Shenandoah

This 1965 movie stars Jimmy Stewart. There might not be an actor that I enjoy more than Jimmy Stewart. Stewart plays Charlie Anderson, a Virginia widower with six sons. Living an idyllic, yet lonely without his wife, life running the family farm Charlie Anderson wants to keep his sons out of the Civil War.

Watching this movie one sees several people that are faces you recall from other TV shows. There is Dabs Greer and Kevin Hagen later to be Reverend Alden and the Doctor on Little House on the Prairie. Denver Pyle, later to be Uncle Jesse on the Dukes of Hazzard and John Wayne's oldest son Patrick Wayne also appear.

The story itself is fairly predictable. Charlie Anderson, somehow, inexplicably so, has managed to get through four years of the civil war in Virginia with no damage to his home or his family. Still he is facing pressure from his community as to why his sons are not in the war.

Eventually the family does become, against their will, in the war. The youngest son having been mistaken for a Confederate Soldier is taken prisoner. Anderson decides to go looking for him and on the way more heartache is in store.

Oscar worthy the movie is not. Still the scenery is nice and Jimmy Stewart is worth the price of admission for any movie he is in. Interestingly the anti war sentiment was thought to be a correlation to Vietnam but the timing of 1965, when the war was widely supported and Stewart's stalwart Conservative record makes it unlikely he would have knowingly particpated in a movie with such an obvious corralary.

Worth watching.