Advance to the Rear (1964) on Netflix
Approved19641h 40mComedyWarWestern
Colonel Claude Brackenbury and his Confederate opposite trade daily artillery rounds and wait out the war. Captain Jared Heath's raid on the enemy gets both officers demoted and shipped west.
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- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb5.9/101,009 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Union Colonel Claude Brackenbury has worked out a comfortable routine with the Confederate commander across the lines: the two batteries fire a few shells at each other every morning at a set hour, and then everyone settles back to waiting. Captain Jared Heath disrupts it by riding out and bringing back enemy prisoners. The Confederates answer in kind, the exchange grows, and the Union ends up with a fiasco on its hands. Both officers are stripped of rank and handed the army's misfits under General Willoughby, then sent west. The Confederates wonder what the unit is really for, so they send Martha Lou Williams, who has been traveling with Easy Jenny, a madam, to find out.
Cast
Show all 20 cast
- Robert Carsonas Col. Holbert (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Advance to the Rear (1964)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The popular song "Today" (while the blossoms still cling to the vine) comes from Advance to the Rear, was written by Randy Sparks of The New Christy Minstrels, and many assume it is a centuries-old folk song rather than part of a Hollywood soundtrack.
- Advance to the Rear was based on Jack Schaefer's 1957 novel Company of Cowards, which drew on a 1956 Saturday Evening Post article by William Chamberlain recounting apocryphal Civil War stories of "Company Q," 19th-century slang for the sick list.
- The film's story may have been the inspiration for the ABC-TV sitcom F Troop, which aired from 1965 to 1967.
