most of the country was still solidly behind the war and only barely beginning to waiver.

The story and the theme are virtually identical to a 1959 German film "Die Brucken", in which seven just inducted teenage boys watch as cynical Wehrmacht soldiers evacuate their town ahead of approaching American troops. Full of enthusiasm for the "blood and honor" of patriotic ideology, the seven boys stay to defend a useless bridge. Both films are somewhat unusual anti-war pictures because the enemy is essentially faceless and the theme derives more from the tragedy of easily influenced and manipulated young people.

Aside from the obvious California scenery (which cannot even remotely pass for Texas or Mississippi), the absurd physical miscasting of John Doucette as General Braxton Bragg, and a rather weak battlefield sequence; "Journey to Shiloh" is reasonably accurate historically. I'm from Tom Green County, Texas (just west of Concho and Menard Counties- where the characters are from) and the boys' journey to get into the far away war was not uncommon for West Texas; where young men went to war seeking adventure without much clue what the fight was really about.

Calling these actors "boys" requires considerable suspension of disbelief as most of them were in their mid to late 20's. James Caan is the leader, the story is told from his point of view and he gets the vast majority of the screen time. Other sixties notables in the group are Michael Sarrazin, Paul Petersen, Jan-Michael Vincent, and Harrison Ford (who gets the least screen time-yet would become the most famous).

Interestingly, even the remaining two had their claims to fame. Michael Burns played Benjie "Blue Boy" Carter in the all-time camp classic "Dragnet" episode about the evils of LSD; the drug caused him to paint his face blue (years before Mel Gibson). And Don Stroud's portrayal of Lamarr in "Joe Kidd" might be the finest piece of overacting in cinema history.

Other notables in the cast are Rockford's dad and Ann Sothern's daughter Tisha Sterling. Sterling was an extremely promising actress in the late sixties (and my personal favorite) who in an ideal world would have had a lot more good roles. Here she plays a patriotic southern belle named Airybelle Sumner, who in the film's best scene inspires the boys (men) to fight for the noble honor of the south. They soon learn that her view of the south is somewhat at odds with reality.

"Journey to Shiloh" does not deserve its obscurity. It has its faults but is gripping entertainment with an important message. Considerably better than most films from the time period.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

I had the impression that Universal pushed this out in Australia before anywhere else. They had no printing on it and I hadn't heard of the film when it hit the city grind house. The people I saw it with were gobsmacked.

As JOURNEY TO SHILOH rolled on, we kept on seeing things that we hadn't encountered in the thousands of westerns we'd seen run through this system - the gamblers with identical pistols under the table, pointed at the kid, the Southern blacks urging the Confederate troops on and the way the plot gets stuck into fatuity of gung ho youngsters rushing into the military. It took a long while to get from here to BORN ON THE 4TH OF JULY.

It also ran to some nice pieces of dialogue - the saloon hoons telling the kids they should have scraped the meat off their leather jackets.

I thought William Hale was going to be a major player, saw his shorts GRAND CENTRAL MARKET and THE TOWERS and contacted him, learning that the dodgy stock footage was forced on the production by the producer, who Hale thought wanted to impose bogus scale on it.

The bonus is that all those faceless juveniles turned into movie stars and one of them stayed one.

This one surfaced the same time as Wadja's POPIOLI/ ASHES, which also deals with young men going to war. Hale's film was not outclassed.