Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13097 in DVD
• Released on: 2000-05-15
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 135 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Great period pictures make you feel as if you've stepped into another era, heard its language, breathed its spirit, and come away with a fresh perspective on that time as well as your own. Ride with the Devil is one of those special films--why wasn't it more widely embraced by reviewers and filmgoers? Did it rely too much on our patience for slow accumulation of unforced rhythms and meanings (as opposed to The Patriot, which "moved" audiences with cattle-prod simplicity and manipulation)? Ride with the Devil--smart, handsome, tenderly awed by how individual lives get ambushed by history--is ripe for rediscovery.

The Civil War of battlefields and plantation houses is nowhere to be seen here. Instead we see the war as an improvised and largely blundering but very bloody feud among neighbours in the border state of Missouri. In this bucolic war zone--more than a little reminiscent of the Balkans in the late 1990s--the Taiwanese-born director Ang Lee (The Ice Storm) traces the destinies of several young Southern bushwhackers (guerrilla fighters) as they experience violence, the seasons, and different kinds of love. Skeet Ulrich draws the aristocratic glamour role (and top billing), but he's overshadowed by Tobey Maguire as a first-generation American, the magnificent Jeffrey Wright (a shameful oversight at Oscar time) as a freed slave fighting beside his former master, and singer Jewel in a very natural acting debut as the young widow who graces all their lives. The title The Birth of a Nation was already taken, but by the end of this movie you feel it would have applied here. --Richard T. Jameson, Amazon.com

DVD Description
DVD Special Features:

Trailer Featurette
Behind the Scenes
Ratio 16:9 Anamorphic
Dolby Digital 5.1

Synopsis
Director Ang Lee follows up the critically acclaimed THE ICE STORM with this look at the bloody, intense conflict between the pro-Confederate Bushwackers and the pro-Union Jayhawkers in Missouri during the Civil War. Pitting neighbor against neighbor, the war in the frontier state tested personal loyalties and often created strange alliances. The film, based on Daniel Woodrell's book WOE TO LIVE ON, follows the conflict through the eyes of two outsiders: a German immigrant's son (Tobey Maguire) and a free black man (Jeffrey Wright), both of whom fight for the Bushwhackers even though they are looked down upon by their fellow guerrillas. The acting is strong all around, the setting realistically grim and absorbing, and Frederick Elmes's photography is, as always, top-notch. Pop singer Jewel appears onscreen for the first time, playing a plucky Southern woman. A nuanced examination of the bonds of obligation, RIDE WITH THE DEVIL anticipates Lee's high-flying CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, both in theme and in pulse-pounding action. The film contains many standout action sequences, including a historically accurate re-creation of William Quantrill's infamous raid on Lawrence, Kansas.

Customer Reviews

A thought provoking film
If you want a war film of the black hawk down genre, then give this a miss. It's message will probably pass you by just as it surely did with the negative reviewer below. Highlighting the amputation scene as "the best bit" says it all. Its a protrayal of civil war played out at it lowest level, with neighbour fighting against neighbour and how that ultimatly affects peoples perceptions, loyalties and relationships. Excellent acting and a truly plausible scenario sensitivley portrayed.

The best Civil War movie ever?
Possibly. But even if some people disagree, there is no denying that it is a fabulous movie. It moves along with a grace and ease that many films of this genre cannot manage. While it is Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ullrich who share the top billing, starring as two teenage boys who become Bushwhackers (Guerilla soldiers who fight for the southern cause along the Kansas and Missouri border during the American Civil War) after Ullrich's father is killed and his house burnt down by Northern Jayhawkers, this is really Maguire and Jeffery Wright's film. Maguire's character is of German descent, a thing out of the ordinary amongst the White Anglo-saxon Protestant southerners, and as such is viewed with suspicion (and in one case downright hostility) by many of the men he is fighting alongside, something that his German Father warned him would happen. He also harbours his own prejudices however, especially against a freed Negro (Wright) who is fighting with them, but as the film moves on Maguire begins to look at events through a different perspective. The acting by all the leads is exceptional, but it is Maguire and Wright who must take most of the plaudits. They are both outsiders, thrown together fighting for a cause, that by all natural laws they should be fighting against. Their changing relationship, from suspicion on Maguire's part to acceptance and then finally to deep friendship is the core of the movie. Ullrich, Jewel (who plays a young widowed southern women romanced first by Ullrich and then Maguire) Jonathon Rhys-Meyers (as a psychotic Jayhawker) and Jim Caviezel (as a southern commander) all turn in first rate performances, but it is Maguire and Wright who really drive the movie along. It is an intelligent, thought provoking, moving, amusing, uplifting and sad movie. Basically the kind of movie that mainstream Hollywood tends to shy away from, and unfortunately, the kind of movie that mainstream audiences tend to pass over. This is a great pity, because Ride with the Devil deserved to take a bucketload of Oscars and a barrowload of Dollars at the box office, which it did neither of.

Work of genius
Outsanding movie that will linger on in the mind long after the final scenes. Vivid brutal portrayal of Civil war and how it steels men souls and compels them to do terrible things in the name of cause. Maguire is excellent, he portrays a farmers son who along with some friends conduct a clandestine war on behalf of the Confederacy. In the course of the movie he loses close friends, becomes disillusioned with war and violence and in the process becomes a man. Some of the imagery is breath taking, the acting excellent, surley one of the greatest Civil war movies ever made and a beautiful love story to boot. No idle sentimenet just a cracking movie that continues to delight on more viewings. Movies dont get much better than this.