Sunrise at Campobello

Another of the movies that TCM ran during the 100th anniversary salute to Warner Bros. is one that has a fairly well-known story, if the actual movie itself may not be quite so well known. (Indeed, I was surprised by the low number of reviews on IMDb.) That is the movie version of the play Sunrise at Campbello.

Ralph Bellamy plays Franklin Roosevelt, but this is well before he became President. Instead, it starts in the summer of 1921, at the Roosevelts' summer home on Campobello Island in New Brunswick just across the border from Maine. Those who don't know US history quite so well may not recall that Franklin Roosevelt had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the Woodrow Willson administration, which included World War I. In 1920, he was nominated for the Vice-Presidency by Democratic presidential candidate James Cox, an election that saw heavy defeats for the Democrats and kicked Roosevelt into the political wilderness. His grasping wife Eleanor (played by Greer Garson) wanted him to keep campaigning for progressive causes, while his more stately mother Sara (Ann Shoemaker), who had been part of the upper-class for some time, wasn't so sure.

And then the non-political thing for which Franklin Roosevelt is best known happened. Franklin and the kids went swimming in the Bay of Fundy one day, and Roosevelt didn't get out of his wet bathing suit for some time. He developed pains in his legs, and then a fever which did not subside for some time. Doctors were called in and diagnosed polio (although some modern-day authors think it might actually have been Guillain-Barré instead). As we all know, Roosevelt would need a wheelchair for the rest of his life, while everybody around him tried to keep that a secret from the public.

That's actually the main plot of the movie; the debilitation led Sara to suggest even more strongly that Franklin should retire to a life of writing at the family estate at Hyde Park. Eleanor and, to a lesser extent, Franklin's best friend and advisor Louis Howe (Hume Cronyn) thought that there might be some chance of recovery and encouraged Franklin to stay active. Meanwhile, Eleanor especially doesn't want it known by the public just how sick Franklin really is. Eleanor, however, keeps her husband's name in the public eye by going out and campaiging for Democrats in the 1992 elections, when they made big gains, coming just short of a majority in the House of Representatives.

The 1924 presidential election was on the horizon, and Franklin had no political capital or experience to make a run himself. Instead, he supported his ally in his home state of New York, Governor Al Smith (Alan Bunce). There was a thought that the Republicans might be weak, with many who had served under Harding compromised by the Teapot Dome scandal and Calvin Coolidge, who became president when Harding died suddenly, not having much of a political base within the Republican party. Now, I knew that Smith would gain the 1928 nomination for the Democrats, and that he didn't gain the nomination in 1924, so I was mildly surprised to see this show up in the movie. When I did a bit of research, I was reminded that in those days the political parties didn't have the long string of primaries that we see in the US today. Smith and a former Treasury Secretary from California, William Gibbs McAdoo, were the two leading nominees, although delegates deadlocked with the result that after dozens of ballots a compromise candidate, John Davis, was ultimately selected.

Anyhow, the movie deals with Franklin Roosevelt's role in the convention, which was to place Smith's name in nomination and give a speech. However, Eleanor and Louis Howe didn't want Franklin to deliver the speech from his wheelchair as everybody would see just how weak he was. Instead, Franklin was going to have to make the ten or so steps from the curtain up to the podium from which he'd deliver his nominating speech (this is the speech in which the term "Happy Warrior" was coined for Al Smith). The movie more or less ends with Roosevelt placing Smith's name in nomination. Since this is all based on real history, we know what happened and I don't think I'm giving much away.

Sunrise at Campobello is definitely hagiography, although it's fairly well-made hagiography. Also, it should be unsurprising that the movie takes such a positive tone toward Franklin Roosevelt. At this point in time, nobody would have greenlit anything that wasn't overly positive toward him. Certainly not somebody like Dory Schary, who wrote the play and was a decided Hollywood liberal (remember, a decade earlier he took over from Louis B. Mayer at MGM and changed the tone of the studio's output). To add to that, Eleanor Roosevelt was an advisor, and there was no way anything strongly negative would have passed her approval.

Still, Bellamy and Cronyn both give pretty good performances, although Garson is rather weaker in giving what seems more like a parody of Eleanor Roosevelt like what Louis B. Mayer gave us in Babes in Arms 20 years earlier. Bellamy has gone on to be thought of as the definitive FDR thanks to his performance in the play and later movie; this is your chance to see the movie.