This is the story of how George Washington saved America by a sneak attack on Christmas Day…
Anybody who watches this movie and isn’t immobilized by the suspense, shivering from fear and apprehension and thrilled by the sheer daring and bravery isn’t a red-blooded American.
If you weren’t in tears by the end you shouldn’t be allowed to vote. If you don’t hate the Hessians as much as the Chicoms you should automatically and forever be exempt from jury duty and the judging of your fellow Americans.
The Crossing is a medium budget film set in the early days of the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence is less than a year old. George Washington’s army has been defeated in every engagement. A once mighty army is now a scraggly mob of young conscripts whose enlistments expire in a couple of weeks.
It’s winter, and Washington’s tiny army is stranded in Delaware without food or shelter. The British have taken two of the three major American cities, Boston and New York, and the Continental Congress has just vacated the third, Philadelphia. The war is over. Freedom is lost, forever.
(If you don’t despise the British for imposing “taxation without representation” then you don’t pay enough taxes. If you don’t know exactly how the Colonials felt when they did the “Boston Tea Party” to protest King George’s excessive taxes then you should go back home to Mexico or Africa or China or wherever it is you came from.)
Christmas is a week away. The American troops want to go home to their families. Their only possible military objective is an encampment of 2000 crack Hessian conscripts (think Special Forces, Green Berets) down the Delaware river at Trenton. Every last soldier is mortified by the very mention of Hessians. Everybody but George Washington.
There’s one man that stands between empire and freedom; one man, a churlish Delaware River with treacherous ice flows, and 2000 Hessian mercenaries.
They crossed the Delaware, but in the course of so doing, Hollywood just couldn’t let George Washington stand brazenly in the wooden boat as they paddled through the night toward sure defeat.
Indeed, the film destroys the very idea… with some crude joking about General Knox being so fat that “if he stood up and swung his balls the boat would topple.” Clearly, they were referring to George Washington (seated right next to Knox) not standing up.
I HATE HOLLYWOOD! (General Knox later became the first Secretary of the Treasury, for whom Fort Knox is named.)
They surprise the Hessians the morning after Christmas, still drunk and groggy after Yuletide celebrations and inebriations. They capture 900 Hessians and kill any more – without a single American casualty.
It was a miracle, truly. Not that Hollywood would admit it because God is dead.
Screw Hollywood.
