Summary
Virginia’s verdant sprawl becomes a cracked canvas upon which fratricidal fury is daubed in sepia: a plantation owner, Herbert Carey, dispenses with the Dudley siblings, sparking vendetta that will weave through cannon-smoke like poison ivy. Secession cleaves the household as cleanly as an axe; Carey gallops southward, morphing into a wraith of skirmish and subterfuge, while the spurned Dudleys don Yankee blue, thirsty for reprisal. Richmond’s siege tightens; Union Colonel Morrison—equal parts cavalier and philosopher—marches to snare the elusive scout. In the torch-glow of a looted manor, overseer Jim torches the ancestral hearth, only to be felled by Morrison’s avenging pistol, a death-mask of disbelief frozen beneath the cinders. Mother Carey perishes among embers and grief; her burial becomes a clandestine hymn beneath cypress shadows. A pass scribbled by Lee promises Virgie safe passage, yet double-dealing Dudley kin denounce the truce; both Carey and Morrison are shackled before a drumhead court, condemned to face the sunrise at the business end of rifles. The titular child—pig-tailed, porcelain, yet steely as Minié shot—threads picket lines and presidential tents, coaxing Grant’s reluctant clemency. Bullets are stayed; flags, once sworn enemies, entwine like hesitant lovers in the dusk of Appomattox.
Synopsis
Herbert Carey discharges the Dudley brothers, Joe and Jim, from their positions as overseers on his plantation and thereby incurs their enmity. War is declared and Carey, after bidding his wife and daughter Virgie farewell, joins the Southern forces, the Dudleys joining the Northern. The spring of '61 finds Carey the most dangerous and daring of Confederate scouts. The Dudleys are under the command of Colonel Morrison, a dashing, chivalrous young Northern officer. Grant closes in on Richmond and orders Morrison to capture Carey. Morrison takes a small detachment of troops, including Jim Dudley, and going to the Carey homestead, searches it. Dudley, seeing a chance for revenge, sets fire to the house, but in endeavoring to escape is shot and killed by Morrison, who has discovered his treachery. Penniless and with the house in ruins, Mrs. Carey and Virgie finally seek shelter in their former overseers' deserted cabin. Mrs. Carey sinks down and finally dies. Carey, hearing of this, gets to the cottage and assists Uncle Billy to bury her. Carey, wishing to remove Virgie to Richmond, receives a pass from Lee permitting Virgie and an escort to go through the Confederate lines. As he goes to the cottage to deliver the pass to Uncle Billy he is discovered and captured in it by Morrison. Carey tells him why he had come and Morrison's heart, being touched, he also gives Carey a pass through the Northern lines, telling him to take Virgie into Richmond himself. Joe Dudley discovers this and informs the Northern officer that Morrison has given a pass to Carey, the notorious scout, to pass through the Northern lines. Carey and Morrison are captured, court-martialed and sentenced to be shot. Little Virgie, hearing of this, goes to Grant and pleads with him to save her "Daddy." Carey is called before Grant and tells his story. Grant's heart is touched and he releases Carey telling him that though he cannot honor Morrison's pass, he can honor that of General Lee. Morrison is released also, and Carey and The Littlest Rebel. Virgie, are once more reunited. After the war finds Morrison, his wife and child, meeting Carey and Virgie over his wife's grave; the North and South join hands. The Confederate flag is seen meeting the Stars and Stripes; they flutter for a moment, then slowly intertwine and the picture fades away.
Review Excerpt
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The camera’s iris glides across sun-bleaked tobacco rows toward a portico where whitewashed columns preen like powdered dowagers—then the Civil War barges in, ripping genteel seams with bayonet indifference. Thus The Littlest Rebel announces itself: a 1935 Fox confection draped in the bunting of Lost Cause mythology, yet pulsing with the manic energy of a studio system that could sell segregation with a wink and a song.
Visual Palette & Stylised South
Director David Butler and cinematograp..."
