My last two choices are obvious ones, both very well-known, popular feature films: the 1992 version of The Last of the Mohicans, directed by Michael Mann, and Mel Gibson’s fine 2000 film The Patriot, a highly fictionalized telling of Southern patriot partisans like Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter. Both are expansive, epic films that echo the titanic continent-wide scope of the American struggle for freedom, a war for the New World. There is nothing narrow or pinched in them.

That is only eight recommended feature films (maybe ten if you throw in a couple of television movies), a very modest haul indeed for over a century of American movie-making. I wish there were more.

It is easy to decry the anti-American nature of Hollywood, yet patriotic movies have always been part of its output—especially war and Western films—even if the American Founding itself has been largely neglected. So it isn’t that Hollywood is completely incapable of making such films. Perhaps part of the problem is that the stirring events of the American Revolution were too well known for American filmgoers. Now it seems that they are too little known.