dvd versions/devilish title origin
Is there a dvd version with deleted scenes and extras not commonly released? I visited with a cast member who was in the stunt riders before I saw this film. He and others had received dvd copies, perhaps distributed only to the cast, and talked about stunt outtakes and extras which I have not seen. He reported that the battle scenes and shots of massed riders in the film lacked some of the really good sequences.
There has been some discussion of the title origin. Cast members were given copies of "The Devil Knows How to Ride" for period background. For the record transposing that title into "Ride With the Devil" may bother some. However, the Quantrill title above is so close to a famous line that I had to really think to figure out its origin. In Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" near the end, a boy says of the mariner, "I see the devil knows how to row."
Calling Quantrill a devil is easy enough to accept. But Kansas had its own devil named Jim Lane, who narrowly escaped Quantrill in the Lawrence raid.And the whole border warfare period was, as has been noted, an especially hellish theatre of the war. Indian Territory, Kansas, and Missouri had a quality of devastation and depravity all their own, even as early as John Brown hacking pro-slavers to death.
Finally, remember the other devil, "that devil Forrest" who caused Sherman and the Union so much trouble until numerically superior Union cavalry units armed with Spencer repeaters took him out of action in April of 1865. I will devil this topic no more.