Followup on this thread. The Spanish-American War established the U.S. for the first time as a Great Power on a global scale and almost finished off Spain as an imperial power – and it had Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders in it – and it won us the permanent possession of Puerto Rico (a necessary precondition to West Side Story) – yet I can’t remember ever seeing a movie about it. Are there any?
TNT had a miniseries (4 hours) on Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders a few years back.
Tom Berenger played Teddy Roosevelt. It wasn’t too bad. It actually showed how hard it was to find any sort of action in that war.
I do recall one of the leaders at that time, I forget which one, said, “It wasn’t much of a war, but it was the only war we had.”
There were a couple of early silent film shorts about San Juan Hill and the “Battle” for Manila Bay made before WWI. Though its not strictly about the combat, Yellow Jack (1938) covers Dr Walter Reed’s struggle against Yellow Fever in Cuba during 1898-1900.
I think that was T.R. himself. Someone later joked that, in typesetting his book about the war, the publisher had run out of the letter “I.” Someone else joked that it should be subtitled Alone in Cuba.
Hearst is supposed to have said to one of his reporters covering the war, “You give me the local color and I’ll provide the war.” Welles later cribbed that for Citizen Kane.
The way I read it, it was, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Welles changed “pictures” to “prose poems.”