The 1991 Civil War Naval Drama Ironclads is Perfectly Fine, All Things Considered!
Get a load of that hat! Nice hat, loser!
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
My older sister used to live in Fairfax County, Virginia. Today Fairfax County is perhaps best known for being the sight of the Depp-Heard defamation trial. But back when my sister lived there, it was famous for being the home many Civil War memorials.
My dad is a huge Civil War buff so every Thanksgiving we used to take the train from Chicago to Virginia, a twenty-two hour ordeal, so that we could spend the holidays together.
This involved many visits to Civil War memorials. My father instilled in me and my sisters a deep love of history. My younger sister writes books about Jewish and Southern history, my older sister is a teacher and I myself rank among the world’s preeminent “Weird Al” Yankovic and Insane Clown Posse historians.
But I will concede hear that I have always found the Civil War to be incredibly boring. I know that it is important and dramatic and determined the fate of an increasingly crappy nation but I just don’t find it terribly interesting.
The past was boring as shit. Nobody twerked, including She-Hulk. TikTok didn’t exist. The YouTubers who make our lives just barely livable weren’t even born yet. Social media didn’t exist so people had to talk to one another. I can’t even imagine how agonizing that must have been.
Finally my now-wife asked why we always went to Civil War memorials when even my dad seemed understandably bored by them.
So when I saw that one of the next steps in my exhaustive journey through Virginia Madsen’s life and career was a television movie about battles between iron-plated ships during the Civil War entitled Ironclads I was the opposite of excited.
Madsen has done some truly impressive work in the field of television movies, like the terrific baseball comedy Long Gone and Gotham, a stylish Neo-Noir about lust, grief and ghost-fucking.
But television movies nevertheless invite low expectations, even when they’re not about subject matter you find inherently uninteresting, like nineteenth century naval battles.
If television movies invite low expectations, they reward them as well. If I may once again toss some faint praise Ironclads’ way, it’s not that bad! It’s reasonably diverting! It’s the kind of thing my dad would really enjoy!
Like so many of the movies I’ve covered for this project the reason Ironclads cleared the very low bar I had for it is because it stars Virginia Madsen and she’s talented and magnetic enough to single-handedly elevate many of her movies through her presence alone.
Madsen is so convincing as a Southerner that I assumed that she was born in North Carolina or Alabama. Nope. She’s a Midwesterner just like me, albeit one with an awful lot of Southern belle in her soul.
In Ironclads, the future Academy Award nominee very convincingly plays Betty Stuart, a courageous Southerner at the beginning of the Civil War. The gorgeous lady of distinction looks, talks and acts the part of the perfect Southern belle, all refinement, manners and stunning beauty. But inside she hungers for a more equitable world without slavery or institutionalized racism.
So she works as a spy to aid the Union cause against slavery. Needless to say, this causes complications in her relationship with her boyfriend, a Confederate officer.
In her role as a secret agent, Betty assists an earnest Union soldier who was court-martialed after refusing a direct order he thought would lead to the deaths of innocent people. This makes him a hero South of the Mason-Dixon Line but a criminal in the North.
The Union uses this condemned man as a double agent. They send him south with Betty to learn more about a new kind of steam-powered battleship fortified with iron plates that’s much more effective than conventional wooden ships.
These ironclad ships have the potential to be game-changers so the Union is understandably eager to build their own to compete with Confederate naval power. The battle between ships of the Union and the Confederacy is so important, in fact, that Abraham Lincoln himself is personally involved in strategizing how to defeat the South and their sexy new iron-clad warships.
The ships of Ironclads are incredible technological marvels, formidable beasts of iron and steel. They’re steam punk marvels that combine the cozily familiar technology of the past with the exhilarating machines of the future.
Much of Ironclads’ third act is devoted to a battle between the Union and the Confederacy where these new tools for war square off against each other in an all-out war for the soul of a fractured nation.
Betty is jailed for being a spy but this is the South, and appearances are important, so her prison is nicer than most folks’ summer homes.
It would be easy for Madsen to go big and broad and play her lilac scented, iron-willed heroine as a larger than life caricature of Southern womanhood. Madsen instead makes her heroine gutsy and real, a woman of strength and substance who is willing to die or spend the rest of her life in prison for the sake of what she believes in.
I just want to add that I also think slavery is wrong. Does that make me a hero? Probably, but not as much of a hero as someone who puts their lives on the line for Civil Rights.
Ironclads was directed by Delbert Mann, who has something directors of television movies generally do not in an Academy Award for Best Direction. Mann won the big prize for his direction of Marty, the thrillingly cinematic story of a sad man who is lonely.
Mann did a perfectly workmanlike job with Ironclads. It’s not a movie anyone has to run out and see, unless they’re really into Civil War naval history but if you inexplicably find yourself in a position where you have to watch and write about all of Virginia Madsen’s movies in chronological order you might find yourself being pleasantly surprised by it. I know I was.
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