Wednesday, March 15 | 6 Films
On March 15th, as part of its celebration of the Academy Awards, Turner Classic Movies is taking a look at Oscar™-winning and nominated political films from Hollywood and beyond. Some are based in fact, some are fiction and some are in-between. Some honored leaders, some were thinly-disguised biographies of the corrupt and some films and their creators were banned for angering the powerful.
It may seem innocuous today, but The Gorgeous Hussy (1936) was controversial in its time. Based on the 1934 novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams, it tells a fictionalized version of the life of Peggy O’Neill, the educated daughter of a tavern owner, who rises in society to marry John Eaton, Secretary of War during the administration of Andrew Jackson. Scorned by Washington society because of rumors about her past, Peggy finds an unlikely defender in President Jackson himself, causing all but one of Jackson’s cabinet to resign, later known as the “Petticoat Affair.”
MGM purchased the film rights to the Adams novel in 1935 for Jean Harlow and Brian Aherne, but the part of Peggy was later given to Joan Crawford, with her real-life husband, Franchot Tone, playing Eaton. Robert Taylor played Bow Timberlake, Eaton’s friend and Peggy’s first husband, Melvyn Douglas was Senator John Randolph, Jimmy Stewart was one of Peggy’s suitors, Lionel Barrymore played Jackson and one of Hollywood’s best character actresses, Beulah Bondi, earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of First Lady Rachel Jackson. George J. Folsey would also earn a nomination for Best Cinematography.
The detractors of the Clarence Brown-directed film included the Hays Office, who acted as the official censor for the film industry. They objected to the liberal dose of profanity in the original script and ordered MGM to cut all the “damns” and “hells.” Also unhappy with The Gorgeous Hussy was Fannie Walton, the great-grandniece of Rachel Jackson, who, along with the Nashville Ladies Hermitage Association, loudly voiced their opposition to the characterization of Rachel as, what Time called “a pipe-smoking crone.” The magazine suggested that “one reason why Hollywood so rarely utilizes the obvious and profitable field of U. S. history may be the squeaks of indignation that result whenever it does so.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s bout with polio was common knowledge during his presidency, but the fact that he was confined to a wheelchair was not. Through the use of leg braces and crutches and the now-unthinkable agreement of the press to not photograph him in his wheelchair, the president was able to give the appearance of mobility. It was not until after his death that the public learned the extent to which polio had ravaged his body. Roosevelt had already been in the New York State Senate, served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson and had an unsuccessful run for vice president by 1920. At the time he contracted polio in 1921, he was considered to be one of the most promising Democrats. His struggles to recover and the influence of his wife, Eleanor, and his adviser, Louis Howe, are the subject of Sunrise at Campobello (1960).
The film was based on Dore Schary’s Tony-winning Broadway play, which ran during the 1958-1959 season. Schary did the film adaptation and served as the film’s producer.
Roosevelt is played by Ralph Bellamy, who won a Tony Award for the role on Broadway, although he felt that at 55, he was too old to play FDR from 39 to 42. The press floated rumors that Marlon Brando and Charlton Heston were being considered before Schary ended speculation. Also held over from the play were Alan Bunce as Alfred E. Smith and Ann Shoemaker as Roosevelt’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt. Hume Cronyn replaced Tony-winner Henry Jones as Howe and Greer Garson played Eleanor Roosevelt, portrayed on stage by Mary Fickett.
Political controversy surrounded the film from the beginning. While it was in production, its mentioning of the anti-Catholic bias against Alfred E. Smith was being equated in the press with the anti-Catholic bias against then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, despite Schary’s protestations that the play had been written years before Kennedy ran for president. When the film opened in Washington D.C., the American Nazi Party picketed outside the theater against Roosevelt being portrayed in a positive light.
Sunrise at Campobello received four Academy Award nominations, including Garson for Best Actress in a Leading Role, Marjorie Best for Best Costume Design (Color), George Groves for Best Sound and Edward Carrere and George James Hopkins for Best Art Direction.
One of the first films to be dubbed a “political thriller” was Z (1969), adapted from Vassilis Vassilikos’ 1967 novel of the same name, and directed by Greek director Costa-Gavras. The story is based on the real-life assassination of Greek parliamentary deputy Gregorios Lambrakis by a right-wing organization in 1963, initially ruled an accident, but later revealed to have been carried out in conjunction with high-ranking members of the army and police. Costa-Gavras’ film has Yves Montand playing the murdered deputy, with Greek star Irene Papas as his widow, Jean-Louis Trintignant as the inspector whose investigation with a photo-journalist (Jacques Perrin, who also produced) entirely changes his opinion about what really happened as he fights against pressure from higher-ups to put a lid on the truth. Costa-Gavras pulls no punches from the start. Instead of the usual disclaimer at the beginning of the film, his reads, “Any semblance to actual events, to persons living or dead, is not the result of chance. It is DELIBERATE.” Costa-Gavras later said in an interview with Z Magazine, “The colonels had just come to power in Greece, overthrowing democracy. Making Z was my way of protest.” According to critic Roger Ebert’s review, “This film's director, writer, composer and Miss Papas are all banned in Greece.”
Unable to secure funding from major US studios due to its obvious criticism of the US’ ally, Greece, the actors agreed to defer their salaries for a percentage of the profits, Perrin himself put in some of his savings and Italian distributor Hercule Mucchielli chipped in $200,000. After a partnership deal with the newly-formed Algerian film industry, Z was finally produced. It found critical acclaim and was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Costa-Gavras and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. It won the Best Foreign Language Film and Françoise Bonnot won the Best Editing Oscar™. Z would not play in Greece until January 1975, six months after the regime was overthrown.
John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May (1964) imagined a coup by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to overthrow an American president who supports a nuclear disarmament treaty that the military fears will leave the country open to an attack by the Russians. On reading the novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Waldo Bailey II, Frankenheimer, producer Edward Lewis and actor Kirk Douglas immediately secured the film rights, even before the book made the New York Times bestseller list. The film was produced through Douglas’ own company, Joel Productions and Seven Arts with a reported budget of $3.5 million. Frank Sinatra and Spencer Tracy were attached to the film in its earliest days, but Sinatra never panned out and Tracy, who was to play the president, left after he was unable to secure top billing. He would be replaced by Fredric March, and Douglas, who had not originally intended to appear in the film, decided to star with his good friend, Burt Lancaster. Ava Gardner’s role of Eleanor Holbrook had first been offered to Edie Adams, who had a scheduling conflict, and Jean Simmons and Audrey Hepburn were also floated for the part.
Filming began on May 20, 1963, at Paramount Studios in Hollywood and lasted fifty days, with locations in Yuma, Arizona and Washington, D.C., including a riot shot in front of the White House, thanks to President Kennedy, who was anxious to see the film. His assassination in November caused Paramount to change their promotional strategy, but the film would go into general release as planned in February 1964. The film received two Academy Award nominations, a Best Supporting Actor for Edmond O’Brien and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White for Cary Odell and Edward G. Boyle.
The Candidate (1972) starred Robert Redford as the son of a former California governor (Melvyn Douglas) who is convinced by a political operative (Peter Boyle) to run against a popular Republican incumbent senator (Don Porter). The screenplay was by Jeremy Larner, who had been a speechwriter on the Eugene McCarthy campaign in 1968, with the original idea reportedly by Redford, who was inspired after watching the 1968 Democratic Convention. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Warner Bros., the only studio that wasn’t afraid of the overtly political message, gave the filmmakers total freedom, only insisting that the film be ready to be released during the July 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami, and that it be shot in color to help with eventual television licensing.
The Candidate was filmed on actual locations in Southern California and in the Bay Area, rather than studio sets, including a California Democratic fundraising event where both Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern can be seen. Redford’s friend and former co-star, Natalie Wood, also appears in a cameo, as do several local and national news reporters. The producers used a storefront in Los Angeles’ Westwood Village near UCLA as a campaign office, where those who wandered in were told about the film and were registered to vote in the upcoming election.
Not universally applauded on its release (The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris called it “a piece of cheese.”), The Candidate won Jeremy Larner an Academy Award for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Based on Factual Material or Material Not Previously Published or Produced, and a nomination for Best Sound for Gene Cantamessa and Richard Portman. Nearly two decades later, Larner would write an op-ed in the New York Times about his regret that so many politicians claimed that they were inspired to run for office because of the film, and rejected Governor Jerry Brown’s claim that the film was based on him. In 2002, Variety reported that Redford was interested in producing and directing a sequel, to be written by Larry Gelbart, but it never materialized.
The Candidate may not have been based on Jerry Brown, but Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “All the King’s Men,” which director Robert Rossen adapted for the screen in 1949 was definitely influenced by the life of Huey Long, the populist governor of Louisiana and later US Senator, who was assassinated in office in 1935. Rossen hired Broderick Crawford to portray Willie Stark, an honest man who begins his political career with the best of intentions to get rid of corruption, but becomes fatally corrupt himself when his power goes to his head. Rossen was sold on Crawford from his first screen test and was so captivated that he let Crawford keep acting even though the camera ran out of film. The executives were skeptical, but Columbia Pictures studio chief Harry Cohn agreed with Rossen. The choice paid off at Oscar™ time. Also in the cast were John Ireland as newspaperman Jack Burden, who covers Stark’s rise to power and later works for him, Mercedes McCambridge (in her film debut) as Stark’s hard-bitten assistant, Sadie, John Derek as Stark’s adopted son and Joanne Dru as Burden and Stark’s love interest, Anne.
All the King’s Men won the Best Picture Academy Award, Broderick Crawford won Best Actor in a Leading Role, Mercedes McCambridge won Best Actress in a Supporting Role and there were nominations for John Ireland for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Rossen for Best Director and Best Writing, Screenplay and Robert Parrish and Al Clark for Best Film Editing.
