Cinema: New Picture, Oct. 10, 1960

Sunrise at Campobello (Schary Production; Warner), quite aside from its respectable merits as heroic drama, patriotic myth, situation comedy and outright soap opera, comes along as a timely piece of campaign propaganda for the Democrats.

Adapted by Dore Schary from his prizewinning play (TIME, Feb. 10, 1958), Sunrise starts off with a heart-rending half-hour description of how Franklin Roosevelt (Ralph Bellamy) was struck down, at the age of 39, by infantile paralysis in the family cottage on Campobello

BELLAMY & GARSON AS THE ROOSEVELTS

The tale that wags the donkey?

Island off the Canadian coast. In the rest of this 143-minute film, Scriptwriter Schary (who also produced the picture) presents the future President’s dramatic struggle against physical paralysis as the outward symbol of a heroic ordeal in which a great man’s will was tempered and his character established.

When the paralysis reaches its full extent, Schary’s Roosevelt experiences despair—”deep, sick despair … the sense that perhaps I’d never get up again. Like a crab lying on its back.” But he never complains, never makes others bear his moral burden. As the weeks go by, Franklin fights his way out of despair, out of an oppressive sense of permanent isolation from the everyday, active world he loves, out of nightmare fears that a fire may break out in the house and burn him alive while he lies unable to lift a finger. He fights his way, day by day, muscle by muscle, out of paralysis. When the infection subsides, Franklin’s fingers are too weak to lift a teaspoon, but some months later he can chin himself on the therapeutic bar that hangs above his bed.

Back at Hyde Park, a more insidious and possibly more dangerous stage of the battle begins: the struggle with his dominating, possessive mother (Ann Shoemaker), who personifies and marshals all the self-indulgence and inertia in his soul as she smothers him with affection, murmuring soothingly over and over that he must rest, that he must forget about politics, that he should live out his life at Hyde Park. In a tremendous confrontation, the hero slays the dragon and thenceforth is able to call his soul his own. In the final sequence, crutch-borne but triumphant, he hobbles up to the lectern where he will nominate Al Smith and resume the role that history had given him to play.

As a piece of cinema craftsmanship, Sunrise, is conventional but careful, a superior commercial product. The settings are authentic—the exteriors were shot at Campobello, Hyde Park and Manhattan, and the interiors are exact reconstructions of the Roosevelt homes. The direction by Vincent J. Donehue, who also did the play, shows a calm good sense of pace and proportion. The acting in the minor roles is competent, and in three of the major ones it is, in one degree or another, magnificent. As Roosevelt’s mother, Actress Shoemaker presents an image of horrible and yet somehow humorous fascination: the mother that only a son could love.

As Eleanor, Greer Garson offers a first-rate physical caricature, but she offers a good deal more besides: a touching picture of a harried wife and mother making the best she can of a bad business, the heroine who makes the hero possible.’ As F.D.R., Actor Bellamy also provides an inspired interfusion of caricature and characterization. He not only looks and acts like Roosevelt; he feels the way Roosevelt feels in the viewer’s memory, his character matures and deepens subtly in the course of the film.

The players are supported by a script in every technical respect professional and polished. Its content is another matter. Roosevelt during his illness and recovery no doubt behaved, part of the time at any rate, in a heroic way—many sick people show great courage, though few become President—and it is suitable and sensible to admire his heroism. But Author Schary, an ardent Democrat, does not merely admire his hero. He obviously worships him. Playing to posterity, Schary presents Roosevelt as a sort of Prometheus with polio. Playing to the cheap seats, he presents him as an all-American husband who loves to romp with the kids on the living-room floor and to settle down on the sofa for some quiet married smooching with the missus. Hero worship, sticky sentiment and corny domestic comedy all build to a smashing election-year climax in a scene, completely irrelevant to the rest of the action, in which Roosevelt vigorously rebuts objections to a Roman Catholic President.