‘Andersonville’ One Of Tnt’s Better Made-For-Cable Efforts

Given the amount of money that Ted Turner has spent on TNT’s made-for-cable movies these past few years “Gettysburg,” “Kissinger and Nixon,” “The Heidi Chronicles,” “Joseph,” “Geronimo,” “Amelia Earhart: The Final Flight” you would think that at least one really great film would have emerged.

It hasn’t … even after “Andersonville,” a big-budget, profoundly ambitious miniseries that will air at 7 p.m. Sunday and Monday.

At times, “Andersonville” comes close. Turner hired legendary feature film director John Frankenheimer (“The Manchurian Candidate,” “Grand Prix,” “Birdman of Alcatraz”) and writer David Rintels (“Day One”) to tell the grim tale of the closest prison that America has had to Auschwitz.

Andersonville was a Civil War camp, built in 1863 in Georgia to hold Union prisoners. Near the end of the war, it held more than 30,000 men, nearly four times its designed capacity. Almost 13,000 died there.

Essentially, Andersonville was a field encircled by a tall wooden fence, with armed guards at the top. There was a 20-foot no-man’s-land at the base of the fence: Enter it, and be shot. Escape, and be hunted by dogs.

If escapees weren’t killed by the guards, they were brought back and chained to a huge iron ball.

A fetid stream ran through the prison camp, downstream from the Confederate camp, meaning the water was polluted before it even reached the prisoners. They ate whatever little they were given and drank whatever rainwater they could collect. Some prisoners managed to build makeshift tents and shelters. The rest sat out in the open.

A gang of non-military scoundrels, armed with knives and clubs, roamed the camp beating and even killing weak soldiers and stealing what little they had. The gang seemed to have the tacit endorsement of the guards, who traded food and liquor with the gang leaders.

We enter Andersonville less than 15 minutes into “Andersonville,” with a newly captured group of Union soldiers from Massachusetts. They are greeted by a colleague they thought had been dead for two years. He warns them of the gang, of the polluted water, and tells them of a popular pastime: watching “grayback” races, held with competing lice.

The 10-acre set, less than half the size of the real Andersonville, was filled with 2,200 extras and 57 featured actors, including:

Frederick Forrest as Sgt. James McSpadden, who continues to lead despite a severe arm wound.

William Sanderson (Larry on “Newhart”) as Munn, a blank-faced, murderous gangster.

Stage actor Jarrod Emick as Josiah Day, a young Union soldier whose early optimism that this will all be over soon quickly fades.

Rintels, who based his script for “Andersonville” on historical data and diaries of actual prisoners, but not on the 1956 Pulitzer-winning novel by the same name, keeps it all relatively simple. That is fortunate because there are so many characters to service.

There are two basic story lines: The Massachusetts prisoners help a band of former coal miners from Pennsylvania dig an escape tunnel. As you know they will early on, the prisoners and the gang eventually fight it out in a battle that would be immediately blocked by any V-chip.

“Andersonville” succeeds more because of what it says than how it says it. Occasionally slow-moving and always depressing (how could it not be?), it is one of TNT’s better efforts.

It is not quite, however, the masterpiece that Ted Turner is striving for. But Turner is getting closer.