This Civil War thriller has so much truth to say about War, Patriotism and combatant-vs.-civilian terror that we can hardly believe it was released in 1954. It’s based on a true event from 1864, a daring undercover mission that hit the Union far away from the conventional fighting. Van Heflin is the vengeance-seeking advance agent, Anne Bancroft a war widow, Richard Boone a maimed Union veteran and Lee Marvin a loose cannon with a hair trigger. The anti-war message is stronger than anything from the Vietnam years!  The 20th-Fox release is not on quality home video, and is in great need of restoration.

The Raid
Not on Home Video
CineSavant Revival Screening Review
1954 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 83 min.
Starring: Van Heflin, Anne Bancroft, Richard Boone, Lee Marvin, Tommy Rettig, Peter Graves, Douglas Spencer, Paul Cavanagh, Will Wright, James Best, John Dierkes, Helen Ford, Lee Aaker, Claude Akins, John Beradino, Robert Easton, Richard Eyer, Dolores Fuller, Roy Glenn, William Schallert, Ken Terrell.
Cinematography: Lucien Ballard
Costumes: Travilla
Art Director: George Patrick
Film Editor: Robert Golden
Original Music: Roy Webb
Written by Sydney Boehm story by Francis Cockrell based on the book Affair at St. Albans by Herbert Ravenal Sass
Produced by Robert L. Jacks
Executive Producer Leonard Goldstein
Directed by Hugo Fregonese

It’s not easy to find a good Civil War movie idea — hard feelings between the states have never really subsided. When asked about his classic silent film The General, Buster Keaton opined that “You can always make villains out of the Northerners, but you cannot make a villain out of the South.”  It must be the rule of Underdogs in drama.

There’s also an obvious problem when making a picture about rebels attacking the United States of America. In the play 1776, writer Peter Stone gives Benjamin Franklin an unforgettable sound bite: “Treason is a charge invented by Winners as an excuse for hanging the Losers.”  Yet real Traitors need to be dealt with as well.

Both of those sentiments get a workout in 1954’s The Raid, a brilliant picture that challenges audience notions of heroes and villains, patriots and terrorists. It’s our favorite film by the capable director Hugo Fregonese, of the Argentinian Apenas un deliquente, Val Lewton’s Apache Drums and the Gary Cooper movie Blowing Wild.

There is at present no acceptable home video release of The Raid, an exciting and suspenseful Civil War thriller. It plays from time to time on the Fox Movie cable channel, in a flat transfer that must be 30 years old. The movie ought to be widescreen-formatted at 1:66 or so. As is the occasional custom here, this is a “CineSavant Revival Screening Review,” undertaken to encourage interest in marginalized movies of merit (translation: we wanted to write it up and no decent release is available). A ’20th Century Fox Cinema Archives’ DVD was released, but it’s the same dismal copy seen on cable.

The Raid is an independent production distributed by 20th Fox and presumably sold back to the studio at a later date. It’s a ‘Panoramic Productions’ film, with a logo that I’ve seen elsewhere only on the odd comedy The Rocket Man from the same producer, Leonard Goldstein.

The subject is the infamous St. Albans Raid of October 19, 1864. Confederate soldiers, some of them escaped prisoners of war, rallied in neutral Canada to plan a punitive raid on the prosperous town just over a mile from the Canadian border. The intention was to rob three banks and burn downtown St. Albans to the ground before retreating across the border. It was seen as vengeance for the burning of entire Southern cities, with a double benefit: the money would help buy supplies for the Confederacy, and the Union might see a need to divert more troops to the northern border, in case of more raids.

Screenwriter Sydney Boehm (The Big Heat, The Atomic City) mostly sticks to the historical facts, adding drama that points up the ironies and hypocrises of the wartime homefront. Major Neal Benton (Van Heflin) escapes from a Union POW stockade with several fellow Confederates, including the reliable Captain Dwyer (Peter Graves) and the unstable, cocksure Lt. Keating (Lee Marvin). In Canada he gathers other escapees to pull off the highly irregular raid. Posing as ‘Neal Swayze,’ a Canadian investor, Benton rents a room from the widow Katy Bishop (Anne Bancroft) and her son Larry (Tommy Rettig). Katy conveniently shows him the town, and he notes the various roads leading in and out. Benton rents an old farm where his raiders can hide while preparing to strike.

Complications stack up quickly. Union troops pass through town now and then, and their arrival forces a last-minute cancellation of the first raid attempt. For the leader Neal Benton, the problem becomes personal. The town welcomes new money, and Neal finds that he’s earned the locals’ favor, especially where Katy is concerned. Young Larry idolizes the dashing ‘businessman.’ Neal’s only non-fan is the local army recruiter Captain Lionel Foster (Richard Boone) — he already feels inadequate for having lost an arm, and now he’s losing the woman he hoped to marry. Before the big day comes, ironic events turn Neal into a celebrated hero — for having to shoot one of his own out-of-control raiders in public, right in the middle of a church service. The city fathers give Neal a parcel of property as a reward. Katy is now certain that Neal is the answer to her problems, a potential good husband and father who can help her put the terror of war behind her.

All those hopes crash when Neal leads his raiders to seize the town — unsure if they’ll be overtaken by a nearby Union column.

The shocking image in The Raid is the reveal of the ‘civilian’ Neal Benton as a full Confederate Major, in uniform, in the town square. It’s as if he appeared in a Super Villain costume. a shock as powerful as a gauntlet thrown down in a knights in armor movie, or a violent terror outrage against French civilians in the subversive The Battle of Algiers. Although St. Albans has contributed soldiers to the fighting, its complacent civilians never thought their homes would become a battlefield. It comes with what they perceive as an ultimate betrayal: a man they thought they loved is The Enemy with a capital ‘E.’

The vengeance-seeking Confederates harbor a dark vengeance for lives and property lost. A trooper humiliates some bankers by forcing them at gunpoint to swear an oath to Jefferson Davis. There are no ordinary heroes to cheer, especially not Major Benton, who carries out his raid dreading the effect it will have on Katy and Larry. His duty is to strike back at the hated North in the best way he can, with whatever resources he has. It’s a dirty Civil War, after all: Lincoln’s General Sherman and others are bending the old rules of chivalrous combat, toward ‘total warfare.’

It’s ‘Americans fighting Americans,’ an idea that I fear not enough of us dread today. That negativity took some of the fun out of the spectacular “1941”. The only other Civil War story that takes the political trauma of The Raid to a higher level is Ang Lee’s very entertaining, very disturbing Ride with the Devil, where ‘Bloody Kansas’ irregulars burn and slaughter in a degenerate orgy.

The basic dramatics are excellent. With his worried brow Van Heflin makes a fine conflicted ‘terrorist spy.’ Neal Benton falls in love with Katy, and for a moment it almost seems he can regain everything he’s lost down South — he likes many of the people of St. Albans. The raiders consider themselves legitimate combatants because they don official uniforms before the raid begins, a distinction the Vermonters aren’t likely to appreciate.

Lee Marvin gets a real chance to shine, running amuck in a drunken rage to shoot some Yankees. Among the supporting characters, Peter Graves and Douglas Spencer do exceedingly well, Tommy Rettig is an inspiring kid, and James Best and John Dierkes sneak into town in a peddler’s wagon. Unbilled but making big impressions are favorites Claude Akins and William Schallert; also notable but harder to spot are the unbilled Richard Eyer and Lee Aaker. Unbilled vocal accent expert Robert Easton plays a potential raider rejected because his Southern drawl is too thick.

By 1954 the blacklist had pretty much removed the ‘social issue’ filmakers intent on criticizing American problems. The amazing thing about The Raid is its unrepentant depiction of ugly wartime attitudes. Posing as a neutral Canadian, Neal Benton must stifle his anger at the level of ‘patriotic’ hate in town. Although the businessmen are mainly interested in making money, all condemn the South and want it destroyed; citizens on the street applaud news of the devastation of enemy cities. Neal attends a charity bazaar where trophies of war are auctioned off, and enters into a bidding war with Captain Foster for a captured Confederate flag. It’s 1864 — the flag is regarded as solemnly as a religious icon.

Neal tells the worshipful Larry that enemy soldiers can be good people, just like his family and neighbors. Katy sees merit in a measure of pacifism, but Neal doesn’t try to sell the lesson to anyone else. The local minister (Douglas Spencer of The Thing from Another World) preaches that  Confederates are in league with the devil, and need to be scourged from the Earth. The image of a town at one end of a divisive spectrum reflects on our present polarized America. Neal Benton’s raid may be a legitimate act of war, but when he flourishes that Major’s uniform on Main Street, he might as well be the Devil incarnate.

The historical raid met opposition from a local Captain on leave, who formed an ad hoc resistance that encouraged the raiders to cut and run before they could start many fires. The film version gives Richard Boone’s cowed Captain Foster an opportunity to fight back, even with just one arm. The screenwriters avoid extreme violence by having Neal Benton order his men not to fire in the direction of townspeople gathered to form a human shield. Little Larry gets his chance to shine as well.

Now The Enemy in every sense, Neil and his raiders race to the border. He leaves behind Katy Bishop, with the hope that she might understand his reasons for the raid. The look on her face makes us think, ‘does it matter if she understands?’

If a remake were filmed of The St. Albans incident, most of it might take place in Canada, which despite being a neutral country couldn’t ignore the U.S. demands for the arrest and return of the raiders. American vigilantes pursued the raiders into Canada, and had to be forcefully evicted. A court returned some of the stolen loot but refused to extradite the Confederates because they acted under military order, in uniform. The diplomatic mess must have fueled many an argument about neutrality.

If The Raid seems even more relevant now, it’s because our present political polarization resembles the Washington impasse that led to the War Between the States. There’s nothing uglier than a civil war and The Raid takes a clear stand against blind militaristic patriotism. Does anybody still read Mark Twain’s 1904 short story The War Prayer?  Wars can be unavoidable, and ‘understandable’ terrorism is still terrorism, but Twain’s words get to the heart of the problem and cut like a knife: a prayer for victory is also a curse to visit horrors upon the innocent:

“. . . help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst . . . for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives . . .”

There is no acceptable videodisc of The Raid, and my DVR is always ready to catch an infrequent airing on the Fox Movie Channel. Although independently produced it appears to have been filmed and finished on the Fox lot. The energetic music score is by Roy Webb, recently loosed from RKO. The Eastmancolor cinematography (originally printed in Technicolor) is by the great Lucien Ballard (The Wild Bunch), so’d we’d love to see it in a good transfer. It must have been a welcome role for Anne Bancroft — her other two Fox films for 1954 were Gorilla at Large and Demetrius and the Gladiators.

The handsome production has one fault — its Southern California locations look nothing like the green-on-green lushness of Vermont, which in 1864 must have been 90% rich woodlands. A parting thought: Sam Peckinpah surely had The Raid on his mind when he added a Confederate escape from a POW stockade to his Major Dundee. The action is the same — seven men break out, clubbing a guard on the way . . . only Peckinpah chose to refer to the event only in dialogue.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Raid
Not on acceptable Home Video
Reviewed: October 6, 2022
(6812raid)

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