THE three-and-a-half-million-dollar film about Woodrow Wilson called “Darryl F. Zanuck’s Wilson in Technicolor” is as surprising as it is costly, tedious and impotent. Some of the minor events in its life of President Wilson from the year 1908 through 1918 are the First World War, the Versailles Conference and Wilson’s first term in the White House; some of its major events include the parade of delegates at the Democratic convention, the Wilsons’ singing of “Put on Your Old Gray Bonnet,” and the locomotive yells given by Princeton students.
For several reasons, one being that Wilson had a “nice” tenor voice, there are 87 songs blared or sung in the picture from 1 to 12 times and as though the audience left its ears in the cloak room: come in at any time and you will think “Zanuck’s Sousa” is being shown. In between musical numbers there is just time for someone to exclaim, “Mr. Baker” or “MacAdoo,” for that person to show himself to you, and for Wilson to say something amusing; then the band starts playing again. As important a key to understanding the character of Wilson as Colonel House is hardly in the film, while two individuals, a cheerleader and an economics professor from Princeton, who seem of no importance for understanding anything, are given whole hunks of the film to act in. Probably the most surprising thing “Zanuck’s Wilson” does is to make Wilson into a congenial, wise-cracking public figure, change his nature from that of a fierce Church father to that of an average business man, and his head from a large horse-head to an oval, doughy one.
The effect of the movie is similar to the one produced by the sterile post-card albums you buy in railroad stations, which unfold like accordions and show you the points of interest in the city. Its views of Wilson and the period are just as sycophantic; the points that it shows can be found for the most part in history books, but it leaves out a whole mass of facts of equal or greater importance, and hides the ones it does show in a kind of atmosphere that Zanuck calls “entertainment.” The producers must have known far more about the World War, the peace-making at Versailles, and Wilson himself, but that is kept out of the movie in the same way that slum sections are kept out of post-card albums.
Zanuck and his film author, Lamar Trotti, have a number of pet notions to hang on their biography of Wilson, one of the main ones being the idea that much of American life is like a great, whooping Fourth of July parade, the people rather comical and foolish, but having one hell of a time, and events running the course of a foolish, comical game. The symbol for this is planted in the first scene—after a programme of credits that is a short feature in itself—at a football game between Princeton and Yale, in which the best part of the occasion is clearly indicated to be the yells, singing and excitement of the spectators; the game itself is a joke, and the players comic-opera characters. This interpretation of American life as a jamboree is repeated almost beyond endurance through the first three-quarters of the film in showing the jolly, vaudeville kind of home life the Wilsons had at Princeton, the funny Democratic conventions in 1912 and 1916, and the Wilsons’ gay time at the White House; it leaves a minimum of space for the all-important events that came at the end of Wilson’s life, and by its noisy, heavy emphasis kills most of the effect of those events. This jamboree interpretation fits in with two other Zanuck notions: it makes for the kind of “entertainment” in songs, dances, and wise-cracks with which he believes a serious picture has to be sold, and it fits in with his desire to recreate Wilson into a genial figure completely lacking in hypocrisy, insensitiveness and imperiousness. By this last transformation he disintegrates a character of the most complicated nature and of terrifying forcefulness into completely unbelievable softness and into the most conventional of screen hero types.
Some of the other notions planted in this film include the lie that the United States’ career in the First World War contained only the highest moral aims and actions, any mention of a less noble action is buried in a conversation where its effect is completely obliterated. Another notion it sells is the one that the people of Germany are incurable gangsters who will never get over the idea of world conquest. This is managed by some tricky writing—from the views and feelings of the present war rather than the first one—of a scene in which the German ambassador, Bernstorff, notifies Wilson of the German decision to torpedo all ships without warning. In spite of the evil nature of the scene’s idea and the fact that the cards are too obviously stacked to make Wilson look good, it is played into one of the most forceful scenes in the film, with Wilson rising into a great, frightening rage of righteousness and seeming to stomp the not unlikeable, dignified German to death with his voice. The third program of the film is to boil the whole tragic affair of Versailles down to a vague incident showing Wilson nobly arguing—without opposition, as usual—against Clemenceau. The only mistake it attributes to Wilson—in what has often been called a major catastrophe for him—was his choosing the wrong Republican for his delegation to Versailles. A hint made by someone that the Peace Treaty was not the most benevolent and just that could have been written is in the less-than-faint category, and the notion that anyone was sold out isn’t even in the picture. It ends on an all-time worst in movie scenes with the Germans coming in to sign the Treaty, while “Deutschland Uber Alles” is played to an idiotic flatness to indicate German depravity.
The creditable moments in the film come during some of Wilson’s orations, when Knox turns on a full, brassy voice that makes his Wilson sound as impressive as you expect him to sound. The Wilson dependence on women is moderately attained by showing his courtship of Mrs. Galt (Geraldine Fitzgerald), going forward with a kind of movie determination and strong suggestion that I find lacking in almost every other idea that the film tries to project. There are bits here and there that I liked: for instance, one of a crowd moving dumbly and strangely in a railroad yard as Wilson suddenly collapses in the midst of a speech, then being seen through the train window still moving oddly and trying to find out what has happened. About three-quarters of the way through, a large amount of actual newsreel from the first World War is run off and the strength of it makes the film that comes before and after seem comical.
August 14, 1944