First Run Features was the only company willing to take a chance on it and, in fact, it did terrifically well. According to their statistics, until Strangers in Good Company came along it was their top-grossing film. It's supposed to be the tenth-highest grossing feature documentary of all time. Isn't that incredible? I could never have imagined it being that kind of a film. Scott MacDonald wrote in his introduction to a summer 1988 Film Quarterly interview with McElwee: We get to know McElwee's (or McElwee's filmic persona's) hopes, concerns, nightmares; and we are behind the camera with McElwee as he uses the film-making process to forge new relationships and to revise previously important relationships. As is true in many literary first-person narratives, McElwee's approach in Sherman's March is simultaneously very revealing and somewhat mysterious: the candidness of the scenes is frequently startling, but the more the film — and McElwee-as-narrator — reveals, the more we realize that there are many aspects of the relationships he is recording that we are not privy to. We cannot help but wonder about the narrator as we experience things with him. Paul Attanasio wrote that "richness of Sherman's March comes from the way McElwee, in his roundabout way, completes the portrait of Sherman he originally set out to achieve" and that its "chief problem is that, at 2 hours, it's about an hour too long. It's as if the very weakness, the retiring politeness, that has made McElwee such an interesting comic character has also made him a crummy editor of his own film — like the women who mostly reject him, you don't really want to spend your life with him. United by theme rather than story, Sherman's March doesn't progress, it only deepens. And at epic length, the film's poor technical quality wears you out." Accolades Sherman's March was awarded the Grand Jury prize in the field of documentary at the 1987 Sundance Film Festival. In 2000, the Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry, calling it a "hilarious, one-of-a-kind romantic exploration of the South." Legacy A 1998 review in The Austin Chronicle proclaims McElwee "a modern master of cinema vérité — rough, real-life documentary filmmaking that seeks to expose a subject's soul through its very lack of polish. In McElwee's case, that subject is almost always