August1991 Posted May 13, 2011 Report Posted May 13, 2011 (edited) This is a good historical costume, courtroom drama. If you like historical movies, with all the costumes, you'll love this movie. (The costumes/scenes are mid-nineteenth century American and wonderfully accurate.) As to the courtroom drama, it's not as good as "Witness for the Prosecution" but it's very good. Yes, it concerns Lincoln's assassination but you'll at most see his boots. I paid money to see this movie because Robert Redford directed. I may disagree with him, but Redford makes intelligent movies. I was curious about this one because I was curious about what Redford would make of a controversial American subject. IMV, Redford bungled - but he made a good movie. He got the clothing right but he missed the rest. In the movie "Downfall", I recall thinking that a movie maker once again had given 1940s/older dresses to actors and supposed that viewers could travel to the past. Downfall proved to me that a good movie could go beyond mere dresses. Redford put costumes on actors and imagined that viewers could travel to the past. Well, no - it didn't work. When the Secretary of War (Kevin Klein) says that "he needs good people", I knew that the scriptwriter and Bob Redford were no longer telling the truth. They were in the modern world of expanding bureaucracy/government. The movie is sadly a modern play of Guantánamo. How should America deal with people who oppose America? Redford pretends that everyone deserves the right to a lawyer - even a southerner (Anna Surrat) who presumably supported slavery. Yet, the movie makes no mention of Surrat's opinion of slavery. Edited May 13, 2011 by August1991 Quote
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