Main Cast: Jarrod Emick, Frederic Forrest, Ted Marcoux, Tom Aldredge, Carmen Argenziano
Release Year: 1996
Country: US
Run Time: 167 minutes
Plot
Made for the TNT cable channel, this lengthy docudrama records the harrowing conditions at the Confederacy's most notorious prisoner-of-war camp. The drama unfolds through the eyes of a company of Union soldiers captured at the Battle of Cold Harbor, VA, in June 1864, and shipped to the camp in southern Georgia. A private, Josiah Day (Jarrod Emick), and his sergeant (Frederic Forrest) try to hold their company together in the face of squalid living conditions, inhumane punishments, and a gang of predatory fellow prisoners called the Raiders. After an unsuccessful escape attempt, the Massachusetts men help to put an end to the Raiders' activities. With the permission of the camp's commandant, Captain Wirz (Jan Triska), the Raiders are tried by their peers (with newly arrived prisoners as the impartial jury) and punishment is meted out. The men eagerly greet each new batch of arrivals to the overcrowded camp, hoping to hear some news of prisoner exchange, but as the months drag on and more of the men succumb to disease, that hope begins to flicker. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
Review
In a genre crowded with classic films like Rules of the Game, Stalag 17, The Great Escape, and Bridge on the River Kwai, Andersonville may be forgiven for falling short of that august company. To simply document the horrendous conditions in that Georgia camp wouldn't have made for very involving drama, so writer David Rintels created several "events" on which to hang his story. As in every POW film, escape is foremost in the minds of the featured group of prisoners. But in Andersonville, that event occurs at the halfway point of the film, and after all of the men are either caught, killed, or wind up dead after suffering punishment, there is a second event. The prisoners' revenge on the Raiders, with the trial and punishment shown in great detail, is Rintels' way of showing how the majority of the Union soldiers would not succumb to barbarism, no matter how badly they were treated. As a variation on that point, he later shows a Confederate officer offering to release whoever will join the cause of the South. Their mass refusal, even though they've been told that the North is not interested in an exchange of prisoners, provides Rintels and director John Frankenheimer with the film's best scene, as thousands of men, one company at a time, turn their backs on the officer and march off. The film has other moments almost as powerful as these, but it doesn't create the rich gallery of characters that the best POW films have. And its grotesque portrayal of Henry Wirz, the camp commandant, as a strutting, bug-eyed Prussian, short-circuits one of this genre's most attractive features: the cat-and-mouse interplay between the officer prisoners and their often cultivated head captor. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
The film is loosely based on the diary of John Ransom, a Union soldier imprisoned there. Although certain points of the plot are fabricated, the general conditions of the camp are very accurate to John Ransom's descriptions, particularly those parts in reference to the administration of the camp by Captain Wirz. His line on escaping prisoners is almost exactly similar to the book, "The Flying Dutchman (Wirz) offers to give two at a time twelve hours the start" (p. 71).[citation needed]
