Gettysburg

The Civil War, said Gore Vidal, is “the great single tragic event that continues to give resonance to our republic.” Gettysburg was its climacteric battle, and Ron Maxwell’s epic Gettysburg (1993), filmed on and around the battlefield, is the definitive cinematic treatment of the most consequential, written-about and argued-over military engagement in the history of the United States. (I would call it the most stirring as well but then I remember the words of the eminent historian J.G. Randall, best-known for his four-volume Lincoln the President: “That there was heroism in the war is not doubted, but to thousands the war was as romantic as prison rats and as gallant as typhoid or syphilis.