Ang Lee's Film: Ride with the Devil李安的《与魔鬼共骑》

Ride with the Devil is a 1999 American Revisionist Western film directed. It is directed by Ang Lee. The storyline was conceived from a screenplay written by James Schamus, based on a book entitled Woe to Live On, by author Daniel Woodrell. The events portrayed in the novel and film take place in Missouri, amidst escalating guerrilla warfare at the onset of the American Civil War.

Jake Roedel and Jack Bull Chiles are friends in Missouri when the American Civil War breaks out. During the mayhem, Chiles's father is murdered by Kansas Union Jayhawkers. The two men join the First Missouri Irregulars, also known as the Bushwhackers; informal units loyal to Missouri in 1861. They later meet George Clyde and former slave Daniel Holt, whose freedom Clyde has previously granted. The Bushwhackers battle Jayhawkers using guerrilla warfare tactics while trying to evade capture. The men manage to hide out in a coarsely-built shelter on the property of a pro-Confederacy family, the Evanses. A young widow in the household, Sue Lee Shelley, becomes romantically involved with Chiles. When Chiles dies of gangrenous wounds received during a skirmish, Roedel escorts Shelley to a refuge dwelling where another pro-Confederate kindred, the Browns family, reside. Following the collapse and destruction of a makeshift prison holding the female relatives of guerrillas, a complementary clan of Bushwhackers led by William Quantrill plot a revenge attack against the Union and raid Lawrence, Kansas.In the midst of the offense, a quarrel arises between Roedel and fellow Bushwhacker Pitt Mackeson. Roedel, a German American, was born in Germany but raised by his immigrant father in Missouri. He suffers from periodical anti-German suspicion from other Southerners, because the German population in the state is largely sympathetic to the Union. In an episode of hostility, Mackeson purposely shoots Roedel in the leg shortly after the raid on Lawrence, while retreating from a counterattack by Union forces. The perceived prejudice makes Roedel somewhat sympathetic to the plight faced by Holt, an African American coping with racism. Meanwhile, Shelley gives birth to Chiles's daughter. Holt and Roedel, both wounded, recover at the same residence that took in Shelley occupied by the Browns folk. Under pressure from the kin who mistakenly think Roedel is the child's father, Roedel marries Shelley in an abrupt wedding. At the close of the war, Roedel gives up being a Bushwhacker and takes his new family to California, while Holt leaves for Texas to find his long lost mother.