Shenandoah (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Shenandoah, the 1965 film starring James Stewart, opens on a Virginia farm in 1864 where a stubborn patriarch named Charlie Anderson has done everything in his power to keep his family out of a war raging within miles of his land. He has six sons, a daughter, and a daughter-in-law. He has no slaves. And he has made a decision: the Civil War is not his fight, not until it touches him directly. What happens next is a slow, terrible undoing of that belief.

  The film was directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and featured the film debuts of both Katharine Ross and Rosemary Forsyth. The American folk song "Oh Shenandoah" runs through its soundtrack. Critics praised it on release, and the state of Virginia broke ticket-sales records to see it. Yet the story's deepest resonance came later, as audiences began connecting its antiwar themes to the conflict in Vietnam. How a Civil War family drama became a Vietnam-era statement, and why James Stewart's performance drew some of the most enthusiastic notices of his career, is the story this documentary tells.

• 2. Charlie Anderson's Neutrality

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  Charlie Anderson is introduced as an archetype of rugged individualism, a man who takes credit for everything he has built and blames no one else, not even God, for what he has lost. His wife is dead, and he holds a quiet, unspoken grievance against heaven for it. At Sunday dinner, his prayer is less a plea than a declaration of self-sufficiency.

  For roughly three years the Civil War has been fought within miles of the Anderson farm. Charlie has watched it from a deliberate distance. His oldest son Jacob wants to enlist in the Confederate Army to defend Virginia, but Charlie refuses to allow it. The war, he tells his family, is not their war. They will not become involved until it concerns them directly. The boys respect that decision and stay on the land.

  The clearest expression of Charlie's philosophy comes not in a speech but in a small domestic detail: when his daughter Jennie is courted by a young Confederate officer named Sam, Charlie gives his blessing. The wedding takes place a few days later. The moment the vows are exchanged, a corporal who has been waiting at the back of the church steps forward to call Sam back to duty. Sam leaves almost immediately, leaving Jennie alone almost before she has time to be a bride. Shortly after, James's wife Ann goes into labor and names the baby girl Martha, after Charlie's late wife. The farm absorbs both events and keeps moving.

• 3. Boy's Capture

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  The break in Charlie's neutrality begins with a cap. Boy, the youngest Anderson at sixteen, is out hunting raccoon with his friend Gabriel when they stumble onto a Confederate ambush. The two run and stop at a pond. Boy is wearing an old rebel soldier kepi that he found at the river. When a Union patrol arrives, the cap is enough evidence for them. They take Boy as a prisoner of war, believing him to be a Confederate soldier.

  Gabriel's path diverges at that moment. A Black Union soldier tells him he is free, and when Jennie confirms that enslaved people in the Confederacy have been declared emancipated, Gabriel sets out on his own. That conversation is a small turning point, a moment where the war's larger stakes briefly make contact with the Anderson world before receding again.

  Charlie responds the only way he knows how: he organizes a search party. He takes Jacob, John, Nathan, Henry, and Jennie, leaving James and Ann at the farm with the baby. Their first stop is a nearby Union camp, where Colonel Fairchild, who himself has a sixteen-year-old son, directs them toward a railroad depot where Confederate prisoners are shipped north. When the captain in charge refuses to let Charlie search the boxcars, citing schedules, Charlie sets up a roadblock on the tracks, disarms the guards, and searches the cars himself. Boy is not there. But in the crowd of liberated prisoners, Jennie sees Sam.

• 4. The War Enters the Farm

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  While the Andersons search the countryside, three Confederate scavengers arrive at the farm. They kill James. Then they kill Ann. Baby Martha survives, cared for by a Black woman who acts as her nanny.

  Boy, meanwhile, has been transferred to a different prisoner-of-war camp, where a rebel soldier named Carter befriends him and pulls him into an escape. They slip away during a loading onto a paddle wheeler and head south. They reach a Confederate camp, and the next day Federal troops attack. Carter is killed. Boy is shot in the leg. A Union soldier is about to kill him when the soldier turns out to be Gabriel, who has enlisted in the Union Army. Gabriel hides Boy in a bush until the battle passes.

  On the road home, the Anderson party encounters a Confederate unit at a checkpoint. A young sentry, startled awake by the sound of horses, fires at Jacob and kills him instantly. Charlie begins to strangle the boy. Then he stops. He asks how old the sentry is. Sixteen, the boy answers. Charlie, thinking of his own missing son, tells the sentry he wants him to live to be an old man, to have sons, and to know what it feels like to lose one. The sentry weeps. It is the scene that reviews would return to again and again, the moment where the film's antiwar argument becomes personal rather than rhetorical.

• 5. Reception and Legacy

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  Howard Thompson of The New York Times called Shenandoah "a pretty good Civil War drama" with Stewart "perfectly cast," though he found it too long and noted that McLaglen's direction hit "many a static snag." Variety praised the Technicolor production and described Stewart as seldom appearing without a cigar butt in the corner of his mouth, endowing his role with "a warm conviction." Leo Sullivan of The Washington Post called it "an engrossing film with lots of heart and even a soul."

  The Monthly Film Bulletin offered perhaps the most generous critical reading, writing that McLaglen's treatment "often has a freshness and humour which show that McLaglen has learned from his admiration for John Ford." It added that Stewart's "laconic drawl makes the dialogue sound funnier than it really is" and called the performance one of the best of his career.

  The film broke box office records in Virginia, the state where the story is set, and it carries a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In 1966 it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Sound, with the nomination going to Waldon O. Watson. Rosemary Forsyth, making her film debut, received a Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Newcomer - Female. The film had been developed under two working titles, Fields of Honor and Shenandoah Crossing, before settling on the name it carried into theaters. Location scenes were filmed near Eugene, Oregon, not in Virginia.

  In 1975, the story crossed to Broadway as a musical adaptation, and John Cullum won his first Tony Award for Best Actor for his performance in it.