Friendly Persuasion is a 1956 American Civil War drama film produced and directed by William Wyler. It stars Gary Cooper, Dorothy McGuire, Anthony Perkins, Richard Eyer, Robert Middleton, Phyllis Love, Mark Richman, Walter Catlett and Marjorie Main. The screenplay by Michael Wilson was adapted from the 1945 novel The Friendly Persuasion by Jessamyn West. The film tells the story of a Quaker family in southern Indiana during the American Civil War and the way the war tests their pacifist beliefs.
The film received positive reviews, praised for its performances, but faced some criticism for inaccuracies in portraying Quaker views. It earned $4 million at the box office, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and received six Academy Award nominations including Best Picture. Michael Wilson, the screenwriter, was initially uncredited due to being on the Hollywood blacklist but was later restored in 1996. The film went over budget to the point that Allied sold the foreign distribution rights to MGM to raise more funds.
Jessamyn West spent a year with the production as both story writer and as technical adviser (credited). Her novel covered a forty-year span of the Birdwell family history and was essentially plotless, so to make the movie effective, she arranged the sequences selected for filming around the Civil War vignette from the novel (altering it significantly for dramatic action) and compressed the whole into a single year, 1862, using the war as the central plot conflict. She created new characters (primarily the Jordans) to fill in for others that had to be deleted, and entirely wrote out Laban, the second eldest son in the novel, substituting a new character, Josh's friend Caleb Cope (John Smith), as a two-scene surrogate. The character Mattie was a composite of the two surviving Birdwell daughters in the novel. Wyler wanted his brother, associate producer Robert Wyler, and author Jessamyn West to receive credit for rewriting the script (also including Wilson), but the WGA ruled that Wilson deserved sole credit for his screenplay.
Cooper expressed initial reservations to West about his character, noting that since in his previous roles "'action seems to come natural to me,' the father should be shown joining the fight. 'There comes a time in a picture of mine when the people watching expect me to do something,' he said. West responded he would do something: 'Refrain. You will furnish your public with the refreshing picture of a strong man refraining.'" It was Perkins' second film, after his debut in the 1953 film The Actress; his Broadway success with Tea and Sympathy in the meantime tempted him to remain on the stage, though ultimately he decided to do the film.
Reception
According to Bosley Crowther, "thee should be pleasured by this film", noting it is "loaded with sweetness and warmth and as much cracker-barrel Americana as has been spread on the screen in some time." Crowther called Cooper and McGuire "wonderfully spirited and compassionate in their finely complementary roles" and said a "great deal of admiration must go to Anthony Perkins" for making "the older son of the Birdwells a handsome, intense, and chivalrous lad." Variety magazine called it "the simple story of a Quaker family in Indiana back in the 1860s" with "just about everything in the way of comedy and drama, suspense and action"; they also said "figuring importantly in the way the picture plays is Dimitri Tiomkin's conducting of his own score." However it struggled to make a profit because of its high cost.
MGM distributed outside the US and Canada. According to their records the film made $732,000, earning the studio a profit of $582,000.
The film also received mild criticism for certain inaccurate portrayals of Quaker views, such as a misunderstanding that although Quakers disliked programmed music they did value individual original expressions of it; and in meetings, Bible passages are not read verbatim but speakers recite scripture from memory and express its meaning in their own words.
Connection with House Un-American Activities Committee testimony
The original screenplay by Michael Wilson was changed significantly in the wake of McCarthyism. The movie script was discussed in 1951 by Michael Wilson in his testimony as an "unfriendly witness" at the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and by director Frank Capra, who was seeking to dissociate himself from Wilson, who was ultimately placed on the Hollywood blacklist.
Capra, who had originally contracted Wilson to write the screenplay just after the war but then dropped the project, said that although he thought Wilson did "a swell job" adapting West's book, the movie was not produced because he felt "it would be a bad time to produce a picture that might be construed as being antiwar. But we let Wilson work on it until he had finished with it."
Wilson told HUAC in 1951, "I feel that this committee might take the credit, or part of it at least, for the fact that The Friendly Persuasion was not produced, in view of the fact that it dealt warmly, in my opinion, with a peace-loving people."
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 73% of 11 critics' reviews are positive.
Ronald Reagan
Friendly Persuasion also became a footnote to world history in the 1980s when United States President Ronald Reagan made a gift of the film to Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at one of their five summit meetings, suggesting that he view the film as symbolic of the need to find an alternative to war as a means of resolving differences between peoples. One Quaker commentator stated: "Friendly Persuasion seems to me to come about as close to truth and fairness as I expect to see Hollywood get in a treatment of Quakerism; I recommend it to every Quaker parent, as projecting images their children ought to see and imitate...I believe (critics have) woefully misjudged the film, on several counts: its place in American cinema, the characters and their roles, its historicity, and, not least, its value as an expression of the Peace Testimony. Here, for perhaps the only time, I think Ronald Reagan was closer to the truth when he commended the film to Gorbachev because it 'shows not the tragedy of war, but the problems of pacifism, the nobility of patriotism as well as the love of peace.'"
Awards and honors
A week before the year's Oscar nominations were announced, the AMPAS Board of Governors introduced a rule denying an Oscar to anyone who refused to talk to a United States congressional committee. The Writers Guild of America protested the new rule and awarded Michael Wilson the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Drama.
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders"
|-
! Award
! Category
! Nominee(s)
! Result
! Ref.
|-
| rowspan="6"| Academy Awards
| Best Motion Picture
| rowspan="2"| William Wyler
|
| align="center" rowspan="6"|
|-
| Best Director
|
|-
| Best Supporting Actor
| Anthony Perkins
|
|-
| Best Screenplay – Adapted
| Michael Wilson
|-
| Directors Guild of America Awards
| Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures
|
| align="center"|
|-
| rowspan="4"| Golden Globe Awards
| Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama
| Gary Cooper
|
| align="center" rowspan="4"|
|-
| Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture
| Marjorie Main
|
|-
| Most Promising Newcomer – Male
| Anthony Perkins
|
|-
| colspan="2"| Best Film Promoting International Understanding
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| National Board of Review Awards
| colspan="2"| Top Ten Films
|
| align="center" rowspan="2"|
|-
| Best Actress
| Dorothy McGuire
|
|-
| Writers Guild of America Awards
| Best Written American Drama
| Michael Wilson
|
| align="center"|
|}
The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:
- 2004: AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs:
- "Friendly Persuasion (Thee I Love)" – Nominated
- 2005: AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores – Nominated
Other adaptations
Another adaptation of the novel was made for television in 1975, starring Richard Kiley, Shirley Knight, Clifton James and Michael O'Keefe. It was adapted by William P. Wood and directed by Joseph Sargent. This version also included material from Jessamyn West's sequel novel, Except For Thee and Me.
See also
- List of American films of 1956
References
Further reading
- Mirisch, Walter (2008). I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin. .
External links
- Friendly Persuasion at AllMovie