Academy Award trivia buffs will know the 1954 production “A Time Out of War” was the first student film to win the Oscar – in the Short Subject (Two-Reel) category, beating out competition from the Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox and Disney studios. And when you experience the film, you’ll understand how a small no-budget student project could one-up the major Hollywood players.
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Tag Archives: Civil War
Cohen Saves the Flag (1913)
It is highly unusual to watch one movie while searching for evidence of another, but that is the main reason why most people today would bother to subject themselves to the painfully unfunny 1913 one-reeler “Cohen Saves the Flag.”
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The Bootleg Files: Confederate Honey
BOOTLEG FILES 667: “Confederate Honey” (1940 Warner Bros. animated short).
LAST SEEN: On DailyMotion.com
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: On LaserDisc and in an edited DVD release.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: Politically incorrect content.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not in its original uncut form.
During the past few years, there has been an uncommon degree of attention paid to the Confederate States of America, which died in 1865 at the end of the Civil War. On one side, a new wave of white racists is flying the Confederate flag at rallies where they spout their idiotic hatred. On the other side, left-wing revisionists are spending their time demanding the removal of statues of Confederate generals and the renaming of schools and streets named for the military leaders of that long-deceased secessionist nation.
The Bootleg Files: The Man in the Barn
BOOTLEG FILES 665: “The Man in the Barn” (1937 short film directed by Jacques Tourneur).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: No commercial home entertainment release.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely.
On the evening of January 13, 1903, an elderly house painter in Enid, Oklahoma, named David E. George laid dying in a hotel room from an attempted suicide. Before he passed away, George told the few people gathered at his bedside, “I killed the best man that ever lived.” The man who was killed, according to George, was Abraham Lincoln – and George insisted that he was John Wilkes Booth, the president’s assassin. Before he could explain how he could be someone who had been killed 38 years earlier, George slipped into a coma before dying.
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The Bootleg Files: Raintree County
BOOTLEG FILES 596: “Raintree County” (1957 epic with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor).
LAST SEEN: We cannot confirm the last exhibition of this film.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: A VHS video and LaserDisc release only.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: Out of circulation in the home entertainment channels for too many years.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: It is possible.
There are some films that seem to be doomed from the first minutes of their inception through the last seconds of their release, and the 1957 epic “Raintree County” is one of the more notable examples. The story of its creation is far more complex and tragic than anything on that appeared on the screen.
Cold Mountain (2003)
“Cold Mountain” wants to be grand. Oh how Minghella wants it to be a grandiose civil war epic, this generation’s “Gone with the Wind”, but sadly, it will never reach those heights, and throughout the running time it never reached those heights because it is such a short-sighted piece of filmmaking, it could never reach the possible limits that Minghella wanted it to. After viewing this, it was plainly obvious this was so utterly manufactured for Oscar, it was nauseating. But “Cold Mountain” is not underwhelming because of that fact, it’s underwhelming simply because it’s so utterly short-sighted in its stories and characters.