IN spite of its infinite pains to tread lightly among the delicate issues, “Tennessee Johnson,” the movie life of the underestimated and misinterpreted Andrew Johnson (which was first called “The Man on America’s Conscience”) has a warmly human quality, a lack of pretense and a fine spirit. In some places the movie is intense with emotion, and otherwise is almost always interesting in showing famous figures of American history in famous or infamous moments. One scene is a great movie episode—Jefferson Davis’ secession speech to Congress. It is spoken amazingly well by Morris Ankrum, with all the rigid formality of the speech and the cultured superiority and dogmatism of the man dominating the first half; but the end, in the quivering lips and body, is full of the terrible effort he was making to keep his emotion within the bounds of his speech.
Its Johnson is a passionate, mulish fighter for the underprivileged, the Union and the Constitution, but because the movie is afraid, it hardly mentions slavery, states’ rights, the problems of reconstruction, the war; that Johnson hated the Abolitionists as much as the Secessionists; that he believed in emancipating the Negro but had no plan for rehabilitating him. Instead it concentrates on two freak incidents that are more sensational than indicative of the man and his times. One is the crazy circumstances that brought an upright Vice President to his inauguration maudlin drunk (he was never known to be so before or after) and led to Johnson’s reeling, extemporaneous speech about his youth. The other has to do with the famous, hoked-up impeachment proceedings (in the movie Johnson shows up at his trial). And while it gets stuck in slow, long-winded debates in Congress and the White House it misses the tragic era outside and a great deal of the man—especially what he was most interested in, the poor white.
It has the hard luck to be intelligent, interesting and unpretentious without being convincing. For instance, the Tennessee scenes of Johnson’s youth are fair enough to his early life: he was a runaway tailor’s apprentice whose wife did teach him to read and write, his first speeches were given in meetings that broke up into gun fights, as a Jacksonian Democrat he did fight bitterly Lincoln’s election—but all these scenes seem too custom-made and familiar, just as its people are too easily recognizable as Regis Toomey, Marjorie Main and Grant Withers rather than Tennessee settlers, and their speech more contrivance than Southern.
The picture looks to have been pretty thoroughly censored, so as not to rake up any coals still burning. There is one telling long-shot of Thaddeus Stevens which shows him wearing an ugly, black wig similar to the one he actually did wear and to the one that “The Birth of a Nation” Stevens wore. Elsewhere there is no wig but softly flowing brown locks. To please the OWI, Director Dieterle reshot several sequences to make Abolitionist Stevens a more sympathetic character. In my opinion, censorship is a disgrace, whether done by the Hays office and pressure groups, or by liberals and the OWI. Certainly it is a comedown from the unhypocritical, cynical, dictatorial, powerful Stevens to the indefinite Stevens Lionel Barrymore projects, using only the material considered safe, which is a bundle of gestures and grimaces rather than a personality.
Van Heflin plays Johnson with knowledge, and makes him a grim, humorless, somewhat puzzled personality, who seemed never to get over the knocking about he took in his youth; not given to tact, but a proud, courageous President who faced the post-war chaos that would have fallen to Lincoln. Heflin’s was a difficult job, with the camera almost never away from him and a lot of long talks to be given, but he makes it, and lifts the picture generally, giving the portrait more dimension than is actually written into it.
It is certainly one of the less obvious pictures in a year of obvious ones. Its hero is not a box-office figure, and at least it tackled a controversial period. For these reasons it deserves respect. And it is a thoroughly interesting movie.
January 25, 1943