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xvi Introduction Th ese fi lm narratives of guerilla war, central to the genre of war fi lms from the beginnings of the form, are diverse and often complex texts, con- veying many diff erent themes and often making widely varying commen- tary on constructions of gender, race, social class, nationality, and even the nature of war itself. Th ere are, however, a somewhat consistent set of con- ventions that recur in a great number of the works that make up this canon of fi lms. Although not every story contains every element, many feature several, and some nearly perfectly conform to formula. First, “American guerilla” narratives often focus on a small group of ordinary Americans, everyday citizens who are drawn into a confl ict by circumstances beyond their control. While some characters have military experience or training, most protagonists in American guerilla fi lms are amateurs who fi ght because they have no other choice. Gil Martin in John Ford’s Drums along the Mohawk (1939) 12 exemplifi es this type of character, as a simple farmer in upstate New York who is forced to defend his home against Tories and their Indian allies during the American Revolution. Characters like Ben Cameron, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan in Th e Birth of a Nation —in that fi lm a guerilla resistance movement against Black liberation—and Belle in Belle Starr celebrate a darker side of the American guerilla narrative both of these civilians are radicalized by Reconstruction into launching a guerilla war against the forces of racial equality in the South. Likewise, Robert Jordan in Sam Wood’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is an American civilian who fi ghts with and renews the faith of Republican partisans during the Spanish Civil War. Even the civilian residents of Trollness, Norway, in Lewis Milestone’s Edge of Darkness (1944) 13 —who come off as more everyday American than Norwegian—are not part of any organized military, but resist the Nazis occupying their town with an almost suicidal dedication. Th e “back to Viet Nam” fantasies of the 1980s are premised on a former military “rogue” hero defying his government and military to fi ght—and win—the war America lost. John Rambo from the Rambo series and James Braddock from Missing in Action (1984) 14 are in part heroes because they are outside the military command structure, taking orders from no one but their conscience and their per- sonal code of honor. Given the nonmilitary or “outsider” status of most of the protagonists of American guerilla narratives, the autonomy or independence of the heroes is also a key feature. Frequently, these stories cast their heroes as isolated and without the guiding hand of a state or government to give them orders. Such narrative isolation shows the characters fi ghting out of their own internal motivation: no established authority governs their actions, preserving them as ideologically uncorrupted by the “politics” and bureaucracy that defi nes political states. Rhetorically, the characters thus are shown as fully owning their actions as resistance fi ghters their