American history, movie-style

For some reason, one of our four channels shows an old movie every afternoon. Don't ask me why, or how they choose their selections. I've never heard of most of them, and only some are in color.

Today's feature was The Raid, a 1954 flick about a group of Confederate soldiers who escape to Canada and then take their revenge by destroying a little town in Vermont. (See here for details.) I learned a few things about history by watching this stunning war picture:

1) Vermont looks suspiciously like the Old West.
2) It's warm enough to go around in little more than shirtsleeves in Vermont in October. Perhaps this was due to nineteenth-century global warming.
3) In the 1860s, it was perfectly acceptable for visitors to carry pistols in their trousers into church. Shooting sprees were par for the course, and no one would suspect anything.
4) In the 1860s, Southern American and Canadian accents were interchangeable. No one would suspect a Confederate officer who claimed to be from Montreal. Then again, they all sounded like Midwesterners, so who really knows?
5) When one owns a bording house, one's offspring should be free to break into guests' rooms via the windows, unless one happens to be harboring Confederate spies. Then the problems start.
6) If one of the aforementioned Confederate spies were to be the ringleader of a massive raid, perhaps it would have been wiser to leave the uniform off. The gray's kind of a giveaway.