Beard-O-Rama Bonus: Gettys-beard
One of the most infamous aspects of the movie Gettysburg were the beards. They’ve become something almost all of us love to hate.
In the fall of 2023, as part of the 30th anniversary commemoration of the movie, the American Battlefield Trust’s Garry Adelman revisited the famous facial hair in a short video he titled “Gettys-Beard.”
The only beard I truly had issue with was Longstreet’s beard. Was the most noticeable problem, as it kept changing length and direction, sometimes in the same scene. Stuart’s beard was bad, but in shadows, it was less noticeable.
The solution is simple: Civil War movie beards need not look exactly like those of the men who wore them in real life. Who knows what they really looked like? A photo of a General with which we are all familiar may have been taken a year or two before or after the battle being depicted – so we do not know what his beard looked like during that battle. In one egregious error that is always repeated, Robert Lee is depicted from the beginning of the war as having snow white hair and beard. Lee was still so young when the war began that his hair and goatee – he did not yet have a full beard – were more black than white. If only the screenwriters had done a modicum of research, they’d’ve discovered this. When they get around to producing the film of my book, I will simply tell the actors to let their beards grow for a month or two before production begins. That way, they’ll look natural – and they’ll be fine.
Some were definitely worse than others- had forgotten until I rewatched this that Brian Mallon ( Hancock) resorted to growing his own! Kudos to him for managing to do so to escape the Gettys-beard stigma!