The American Civil War of 1861 to 1865 has attracted the attention of the filmmaker from the Silent Era to the present. Since D.W. Griffith released his infamous The Birth of a Nation in 1915, some 200 feature films have been set in the context of the war between the North and the South, and there are few of Hollywood’s leading male actors from Clark Gable through John Wayne, James Stewart and Clint Eastwood to Leonardo DiCaprio who have not starred in at least one. In the main, the films have been based on successful historical novels or non-academic histories. Informative and thought-provoking documentary-dramas have been far and few between. There has a been a tendency too to make films about the South, and films which are not just set in the South, where most of the fighting occurred, but films where the Confederate army and Southern society are their core. This may simply reflect that there is great potential drama in stories about a defeated bankrupt enemy whose cities have been put to waste, especially one of shared blood who fought valiantly to the end against overwhelming odds. Tales about the victors whose failure to record an easy victory reflects hubris and incompetence are not so appealing. But the tendency has helped to cement a Hollywood legend of the South as a noble lost cause. While only Griffith has ever suggested that the wrong side won, many Hollywood films leave the impression that something worthy was lost all the same when the South went down in flames, especially when Union soldiers are often depicted as brutes.