The
tagline of Ride with the Devil summarizes much
about the film: "In a no-man's land between North and South,
you didn't fight for the Blue or the Gray . . . you fought
for your friends and your family." Directed by Ang Lee, Ride
with the Devil is based on the novel Woe to Live
On by Daniel Woodrell, whose interest in the American
Civil War was stimulated by the internecine wars involving
Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The venue is the territory of southwestern
Missouri adjacent to Kansas, where the movie was filmed. Ride
with the Devil covers the same period as the film
The Jayhawkers (1959), in which Northern loyalists
mercilessly attacked those loyal to the South in Kansas. Ride
with the Devil begins in 1861 with a wedding, the
last social occasion where pro-Southerners and pro-Northerners
commingle peacefully. Missouri, a slave state, did not secede,
so partisans of the North and South engage in guerrilla war
campaigns against one another, burning barns, houses, and
entire towns as well as executing those loyal to the opposite
side, and the Union army intervenes to stop the rebels. The
film focuses on four persons caught up in the war who joined
the Missouri Irregulars to show support to the cause of the
South. The film's narrator, Jake Roedel (played by Tobey Maguire),
is the son of a German immigrant who might have sided with
the Federalists until he saw Jayhawkers burn the house and
kill the father of his friend Jack Bull Chiles (played by
Skeet Ulrich), a Southern aristocrat who simply wanted to
preserve his way of life. Daniel Holt (played by Jeffrey Wright)
is a slave who fights alongside, as did many Blacks in the
Civil War, because his Southern master George Clyde (played
by Simon Baker-Denny) gave him his freedom. The four try to
avoid the excesses of the war, but we see plenty of sadistic
killers in the reenacted bushwhacking, especially the storming
of Lawrence, Kansas, a Union stronghold, which left 180 civilians
dead. By peering into the actions of and interactions among
the Irregulars, we discover the barbarity and futility of
their efforts, as indeed do all four characters, two of which
die (Chiles and Clyde) and two survive (Roedel and Holt) but
are seriously wounded. Much of the slow-moving film deals
with the romance between Chiles and Sue Lee Shelley (played
by Jewel Kilcher); Sue Lee becomes pregnant, but Chiles dies
before seeing the baby, and Roedel reluctantly but honorably
decides to marry Sue Lee to preserve her honor. In the end,
unable and disinterested in continuing the battle, Holt heads
for Texas to find his mother, and Roedel hitches up a covered
wagon bound for California with his bride and her child. MH
I
want to comment on this film
