I have been
back in the United States for a few weeks now, though until today I was too distracted by
other concerns to update my blog – one of those ‘other concerns’ being, of
course, the celebration of Independence Day. For my family, these celebrations
consisted of reading the Declaration of Independence while standing in front of
a Bennington Flag, setting off a few fireworks, and watching the movie April
Morning.
April Morning,
based on the Howard Fast novel of the same name, is a 1988, made-for-TV
Hallmark movie starring Tommy Lee Jones and Chad Lowe. Despite its obscure
origins, it usually scores earns a fairly high spot on internet rankings of Revolutionary
War movies, which is how I ended up choosing it.
The first few
scenes introduce the time period – we are in Spring of 1775, when the
“Committees of Correspondence” that had sprung up all over colonial America during
the foregoing years are moving beyond the petition-writing and peaceful
demonstrations of earlier years, and are beginning to weapon up.
Then we get introduced
to the leading characters. Adam Cooper (Chad Lowe) is a 15-year-old boy growing
up in Lexington, Massachusetts. He is a lazy and indisciplined youth, and his
father Moses Cooper (Tommy Lee Jones) is constantly berating him and complaining
that, though he has the height and age to be called a man, he doesn’t act like
one. (Though it’s also clear that Moses never really treats Adam in a way that
would make his son want to respect him).
Adam has a
girlfriend (apparently won over by his looks?) and both she and his mother and
grandmother are more open about expressing their affection for Adam, though
they all do wish he would change his ways. (Yes, it is kitschy and clichéd.
This is a Hallmark movie, after all.)
Finally, on 18
April, 1775 (the eve of the first battle of the Revolutionary War, though
nobody knows this yet) Moses Cooper yields to his wife’s pleas to start
treating his son like somebody he loves and trusts – though to her
consternation, he achieves this by enrolling him in the Lexington militia. A
little later, Paul Revere rides into town, shouts out his hurried warning that ‘the
Regulars are coming,’ and disappears into the night, leaving Lexington’s little
militia company to nervously deliberate how they’ll respond to the news.
As the sun
rises, we see the militia assembled on the Lexington village green. Following
proper Puritan discipline, they sing a hymn. In due time, the redcoats appear,
a long marching column on its way from Boston to Concord to seize the powder
and shot that is stockpiled there.
The (badly
outnumbered) Lexington militia is ordered to disperse. It doesn’t. The regulars
fix bayonets and march against the militia. The shooting begins. After a single
volley; what’s left of the militia has broken and fled. Eight colonists,
including our hero’s father, lay dead on the ground. The column marches on to
Concord.
I won’t give away more details of the plot. Suffice it to say that the events of the rest of the day follow the historical record: the Regulars can win in a pitched battle, but they lose against the ambush warfare of little bands of militia hiding in thickets and behind stone walls. It is just as in Longfellows’ poem:
The film closes at around nightfall. If there
can be said to be a ‘lesson’ or ‘moral’ to April Morning, it can best be summed
up as: ‘This is how it all began.’ Before there was the Continental Army
or the Declaration of Independence or the American Flag or General George Washington
or the White House or The Star Spangled Banner or any of the other
symbols that make people think ‘America,’ there was a little band of
minutemen on the green at Lexington, facing down a larger force of government
troops and standing their ground.
The minutemen
knew that they were the weaker party. They knew that if the Regulars fired on
them, the battle – in that moment – would go to the enemy. Each man knew that
if he fell to a British musketball, his wife and children would have to lead a
harder, lonelier life in his absence.
But these men
also suspected that, across the thirteen colonies, there were hundreds of other
towns that felt the same way as they did about British rule and whose inhabitants,
once battle was joined, would fight on their side. And they knew that if they
didn’t fight – if they yielded and submitted – then all their
committee-of-correspondence work and petition-writing and eloquent speechifying
about the Rights of Man wouldn’t mean anything.
And so, even
though they disliked violence (it takes quite a while, later on, for the boy
Adam Cooper to work up the guts to kill a man) and would much rather have been
let alone to enjoy their rights in peace, they made up their minds to preserve
their liberties and their way of life by force of arms if that’s what it took.
The historical
accuracy of the film is, on the whole, quite praiseworthy. We see that, while
there are a few rabble-rousers among the people in Lexington, most of the
colonists start off as just ordinary working men and women, concerned with
humdrum and private affairs unrelated to the war that is brewing up around
them.
Although the
film’s rural setting spared its creators the difficulty of constructing a
convincing set of (say) Colonial Boston, they did see to it that the various
kinds of British troops – grenadiers, battalion, and light infantry – are all
uniformed accurately. Soldiers on both sides follow the kind of tactics that
make sense when one’s weapons are a bayonet and a single-shot, blackpowder
musket that takes about a minute to reload. And so forth.
The characters
generally avoid anachronistically talking up twentieth-century ideas. At the
same time, we get an honest portrayal of the behind-the-scenes conflict between
the old faith in the Puritan variety of Christianity that had burned so
brightly with the Pilgrim Fathers, and the rising tide of rationalism in which
a man, while still acknowledging his Creator, is free to believe that God is
often indifferent to human concerns, or that Holy Writ can’t be relied upon to
supply the final answer to every question that might trouble him.
While the
British characters are walk-ons, you still get a (correct) impression that
most of them are honest, Christian men who simply believe in law and
order more than they believe in the ‘rights’ that the colonists are claiming to
have. In other words, they are not the bloodthirsty thugs seen in the Mel
Gibson slaughterfest that unfortunately still dominates how all too many
moviegoers think about the War of Independence.
One of April Morning’s
few weaknesses, in my opinion, is that it makes a big deal out of a specific
character firing ‘the shot heard round the world’ instead of leaving the
question of who fired first as a mystery, the way it is in the actual
historical record.
Notwithstanding
such trifles, April Morning is, on the whole, a movie that I highly recommend. Next
time the Fourth of July comes around – or the anniversary of the Battle of
Lexington itself, or even just some night when you want to watch a movie and
don’t already have one picked out – watch this film, and show it to your
children.
The movie
really does an excellent job showing what the American Revolution was all
about. It is a story of solidarity – a story of knowing that, on your own,
you’re too weak to take on your enemies, but deciding to fight anyway because
you feel a sense of brotherhood with your comrades and you know that only by
sticking together do you have any chance at all.
It’s a story of courage – a story of choosing defiance over fear. It’s a story of not caring that your enemies
nominally have the law on their side, because the only laws you recognize are
laws that, in your own judgment, conform to your people’s traditional
notions about the rights that a government has got to respect whether it wants
to or not.
And it is a
story of recognizing that, while the defense of one’s liberties will usually begin
with cool-headed discussions and petition-writing and voting and the like, there
will often come a time when such acts will be shown to mean nothing unless a
critical number of patriots are willing to shed their blood rather than submit
to tyranny.
And these are lessons that the current generation of Americans would do well to take to heart.
Interesting. I read -- or re-read -- April Morning a couple of years ago. I didn't know there was a movie of it. It might interest you to know that Howard Fast was a Communist, leaving the Party in 1956 under the impact of Khruschev's 'Secret Speech' about Stalin's crimes, plus the Hungarian Revolution. He was prtty bitter about the Communists, as expressed in a book he wrote in 2957 -- THE NAKED GOD: THE WRITER AND THE COMMUNISTS. But by 1990, he seemed to have gone some way back towards his Leftist origins, in a kind of autobiography he wrote, BEING RED. Both are worth reading. What's interesting is that the old Communists never denounced America as soaked in racism. Rather, they celebrated the American Revolution, and saw themselves as fighting for its continuation. What a contrast to the hate-Amerikkka Leftist vermin of today!
ReplyDeleteInteresting - I knew that Howard Fast had been a member of CPUSA until he left after the Hungarian Revolution, though I haven't read anything he's written about that subject; for that matter, I haven't yet read the novel of April Morning! Though perhaps I should, one of these days.
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