The tagline of Ride with the Devil summarizes much about the film: “In a no-man’s land between North and South, you didn’t fight for the Blue or the Gray . . . you fought for your friends and your family.” Directed by Ang Lee, Ride with the Devil is based on the novel Woe to Live On by Daniel Woodrell, whose interest in the American Civil War was stimulated by the internecine wars involving Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The venue is the territory of southwestern Missouri adjacent to Kansas, where the movie was filmed. Ride with the Devil covers the same period as the film The Jayhawkers (1959), in which Northern loyalists mercilessly attacked those loyal to the South in Kansas. Ride with the Devil begins in 1861 with a wedding, the last social occasion where pro-Southerners and pro-Northerners commingle peacefully. Missouri, a slave state, did not secede, so partisans of the North and South engage in guerrilla war campaigns against one another, burning barns, houses, and entire towns as well as executing those loyal to the opposite side, and the Union army intervenes to stop the rebels. The film focuses on four persons caught up in the war who joined the Missouri Irregulars to show support to the cause of the South. The film’s narrator, Jake Roedel (played by Tobey Maguire), is the son of a German immigrant who might have sided with the Federalists until he saw Jayhawkers burn the house and kill the father of his friend Jack Bull Chiles (played by Skeet Ulrich), a Southern aristocrat who simply wanted to preserve his way of life. Daniel Holt (played by Jeffrey Wright) is a slave who fights alongside, as did many Blacks in the Civil War, because his Southern master George Clyde (played by Simon Baker-Denny) gave him his freedom. The four try to avoid the excesses of the war, but we see plenty of sadistic killers in the reenacted bushwhacking, especially the storming of Lawrence, Kansas, a Union stronghold, which left 180 civilians dead. By peering into the actions of and interactions among the Irregulars, we discover the barbarity and futility of their efforts, as indeed do all four characters, two of which die (Chiles and Clyde) and two survive (Roedel and Holt) but are seriously wounded. Much of the slow-moving film deals with the romance between Chiles and Sue Lee Shelley (played by Jewel Kilcher); Sue Lee becomes pregnant, but Chiles dies before seeing the baby, and Roedel reluctantly but honorably decides to marry Sue Lee to preserve her honor. In the end, unable and disinterested in continuing the battle, Holt heads for Texas to find his mother, and Roedel hitches up a covered wagon bound for California with his bride and her child. MH