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Tavington, believing Martin to be a rebel sympathiser, burns down his home and murders another son, Thomas. His son Gabriel, however, joins the Continental Army, but is wrongly accused of being a spy and threatened with execution. It is much less easy to justify the spilling of blood in defence of that principle, and Martin, scarred by his experiences in the French and Indian Wars, is originally shown as a pacifist, unwilling to fight or to support the Declaration of Independence which he believes will lead to war. It is easy to make out an intellectual case for the principle of 'no taxation without representation', which had been part of British constitutional thought since at least the Civil War in the 1640s. The film probably concentrated so heavily on British brutality because it is difficult to interest a modern audience, even an American audience, in the actual reasons why the war was fought. My other reservation about the film's political stance is similar to Ford's. In this, if in nothing else, he and Marion had something in common). In later life Tarleton became MP for Liverpool, and a vehement defender of slavery. Needless to say, there is no mention of this attitude in the film. (Incidentally, a reason why so many Southerners supported the revolutionaries was that slavery had been declared illegal in Britain itself in 1771 and they feared that the British Parliament would eventually legislate to ban it in the colonies. This sort of dishonest, idealised portrayal of slavery was at one time common in films like 'Gone with the Wind', but I thought that it had died out with the growth of the Civil Rights movement. The black workers on Martin's land are all free men, and black and white live together in harmony, with black soldiers willingly fighting alongside whites in the Continental Army. The slavery issue could have been avoided by moving the action to, say, New England, but instead the film gives us a wholly unrealistic picture of race relations in the period. His exploits, therefore, are credited to a fictitious 'Benjamin Martin'.

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Unfortunately Marion, although undoubtedly courageous and a skilled guerrilla leader, was also a slave-owner (as any landowner of substance in 1770s South Carolina would have been) and was therefore deemed unworthy to be the hero of a modern blockbuster (even though a TV series about him was made in the fifties). It was originally intended to make the film about Francis Marion, a real-life figure.

I did, however, have some reservations about the way these events were portrayed. In reality, Cornwallis wanted to have Tarleton court-martialled Tarleton was only saved by his influential connections. In the film the British commander Lord Cornwallis is shown as outwardly gentlemanly and honourable, but prepared secretly to countenance Tavington's methods. Some of the deeds attributed to Tavington may be fictitious, such as the church-burning scene, but in real life Tarleton had a well-deserved reputation for brutality, and was not only loathed by the American colonists but also distrusted by his own side. (The rebels could be as ruthless as the British, but none of their atrocities are shown in this film). Nevertheless, in every war ever fought there have been crimes on both sides, and the War of Independence was no exception. The total death toll in the American War of Independence was remarkably low, not only by modern standards but even by the standards of other wars of this era, such as the Napoleonic War. Unlike some of my fellow-countrymen, I was not too worried about this aspect of the film. One commentator went so far as to say that it was the sort of film that the Nazis might have made about the American Revolution had they won World War II.

One newspaper accused it of blackening the character of the British officer Banastre Tarleton who served as the inspiration for the villainous Colonel Tavington. Because of its anti-British stance, the film was badly received in Britain. The producers originally wanted Harrison Ford who turned the part down, reportedly because he felt that the script turned the American Revolution into the story of one man's quest for revenge. Indeed, he was not even first choice to play the lead. Although 'Braveheart', which he produced and directed, was very much Gibson's own pet project, he was neither the producer, director or scriptwriter of 'The Patriot'. This is perhaps unfair to Gibson, who has gone on record as supporting the ties between Australia and the British monarchy (hardly the stance of a Brit-hating bigot). 'The Patriot', the story of an American farmer who fights in the War of Independence, is sometimes used, together with 'Braveheart', as evidence of a supposed anti-British prejudice on the part of Mel Gibson.

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