Class of '61 Reviews

"A plot divided against itself cannot stand." That's how Abe Lincoln might have summed up CLASS OF '61, an ambitious but ultimately disappointing TV feature from Steven Spielberg's company. Taking more than a little inspiration from Ken Burns' popular PBS documentary series "The Civil War" (and utilizing input from Burns's star historian Shelby Foote), CLASS OF '61 purports to span the diary entries of Shelby Peyton (Dan Futterman), a West Point cadet from 1860s Virginia. When cannon fire at Fort Sumter signals open hostility between the Union and Confederate states, Shelby and other Southern cadets enlist with the Rebel army. Yet he maintains a close friendship with West Point comrade Devin O'Neil (Clive Owen), a proud Union lieutenant whose sister Shannen (Sophie Ward) is Shelby's fiancee. There's greater division in O'Neil's Baltimore household. While father is a firm Union supporter, his other son sees in Washington all the hallmarks of tyranny his family faced back in Ireland; he agitates for the Confederate cause as an act of protest and eventually dies in battle carrying the flag of Dixie. Meanwhile, back in Virginia, Shelby Peyton has another boyhood friend, favored family slave Lucius (Andre Braugher), whose wife is about to give birth. To celebrate, the Peytons grant Lucius his freedom, but, having just killed a white slave-hunter, that's not enough protection for Lucius. He heads north via the Underground Railroad. Shelby and Devin finally meet again at the first Battle of Bull Run, where Confederate cunning leads overconfident Union troops into a trap. When Shelby recognizes his West Point classmates among the defenders, however, he gives an order to cease fire, sparing their lives--temporarily, anyway. An abrupt epilogue states that Devin and Shelby both perished later at Gettysburg, leaving behind Shannen and her baby, Shelby's out-of-wedlock son. The suddenness of that curtain close effectively cuts CLASS OF '61 off at the knees, just when the viewer has begun to really care for these people after spending the first hour or so trying to sort them out. The truncated tale seems uncertain whether it wants to be a mighty family saga or history lesson, never fully satisfying in either mode. Dialogue is especially academic, with one flirty Southern belle riposting, "Any man who would suspend habeas corpus without the consent of Congress is not only an enemy of the people but of the Constitution as well!" The names of Matthew Brady and George Armstrong Custer are frequently dropped, and to keep transitions and establishing shots cheap, director Gregory Hoblit inserts monochrome stock footage, drawings, and maps, all contributing to the classroom-filmstrip flavor and a low-budget ambiance. Uniformly fine acting and glowing cinematography by Janusz Kaminski (SCHINDLER'S LIST) can't wholly offset these faults. The feature scores points in delineating the dilemma of first-generation Irish-Americans, an oppressed minority now ordered to take up arms and defend their adopted home. CLASS OF '61 does a more compelling job than did Ron Howard's epic FAR AND AWAY with similar material, even if the O'Neil trait of speaking in Celtic aphorisms ("Poetry ... piss and vinegar is the trinity of the Irish soul") grows wearisome. In defiance of 1990s political correctness, CLASS OF '61 depicts the slavery issue with an even hand, asserting that some Southern blacks preferred the security of plantation servitude to a life as wage slaves among Northerners, who could preach equality and tolerance yet lynch any freedmen who violated the color barrier. Lucius himself proves to be no mere token character but a member of the class of '61 in his own right; the ex-slave survives the Civil War in the 54th Massachusetts, the all-black Union regiment dramatized in the theatrical film GLORY. Despite its pedigree, CLASS OF '61 premiered to indifferent critical notice on cable TV in 1993, and graduated to the home video class of '95. (Violence.)