The Raid | |
---|---|
Directed by | Hugo Fregonese |
Produced by | Robert L. Jacks |
Written by | Francis Cockrell (Story) |
Screenplay by | Sydney Boehm |
Based on |
Affair at St. Albans 1948 novel by Herbert Ravenel Sass |
Starring |
Van Heflin Anne Bancroft Richard Boone Lee Marvin |
Music by | Roy Webb |
Cinematography | Lucien Ballard |
Edited by | Robert Golden |
Production
company |
Panoramic Productions
|
Distributed by | Twentieth Century-Fox |
Release date
|
|
Running time
|
83 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $650,000 |
The Raid is a 1954 Technicolor American film set during the American Civil War. It stars Van Heflin, Anne Bancroft, Richard Boone and Lee Marvin. It is loosely based on a true incident, the St. Albans Raid, as well as the book by Herbert Ravenal Sass. However the film made a significant change, moving the action from 1864 to 1865, turning the raid into an act of revenge for William Tecumseh Sherman's burning of Atlanta.
In 1864 a group of Confederate prisoners held in a Union prison stockade at Plattsburg, New York, not many miles from the Canada–US border, escape. They head for Canada and plan a raid across the border into St. Albans, Vermont, to rob its banks to replensih the Confederate treasury and burn buildings as revenge for Sherman's March to the Sea and to tie up Union forces.
The leader of the raid heads into St. Albans as a spy, and develops ambiguous feelings about what he is doing when he becomes friends with a young widow and her son.