HOLLYWOODROW WILSON
Hesseltine, William B.
Hollywoodrow Wilson By WILLIAM B. HESSELTINE THERE was a time, in the days of long ago, when the illustrious dead could be expected to become subjects of dignified, leather-bound biographies....
...In the end, there is a bald statement that the soldiers were betrayed...
...Wilson, the wooing of Mrs...
...invaded the field and has presented, in recent years, screen versions of the careers of such scientists as Pasteur and Madame Curie, such inventors as Edison . and Bell, and such politicians as Andrew Johnson and Catherine the Great...
...Yes, eventually," he says with a final dig at a "few obstructive men," and, he adds, it may come "in a better way...
...Moreover, after the movie-men had smeared Lodge sufficiently, they filmed a scene in which the Senator starts to say...
...The parts of his speeches that are used are quoted accurately...
...It must accept the League of Nations or live with a gun in its hands...
...The camera then hurried along to the campaign of 1912, landed Wilson in the White House, portrayed the last days of the first Mrs...
...you promised . .." "This Government promised . . ." bellowed Wilson in the same tone he had used to Bernstorff...
...Interspersed at appropriate intervals in the picture are some old news reels of the World War and the Versailles Conference that amply illustrate the advances that 25 years have made in photographic techniques...
...New style biographies have taken many forms: some have been "fictionalized" accounts, some have undertaken to psychoanalyze their subjects, and some have been "debunking" assassinations of character...
...For the past quarter century or more—since about the time that Strachey attempted to humanize, if not glamorize, Queen Victoria—the "modern" biography has been an increasingly popular and profitable branch of literature...
...The movie quotes him, frequently and at length, as saying that the people must decide, and that he had faith in the people...
...The Hollywood biographers preferred to begin with Jim Smith (deliberately • mis-named "Big Ed Jones...
...America has but two choices," exclaimed Wilson...
...Gait, serving coffee to soldiers at a railroad canteen, brooding over the mounting casualty lists...
...The players are properly garbed, and the field is marked off in the checkerboard pattern that was correct for that date...
...Only a captious critic could quarrel with the casting...
...offering Wilson the governorship...
...The automobiles, the hats, and the hair-dos conform to the strictest standards of pedantic historical scholarship...
...Propaganda Overplayed Yet, even in reducing the League fight to a personal struggle, the film propagandists overplay their hand...
...As propaganda, the cinema version of Woodrow Wilson does not deviate from the current party line...
...It's almost a shame that a picture which could achieve such rigid accuracy in putting a nose guard on a 1909 football player and the exactly right sheet music on the piano should misrepresent so vital a segment of human history...
...Hollywood did its best to make Wilson warm up—showing him singing around the family piano, making awkward love to Mrs...
...This is a technicolor job, which gives the sallow Woodrow an almost ruddy hue, makes a Washington fog look like a romantic blue mist, and dresses up the dowdy White House furniture until it looks like a Hollywood interior decorator had had a hand in it...
...Unfortunately for the movies, human lives do not unroll at the pace of a scenario...
...On the other hand, the movies do possess some distinct advantages in presenting biographical subjects...
...in history at Johns Hopkins, taught at Bryn Mawr and Princeton, and wrote books...
...On the screen Wilson is smug enough—in a scene where Mrs...
...A written biography must devote considerable space to an exposition of the times, to describing the physical setting of events, or to discussing the personal mannerisms of the characters...
...But, as they say in Hollywood, any resemblance between this picture and historical truth is purely coincidental...
...They can succeed, too, in making situations vivid—capturing, for example, the spirit of a crowd in a way that the printed page can never do...
...He went to college, studied law, and tried to practice at the bar...
...Thereafter, the lens were focussed on the war and the peace treaty...
...After a decent interval, and after the relatives had stopped squabbling over the division of the spoils, some "official" biographer or some sychophant Boswellian henchman of a great man undertook the task of composing an instructive book which would be an inspiration to the readers...
...These are things that a movie biography can do as effectively as any written account, and here they are done well...
...Apparently, they were betrayed by the people whom the cinema Wilson professed to admire...
...By making the Massachusetts Senator the villain of the piece, and by implying that Lodge was miffed because he was once kept-waiting for an audience with the President, the movie makers shift the whole opposition to the League to a personal and political attack on Woodrow Wilson...
...It makes no mention of his long opposition to Bryan's "foolish and dangerous" ideas, his early affiliation with George Harvey and the Wall Street Democrats, and his persistent association with the Southern Bourbons...
...The picture fails to present Wilson's arrogant refusal to accept advice and his persistent rejection of offers of honorable compromise...
...Then, in a touching last scene, the departing President answers the question whether there is any hope for peace...
...As a teacher, Prof...
...pictorial biographies for the illumination of the illiterate...
...The Need For Romance The appearance of this succession of financially successful cinema biographies raises the serious question whether the silver screen is a valid medium for presenting the career of a historical character...
...Wilson had the respect of his colleagues, but he inspired few students...
...It shows him fighting with Clemehceau, and assuring the Frenchman that the people would "rise and smash the Senators" who were opposing the treaty...
...The movie makers, despite their technicolor, could not quite conceal these characteristics...
...Whether this picture will contribute to that end is still an open question...
...The career of Woodrow Wilson furnishes poor material for drama...
...It shows Wilson rejecting the advice to take "practical men" to Paris, and emphasizes his determination to go because "our own people expect me to go...
...But the best was not good enough...
...They dubbed in the rapid beat of martial music...
...The opening scene, for example, is at a football game in 1909...
...One thing, however, is certain: the cinema is a poor medium of biography...
...Obviously, the "better way," in the eyes of Hollywood's non-too-subtle propagandists, is the present power-politics route...
...He took a Ph.D...
...In all of this, the movie biographers experienced considerable difficulty in making Wilson himself appear dramatic...
...In spite of them, Wilson appears irascible and ill-tempered...
...There are no economic causes of the World War—it was solely caused by Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare...
...He offered to trade a professor of economics for a good full-back...
...Wilson remained cold...
...Perhaps, after all their efforts, the Hollywood biographers had hit upon the truth:—Woodrow Wilson had confused himself with the Government...
...To hide their subject's essential colorlessness, the movie makers dwelt at length on the conventions, the crowds, and the troops...
...In the process, the picture builds Wilson up as a devotee of progressivism, and a lover of democracy...
...oor Material For Drama But, aside from these technical excellencies, the screen biography of Woodrow Wilson is a miserably inadequate and deliberately inaccurate presentation: Some of the inadequacies may properly be attributed to the limitations of the cinema itself...
...The movies can sketch such things in without trying an audience's patience...
...Born in a Presbyterian manse, Wilson grew up as a model minister's son—earnest, cold, reserved, and suspicious...
...But Woodrow remained wooden...
...Then, in succeeding scenes, they sliowed the governor repudiating the Boss' support...
...The alumni arranged to have him "kicked upstairs" into the governorship of New Jersey, and therby launched him on a political career that led quickly to the White House...
...The inaccuracies •spring primarilly from a conscious effort to pervert the facts to serve a propaganda purpose...
...Instead of an honest presentation of the issues involved in the acceptance of the muddled League of Nations, the cinema propagandists resort to misrepresenting Henry Cabot Lodge...
...Moreover, the words used can be documented...
...Wilson was not a fighter, not a valiant crusader...
...All types of biography have found a ready market— even the publishers of "comic" books have turned out...
...After a time, he became President of Princeton where he quarreled with Dean West over the nature of the graduate school and won the enmity of many of the alumni by trying to oust fraternities from the campus...
...In fact, the picture carefully avoids showing that Wilson lost the support of the people, that he never understood them, and that they, in the end, repudiated his League...
...Finally Hollywood, not to be outdone by the "funnies...
...The picture, as might be expected, gives a warped Version of the League fight...
...The cinema makers failed completely to point out that the 14 Points—only six of which are even mentioned—went down through Wilson's inability to cope with European politicians...
...All of Wilson's early life is highly important for an understanding of his career...
...But more serious are the picture's meditated distortions for the ends of propaganda...
...Gait, and the election of 1916...
...The makers have been careful to avoid anachronisms, and to present scenes and clothes accurately...
...The picture is designed to glorify the first World War as a great crusade for democracy, and to advocate a new League of Nations based on force...
...It was fought to bring democracy to the world, and only the defeat of the League by 37 Senators prevented war from being forever eliminated...
...In real life, Woodrow Wilson was cold, and arrogant...
...As a scholar, he was seldom first rate...
...Interested in political theory, he read the English philosophers and became enamoured of England's parliamentary system...
...From the standpoint of photographic and dramatic technique this is an excellent picture...
...But his personality attracted no clients, and he abandoned the uncertainties of the legal for the securities of the academic profession...
...Some of Wilson's best wise-cracks are repeated in appropriate settings: He answered charges that he was inexperienced in politics by saying his detractors had never dealt with a college faculty or the trustees' wives...
...Moreover, so long as the movies operate at an "entertainment" level (and to pander to a taste they have already helped deprave) they must make their characters both romantic and "dramatic...
...Wilson and their daughters are admiring the White House furnishing, the newly inaugurated President asked if they were surprised that "our predecessors also had good taste...
...He explains, in one scene, the need of an international police force in terms which, however delightful they may sound in the ears of totalitarian liberals of Hollywood, smack of the essence of Nazism...
...The attempt to compress the complexities of a lifetime into a couple of hours and a few hundred feet of film would seem to necessitate an unwarranted distortion...
...They filmed the spectacles, the public gatherings, and the parades...
...The typical product of such labors was a dull "Life and Times"—an imposing literary monument in which neither the subject nor the times came to life...
...But it lacked drama, and the movie makers ignored it...
...His best selling book, a many-volumed History of the American People, was a pot-boiling piece of hack work...
...Few actual careers possess the dramatic unity which a motion picture presentation demands...
...Both these advantages and these defects are richly illustrated in Darryl Zanuck's Woodrow Wilson, now playing the opery houses at double the cost of a good movie...
...Meditated Distortions Such inaccuracies simply prove that the motion picture is an inadequate medium for biography...
Vol. 8 • December 1944 • No. 49
