Word: raid
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...startled Mississippi belle (Constance Towers) exclaims. "Them's Yankees!" Them, to be more precise, is the 1st Brigade, U.S. Cavalry. Colonel John Wayne commanding, and they are plunging along toward Newton Station in Director John Ford's $5,000,000 screen version of Grierson's Raid through the depths of Confederate territory during Grant's advance on Vicksburg. Summoning all her Southern charm, the proud beauty invites Wayne and his officers to dinner. Making the most of her downfall neckline, she leans low over the harried foe and offers him chicken: "What was yoah preference, thuh...
...would prefer, Colonel Wayne informs her, the pleasure of her company during the rest of the raid. So off they all go, plodding along at a pace that is unhistoric as well as uncinematic, to the climactic engagement-in which Colonel Wayne is decisively defeated...
...good clean fun, especially for customers who like John Wayne and don't care much about Grierson's Raid. For those who do not like Wayne there is William Holden, who comes along for the ride as a military surgeon, and prescribes penicillin, or something mighty like it, a good 80 years before it was discovered. For those who like tennis there is Althea Gibson, women's national champion, who plays a slave. For those who collect rocks -the kind that comes out of scriptwriters' heads-there are the following specimens of Civil War speech...
...children glanced out the schoolhouse window, saw the plane and screamed, "Air raid!" The pupils dropped to the floor as the plane grazed the schoolhouse roof, showered glass on the children, spewed flaming gasoline on an older school building next door, and blew up with a roar that sent burning wreckage raining through a ten-block area of flimsy wood-and-paper houses...
Aroused Indians. But as long as there were French and Indians to fight, Rogers' stock was high. His most famous raid, which took him 150 miles into enemy territory, obliterated the troublesome Indian village at St. Francis, near the St. Lawrence River. The raiders had bad luck; the French discovered their cache of food and boats for the return voyage, and cut off all possibility of retreat. "This unlucky circumstance," Rogers recorded laconically, "put us in some consternation." But the Rangers pushed on, slogged for nine straight days through a vast spruce bog. Sacking the Indian town was comparatively...