Civil War Films Of The Silent Era (1915) Rating: Starring: Gertrude Claire, Margaret Gibson, Frank Keenan, Charles Ray Director: Reginald Barker Category: Classic, Drama Studio: Image Ent. Subtitles: [None] Length: 134 mins     Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the American Civil War was a deluge of literature, drama, re-enactment, ceremony -- and movies. 1911-1915, as close to Lincoln's time as the Korean conflict is to the present, also marked the passage of movies from nickelodeon theaters, showing enormous quantities of one- and two-reel films, to movie palaces showing carefully-prepared feature films long enough for a full evening's entertainment, their standard set by a Civil War film, D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. The three films on this DVD include a feature, "The Coward" (1915, 77 min.), and two nickelodeon films, "Drummer of the Eighth" (1913, 24 min.) and "Grand-Dad" (1913, 29 min.), made by pioneering producer Thomas H. Ince, who, at least in Europe, was more famous than and regarded as superior to Griffith.Less important than the conventionalized plots of these films is their pictorial beauty, their sense of romance, and the emotional grandeur of unsuspecting characters pitted against fate.