More than three generations after Hollywood’s blockbuster Gone With the Wind appeared in 1939—and received a scholarly pasting for its mellow and painless picture of slavery, we might expect something more enlightening from the new blockbuster Cold Mountain that also wades into the Civil War. But the writers, directors and consultants who shaped Cold Mountain—like those of Gone With the Wind—still have no idea African Americans played a crucial role in this history.

Cold Mountain leads its audience not forward but back to 1939 and Gone With the Wind's shameless apology for the Confederacy that became a movie classic. There is no mention of the more than two hundred thousand people of color who were welcomed into the Union army and navy after 1863, fought in 449 military engagements, 39 major battles, and earned 22 Medals of Honor. Unmentioned are the Black troops who freed Charleston, Petersburg, Wilmington and Richmond, the Confederate capitol, as they liberated their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and loved ones. President Lincoln said that without his Black troops he would have to abandon the war "in three weeks" but no Black troops appear in this film.

There is a brief glimpse of a large family fleeing slavery—representing the hundreds of thousands who used the turmoil of war to break their chains, withdraw crucial labor power from the Confederacy when it was needed to bring in crops, and instead provided valuable eyes, ears, man and woman power to the Union armies penetrating the South. There are no instances shown of Black people providing aid and comfort to Union soldiers behind Confederate lines when many later testified "to find a black face was to find a true heart."

Gone With the Wind had a redeeming feature. It introduced actress Hattie McDaniel as a dignified, outspoken slave—and her Oscar desegregated the Academy Awards. In Cold Mountain no person of color can be nominated for an Oscar. Few Black actors appear and none utter a line! Even the movie’s brutal recreation of the "Battle of the Crater" in Petersburg, Virginia, where hundreds of Black Union soldiers lost their lives, appears in Cold Mountain as a clash between two white armies.

Slavery hardly appears. The heroine, Ada, expresses disdain for it, and later we are told she freed her slaves. This presumably gains her angelhood. Ada leaves her father’s sumptuous party to bring drinks to the slave quarter. But she never reaches her goal since her real aim is to meet Inman, her hearthrob, who’s standing on the porch. Are we to believe that masters interrupted their fine parties to bring refreshments to the men, women and children they enslaved? Perhaps they said, "Oh, I do hope our slaves like our delicacies, and know from our generosity how much we love them."

Gone With the Wind focused on the discomfort the war caused wealthy southerners, and Cold Mountain reveals the pain and travail it inflicts on poor white mountain folks. It describes a relationship between two women, one rich, conversant in foreign languages and unused to hard labor, and the other poor and hard-working, as they restore a family farm and bond. And there is the tender love story of Inman and Ada, largely lacking sparks.

Except in these instances poor whites fare almost as badly as people of color in Cold Mountain. They are gullible, eager recruits for the Confederate army, who finally learn they have been hoodwinked. The Home Guard is portrayed as ordinary whites who use their law-and-order mantle to rob and inflict pain on white men and women. Actually, their main function was as slave-catching patrols [called "pattyrollers" by enslaved people] who seek to halt the massive plantation defections that weakened the Confederacy and speeded its collapse.

But in Cold Mountain Home Guard/"pattyrollers" are shown paying meager rewards to desperate whites who hand over deserters and runaways. One scene does shows white deserters chained to slave runaways—a reminder that in the Hollywood of Gone With the Wind—films about prison life were the only "integrated" movies.

The Union army also stands of moral quicksand. Bluecoated soldiers appear as starving deserters when they put a sick baby on the ground so they can rape its mother. The south’s elite do not appear — slave owners, overseers, politicians and businessmen who bilk poor whites and use a white supremacy ideology to whip them into supporting the Confederacy. There is no mention of this corrupting ideology that persuades millions to defend a system that also exploits and holds them down. It was the promise of white dominance, not any "just cause", that pulled men into the army and held the Confederacy together.

Cold Mountain is more critical of war than other US movies. It shows the destruction of militarism, random violence, and Army deserters emerge as the real heroes, perhaps for the first time in patriotic Hollywood. "I was lied to," Inman says of his army career. Perhaps this message is addressed to our own era when a government uses lies and patriotism to launch pre-emptive wars, persuade civilians to support an unjustfiable cause and convince soldiers to sacrifice their lives on distant shores.

The Civil War was transformed from a battle over an abstract legal principle—a state’s right to leave the Union—into a vital struggle for freedom largely through the vision anddogged efforts of African Americans. Cold Mountain sees no need to focus on or even include that important lesson.