Saul Levitt's The Andersonville Trial [1970] (REGION 1) (NTSC)

Customer Reviews:

"The real crime is that I chose the losing side.".......2007-08-16

Directed by George C. Scott, and starring Richard Basehart, Cameron Mitchell, Jack Cassidy, William Shatner, Martin Sheen, and Buddy Ebsen in some of their best roles ever, this stunning 1970 production was a shoo-in to win three Emmys and the Peabody Award, with Cassidy also nominated for an Emmy as Best Actor. Filled with the kind of drama that only a real war crimes trial can generate, the play by Saul Levitt focuses on the trial of a German-born Confederate captain who was in charge of the Andersonville Prison in Georgia, where Union soldiers died at the rate of 3000 men a day during the hot summer months of their incarceration in 1864. Living in overcrowded conditions without shelter, shade, clean water, or adequate food, the men became desperate, preferring to risk being shot during escape attempts to living in the squalid and unsanitary conditions of the prison.

Captain Wirz (Richard Basehart in one of his all-time best dramatic roles), was in charge of the prison and is now on trial. His counsel, southern lawyer Otis Baker (Jack Cassidy), is highly skilled at twisting words, and brilliant at forcing the court to consider the rules of wartime engagement and the necessity of following orders. The courtroom battles between Baker and the Union prosecutor, Col. N. P. Chipman (William Shatner, when he was young and hungry for great acting jobs), are memorable for the philosophical complexities of their arguments and the emotions with which they argue their positions. Gen. Lew Wallace (Cameron Mitchell) is hard pressed to keep the two sides in order and arguing relevant legal issues.

Buddy Ebsen, a fine actor who does not deserve to be remembered primarily for "Beverly Hillbillies," is the doctor who worked at the prison for eight months, a man who shows how his compassion gradually became dulled by the horrors of the conditions, until he became inured to the hundreds of deaths he had to certify every day. Michael Burns as James Davidson, a nineteen-year-old Vermont soldier who was incarcerated at Andersonville, shows the traumatic effects of his experiences as he testifies, his role becoming one of the most sympathetic in the entire play.

George C. Scott, as director, gets the finest performances possible from these actors and wrings the play of every moment of drama. The tension is so great that viewers will easily sit through the two-and-a-half hour performance, breathless with anticipation, their emotions soaring with the legal points made by the prosecution and soaring equally with the human feelings engendered by the defense. As Chipman says, "I'd like to believe that I am more of a man than Wirz was to save those men, but am I?" One of the finest productions ever done by Broadway Theatre Archive, this is a performance not to be missed by lovers of theatre and anyone interested in Civil War history. Mary Whipple

A powerful courtroom drama on the question of obeying orders.......2003-12-14

The most important thing to remember about this Peabody Award winning production of Saul Levitt's play "The Andersonville Trial" is that it was produced in 1970, during the Vietnam War. However, the play was originally produced on Broadway in 1959, which is rather surprising because this particular version has a reputation for being a historic allegory in the grand tradition of "The Crucible." In 1959 the historic parallel would have been to the Nuremberg Trials where Nazi leaders were tried as war criminals. But in the wake of the My Lai massacre the court-martial of Capt. Henry Wirz (Richard Basehart), commandant of the infamous Andersonville prison during the Civil War it would be impossible for an audience to view this drama as anything else that a discussion of the war in Vietnam.

Henry Wirz was the only Confederate soldier to be convicted and executed for war crimes during the Civil War. Wirz remains a controversial figure whose name is associated with some of the worst atrocities of the war by many while considered a martyr to the Glorious Cause by others. As Union forces pushed into the South the Confederacy was ending up with more and more Union prisoners and the Andersonville Camp was created to relieve the situation in Richmond and elsewhere. However, in June of 1864 the Union discontinued the policy of prisoner exchanges and without that avenue of release or the construction of another facility, the prisoner population of Andersonville swelled to 26,000 prisoners crammed into a little more than 26 acres. Add to this the impoverishment of the Confederacy in the final year of the war when the 33,000 prisoners in Andersonville made it the fifth largest "city" in the Confederacy, and it is hardly surprising that hundreds of men were dying each day. Of the 45,000 prisoners sent to Andersonville, 13,000 died.

Levitt used the official record of the trial of Henry Wirz as his basic source material. While sticking to the facts, Levitt was obviously more interested in the personalities involved in the proceedings. So while "The Andersonville Trial" is accurate with regards to the time and place of the trial, names of the participants, and some of the dialogue, it is still much more of a drama than a documentary. Furthermore, as a televised stage play it is necessarily restricted to the primary set of the courtroom and the scope of its interest is pretty much restricted to that venue as well.

The pivotal character of the drama is Lt. Colonel N.P. Chipman (William Shatner in the role Scott played in the original Broadway production), the officer prosecuting Wirz (Richard Basehart), who responds to the charges against him with the defense that he was obeying orders and doing what he could under the circumstances. This leads Chipman to the conclusion what Wirz should have done was disobey orders that would lead to the deaths of thousands of prisoners. However, this is not an argument that an officer in the military can make lightly, and this sets up a conflict with the presiding judge, General Lew Wallace (Cameron Mitchell), who would achieve fame as the author of "Be-Hur: A Tale of the Christ." But Chipman feels compelled to come up with a response to the argument that following such orders is a legitimate defense.

Shatner's performance is superb, and those who remember playing Spencer Tracy's aide in "Judgment at Nuremberg" can appreciate the irony of his having a larger role in this related drama. The biggest compliment I can give Shatner's work is that I cannot imagine George C. Scott having played this role. One of the strengths of this production is how Scott takes a collection of "television stars" like Shatner, Basehart, Jack Cassidy, Buddy Ebsen, Martin Sheen, John Anderson and Whit Bissell, along with veteran character actors like Mitchell and Albert Salmi, to create a stellar ensemble cast. Just as impressive is how he has actors like Alan Hale, Jr. and Kenneth Tobey sitting as members of the Court-martial board. For Shatner, Basehart, Cassidy, Mitchell and Salmi you will be hard pressed to find anything better on their acting resumes.

"The Andersonville Trial" is one of the most powerful courtroom dramas you will ever see. It has something of an advantage over the likes of "The Caine Mutiny" and "A Few Good Men" in that the play is almost entirely the trial, which makes it more like "Breaker Morant" and, most obviously," Judgment at Nuremberg." The drama comes down to Chipman's cross-examination of Wirz and the prosecutor's futile effort to get the prisoner in the dock to explain why he did not do the "right" thing and disobey his orders. I think the net effect is to make Wirz more of a tragic figure than a monster, locked into a system of rules and beliefs that would not let him see a way out of the disaster happening before him.

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