Sacrifice (1987 film)
Sacrifice is a 1987 Confederate historical epic film directed by Bill George and starring Andie McDowell, Julie Boyd and Ned Beatty in lead roles. Set in the 20 years between 1916 and 1936, it chronicles the end of the Great American War, the postwar Confederacy, the Redemption Era and finally the rise to power of Huey Long in the early 1930s through the perspective of two former Confederate sorority sisters in Georgia.
The film follows Eleonora "Little El" Rainey (McDowell), a middle-class girl from Augusta through her frosty relationship with upper-class schoolmate Catherine McGrath (Boyd), the daughter of a powerful Georgia planter and state senator, starting with the order of the Governor of Georgia for all women to remain on the university campus as the United States Army approaches Athens and their stranding there under occupation during the March to the Sea, followed by the temporary closure of the University of Georgia due to the end of the war. McGrath's husband is killed in the war and her family rendered destitute by a slave uprising and the burning of their plantation by John Pershing's forces, and she is forced to resort to prostituting herself to American soldiers in Athens and, later, the ruins of Atlanta in order to survive. Rainey returns to Augusta, where she before long falls in with local partisans and hillboys, including a man whom she marries before seeing him killed in the occupation and their child stillborn. A smuggler thereafter, Rainey and McGrath eventually reconnect in Atlanta, where they are at opposite ends of, and eventually the same side, of a power struggle in the city between its powerful City Commissioner Robert Doakes (Beatty), organized crime elements both white and Black, and the rising tide of anger at poverty that culminates in Huey Long's rise.
The film, clocking in at 191 minutes, was praised upon release for its dealing with considerably more sexual themes than was common in Confederate cinema at the time; an international release cut at 168 minutes was hailed in Britain as "the finest output of Dixiewood in decades." However, in the United States, the movie's release came at the crescendo of the Boycott Movement and movie theaters were picketed; it was strongly protested by Black political and cultural leaders on both sides of the Ohio for its portrayal of Blacks as being "spectacularly prejudiced" and especially for two extended portrayals of lynchings and a scene in which Boyd's character, Cate McGrath, has sex with several Black men consecutively for money (a scene abridged or excised entirely in many Confederate cuts in order to be released in theaters). While a star-making turn for both McDowell and Boyd, the movie failed to be nominated for any Academy Awards even with wide distribution in the United States eventually being secured by RKO. On the occasion of its 2012 limited and digitally remastered re-release, with the full cut, in the United States, film critic Roger Ebert noted, "It is a towering accomplishment of Confederate cinema; a view of two seminal decades of Dixie life through the eyes of two women who alternate hating each other and loving each other, mistrusting each other and relying on each other, but fundamentally in a time when cinema was profoundly male it is a story of two women. It is also, to put it bluntly, a remarkably racist film, unapologetic in its portrayal of Black Yankee soldiers in particular as animalistic savages and Dixie freedmen as people who were better off under slavery and ought to re-learn their place. It is a film of its time and place, and that place was most certainly not the United States of 1987, and as the conclusion of segregation just a few years later would suggest, probably not of the Confederate States of 1987, either." It is regarded as the last major piece of segregation-era Confederate art that maintains the social mores and attitudes of its time.
(@traveller76 gave me the idea for this - his thoughts have been revised and written into a full post)
The film follows Eleonora "Little El" Rainey (McDowell), a middle-class girl from Augusta through her frosty relationship with upper-class schoolmate Catherine McGrath (Boyd), the daughter of a powerful Georgia planter and state senator, starting with the order of the Governor of Georgia for all women to remain on the university campus as the United States Army approaches Athens and their stranding there under occupation during the March to the Sea, followed by the temporary closure of the University of Georgia due to the end of the war. McGrath's husband is killed in the war and her family rendered destitute by a slave uprising and the burning of their plantation by John Pershing's forces, and she is forced to resort to prostituting herself to American soldiers in Athens and, later, the ruins of Atlanta in order to survive. Rainey returns to Augusta, where she before long falls in with local partisans and hillboys, including a man whom she marries before seeing him killed in the occupation and their child stillborn. A smuggler thereafter, Rainey and McGrath eventually reconnect in Atlanta, where they are at opposite ends of, and eventually the same side, of a power struggle in the city between its powerful City Commissioner Robert Doakes (Beatty), organized crime elements both white and Black, and the rising tide of anger at poverty that culminates in Huey Long's rise.
The film, clocking in at 191 minutes, was praised upon release for its dealing with considerably more sexual themes than was common in Confederate cinema at the time; an international release cut at 168 minutes was hailed in Britain as "the finest output of Dixiewood in decades." However, in the United States, the movie's release came at the crescendo of the Boycott Movement and movie theaters were picketed; it was strongly protested by Black political and cultural leaders on both sides of the Ohio for its portrayal of Blacks as being "spectacularly prejudiced" and especially for two extended portrayals of lynchings and a scene in which Boyd's character, Cate McGrath, has sex with several Black men consecutively for money (a scene abridged or excised entirely in many Confederate cuts in order to be released in theaters). While a star-making turn for both McDowell and Boyd, the movie failed to be nominated for any Academy Awards even with wide distribution in the United States eventually being secured by RKO. On the occasion of its 2012 limited and digitally remastered re-release, with the full cut, in the United States, film critic Roger Ebert noted, "It is a towering accomplishment of Confederate cinema; a view of two seminal decades of Dixie life through the eyes of two women who alternate hating each other and loving each other, mistrusting each other and relying on each other, but fundamentally in a time when cinema was profoundly male it is a story of two women. It is also, to put it bluntly, a remarkably racist film, unapologetic in its portrayal of Black Yankee soldiers in particular as animalistic savages and Dixie freedmen as people who were better off under slavery and ought to re-learn their place. It is a film of its time and place, and that place was most certainly not the United States of 1987, and as the conclusion of segregation just a few years later would suggest, probably not of the Confederate States of 1987, either." It is regarded as the last major piece of segregation-era Confederate art that maintains the social mores and attitudes of its time.
(@traveller76 gave me the idea for this - his thoughts have been revised and written into a full post)
