New Picture

Wilson (20th Century-Fox), cinema biography of the 28th U.S. President, may not be the most ambitious and venture some moving picture ever made. But it is indisputably the most expensive. The wardrobe alone cost $200,000; the total cost of this three-hour plea for internationalism--including $1,200,000 for promotion--is some $5,200,000.*

Hollywood at the Crossroads. Wilson is not a great picture, but it is an extremely absorbing, significant and entertaining one, which everyone interested in the protracted coming-of-age of U.S. cinema will welcome. Millions are likely to be excited and moved by it. It is not the first or the best Hollywood attempt to make first-rate entertainment out of serious ideas. But more spectacularly than any other film to date, Wilson represents Hollywood at the crossroads--a Hollywood scared to death of mature responsibilities yet eager to assume them, and willing now & again to bet its shirt on the attempt.

Appearing as 1944 political tempers grow warm, Wilson might be interpreted as straight Fourth Term propaganda. But as Producer Darryl Zanuck, a Republican, pointed out last December, it might just as easily have proved helpful to Wendell Willkie, board chairman of 20th Century-Fox, whose One World Zanuck will produce if Wilson clicks. And Wilson is so patently sincere that even its stoutest ideological opponents may well wish Darryl Zanuck luck when he grimly announces that if Wilson flops: "I'll never again make a picture without Betty Grable."

Petty Cash. It must have been with truly heroic restraint that Mr. Zanuck kept Miss Grable out of Wilson itself: he has put in just about everything else in reach. Messrs. Zanuck, Lamar Trotti (who wrote the screen play), Henry King (who directed it) and their vast corps of experts stopped short of resinking the Lusitania, refighting World War I and rebuilding postwar Paris. But they did produce replicas of the White House and the U.S. House chamber whose accuracy will bring gasps of admiration from Washingtonians.

They transformed the ballroom of Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium into a scrupulous likeness of the 1912 Democratic convention hall at Baltimore. Hugest interior shot, the convention scene was "light-painted" for Technicolorists by enough electric power to service a city of 80,000.

How to Sell a "Character." But gargantuan sets were easy by comparison with the problem of converting a famously cold and fiercely arrogant intellectual--in the withering jargon of show business, a "character"--into a cinema hero. The makers of Wilson have gentled, sweetened, warmed, simplified and softlighted Woodrow Wilson's complex personality in every way the facts allowed. Their title-role choice of Canadian-born Alexander Knox, largely for his excellent voice, was well-nigh perfect for the purpose.

Knox's blend of primness, courage, unworldliness and warmth is expertly and sincerely manipulated. Wilson's interest in golf, football, baseball, is carefully jotted in; his love of vaudeville brings Eddie Foy Jr. in a charming re-creation of Foy Sr.'s old act; and his home life is chiefly represented as high-collared close harmony, with his wife and three daughters expounding such lamplit tunes as Put On Your Old Grey Bonnet. Ruth Nelson, as gentle Wife No. 1, tells her daughters of Wilson's profound need for love and trust, in an uncommonly touching sickroom scene; her funeral affords an opportunity for high-grade tear jerking rivaled only by a scene in which serenading Princeton undergraduates softly roll Old Nassau to their president.

As Wife No. 2, Geraldine Fitzgerald is cultivated, gallant, kind, almost too beautiful to keep the fiction nonfictional enough. The difficult scene in which Wilson proposes to her is handled with a tact and maturity and absence of romantic blur which alone would make this film notable. Thomas Mitchell, as the faithful Tumulty, devotes his reliable talents to the helpful idea that a ruggedly masculine man could be devoted to the remote, woman-foundered President. And Charles Coburn, as a composite of the Princeton professors whose friendship Wilson cherished all his life, contributes a rich, wise, valuable performance.

Wilson offers a far-from-definitive characterization of its complex protagonist, but as a dramatic idealization it is a skillful, harmonious and intelligent selling job. By contrast, Wilson cuts loose with the most amusing and cynical ribbing of demagogic types ever seen on the U.S. screen. Thurston Hall, as New Jersey's Senator-Boss Ed Jones (in real life: Jim Smith) who put Wilson in the Governorship and lived to regret it, is the finest caricature of a suet-voiced political boss that Hollywood has ever produced.

Fact & Fiction. The political and moral story of Woodrow Wilson is a great and fascinating one. The political and moral story told in Wilson is by no means so great or so fascinating. There have been some inevitable dramatic foreshortening, simplifications, fictional invention. One of the finest scenes in Wilson (his terrifying outburst against Germany's Ambassador von Bernstorff) is wholly fictional. Another (his breakdown, in mid-speech, on a train platform in Pueblo) is semifictional, and its most telling touch (when Mrs. Wilson draws down one window shade after another between the bewildered people and her broken husband) is completely so. And the introduction of Colonel House, in a few brief glimpses, as a mere ankle-rubbing old White House cat is a seriously misleading oversimplification.

There are others, still more serious. The American people, as a motivating force in politics, are inadequately suggested in this picture and Wilson operates almost in a political vacuum. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) is a cold patrician, complete with white eyebrows and whiskers, but his opposition to Wil son will seem to some to grow as much out of the fact that Colonel House was once ushered in to see the President ahead of him as out of a larger clash of ideas.

Despite a couple of installments of magnificent newsreel, Wilson conveys very little feeling of World War I's tragic terror, and none whatever of that all-but-millennial popular reception of Wilson abroad which is one of the most moving moments in history. The fearful, slashing Battle of Versailles becomes a Wilson-v.-Clemenceau spat in which the enormous symbolizations and crossed motives of everyone present attain only token force. And the disintegration of Wilson's position is not even indicated.

Wilsonian Act. But Wilson is far more to be honored for its integrity and courage than regretted for its shortcomings. It presents its case often with special pleading and sometimes without adequate dramatic force. But unlike most films, it does present a case, passionately, with simple confidence in its Tightness. On Hollywood's relatively modest scale, Producer Zanuck has performed a Wilsonian act: devoted to an idea and a hope, he has stuck his neck out as far as he could get it.

Since, unlike Woodrow Wilson, he is an experienced entertainer, his colorful, worshipful sermon on internationalism may serve to bring millions of Americans a few steps forward on the sawdust trail.

* Famed runners-up: GWTW ($4,000,000); Hell's Angels ($4,000,000); Ben Hur ($4,500,000).

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