Sunrise at Campobello (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Darragh O’Donoghue

Produced by Dore Schary; directed by Vincent J. Donehue; screenplay by Dore Schary, based on his play; cinematography by Russell Harlan; edited by George Boemler; music by Franz Waxman; art direction by Edward Carrere; starring Ralph Bellamy, Greer Garson, Hume Cronyn, Jean Hagen, Ann Shoemaker, and Alan Bunce. Blu-ray, color, 144 min., 1960. A Warner Archive Collection release.

In 1938, MGM released Boys Town, the famous male weepie about a Catholic priest who establishes a home for underprivileged boys. A didactic film, it shows the boys learning to be good citizens, as they vote for their own mayor and hold court sessions. Like Sunrise at Campobello, it demonstrates the power of a charismatic leader and of persuasive oratory, and ends with the ballyhoo of an election platform. One of those standing for election is a young polio who feels marginalized by a community he thinks prizes physical prowess over mental or moral values. As the light brightens and “heavenly” music plays, Spencer Tracy’s Father Flanagan tells of another polio survivor: “There’s a true story about a man who was very ill for a long time, but he had courage. He got well. People began to cheer him for a lot of things. And he became the President of the United States.” This man, of course, is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

Boys Town was released at the start of FDR’s second of four terms as U.S. President; the construction of a commune for the socially marginalized was an allegory for his New Deal policy to lift Americans from the depredations of the Depression. The screenplay was written from his own story by Dore Schary—actor, playwright, liberal, Jewish activist, future producer, scourge of Hollywood communists and HUAC demagogues, and, most famously, the man who replaced Louis B. Mayer in 1951 as the head of MGM. Throughout his career, Schary was an active member of the Democratic Party and contributed to several reformist or socially conscious films or works celebrating national genius. In 1951 he generated It’s a Big Country, an all-star pageant promoting diverse facets of American citizenship. In the episode Schary himself wrote, Van Johnson plays an ambitious priest who neglects his true religious duties in order to impress the president with flattering sermons. Eventually guided by a wise older man, he is rewarded by a visit from the president, FDR’s former Vice President Harry Truman. 

His rocky tenure leading MGM terminated in 1956, and Schary returned to the stage as a writer, producer, and director. By far the most successful of his plays was Sunrise at Campobello (1958), the story of FDR’s years in the political wilderness after contracting polio. It ran for 556 performances on Broadway, and won four Tony awards, including Best Play, Best Actor (Ralph Bellamy as FDR), and Best Director (Vincent J. Donehue). It was made into a film by the Schary–Donehue–Bellamy team two years later, earning a Golden Globe for Greer Garson (who wasn’t in the original production). The project as a whole was warmly received across the political spectrum, and for years it served as a kind of unofficial monument to the president before the opening of the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC in 1997.

Although largely forgotten today, the film has been surprisingly influential. Its (relatively) positive representation of disability as something to live with rather than defeat or transcend, marked an advance on angst-ridden predecessors such as King’s Row (1942, with another future president, Ronald Reagan, waking up after surgery for a work-related accident with no legs and wailing, “Where’s the rest of me?!”), or The Men (1950) with a surly Marlon Brando as a WWII-wounded paraplegic. The casting of an able-bodied actor as awards bait would also be standard Hollywood practice. Less obviously, but perhaps even more lasting, is the film’s influence on the representation of politics as a fusion of (relatively) ordinary, intelligent people negotiating a defined but flexible system, rather than monumental historical protagonists going through their preordained paces—the roots of The West Wing can be found here.

Nevertheless, like the scene from Boys Town, Sunrise at Campobello is pure propaganda and hagiography. Made with the imprimatur of his widow and children (Eleanor was at Hyde Park for some of the production), and filmed on actual historical sites, it presents FDR as a Great President in the making, mastering both his unruly family and body as a dress rehearsal for directing the country, with Eleanor (Garson) at his side as his selfless helpmeet. There are none of the extramarital shenanigans or marital bitterness depicted in Hyde Park on Hudson (2012), set during FDR’s presidency.

Sunrise is as faithful to the play as it is to an idealized FDR. A few misjudged external scenes cannot conceal the theatricality of the enterprise. This is by no means a bad thing. Bellamy, after decades as a supporting stooge in A-list romantic comedies—including Mitchell Leisen’s Hands Across the Table (1935), where he attempted from a wheelchair to woo Carole Lombard—is remarkable as FDR, complementing his florid delivery of florid dialogue with some extraordinary and unprecedented physical acting that today, alas, will be dismissed as the disabled equivalent of a minstrel show. Bellamy’s frequent freezing in and out of iconic FDR poses exemplifies the film’s theme of performance, of the necessary presentation of the private individual in public life (one of the key biographies of FDR is titled FDR’s Splendid Deception). Garson has to overcome physical impediments worse than Nicole Kidman’s nose in The Hours (2002)—grotesque buck teeth and an even more grotesque fluting voice—and risks caricature, but succeeds in conveying warmth and spirit in the face of Schary’s sexist and condescending conception; she has to carry much of the film in its opening half as FDR recuperates off screen. Hume Cronyn is the heart and soul of the film as Louis Howe, FDR’s right-hand man, an asthmatic whose relish for the “real world” of compromised politics disgusts FDR’s patrician mother played with haughty relish by Ann Shoemaker.

It could be argued that Sara Roosevelt’s bigotry sublimates the anti-Semitism Schary faced throughout his career. It certainly signifies a major context for the release of the film. Although the play was conceived and produced long before he was ever considered a candidate, the film of Sunrise at Campobello was released six weeks before John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s election as president. The long final section, wherein FDR’s support for the Catholic candidate Al Smith against the wishes of conservative vested interests (represented by David White, soon to be a very different kind of businessman as Larry Tate in the beloved sitcom Bewitched), parallels the struggles faced by the Catholic Kennedy during his candidacy.

So not everything is sunny in Sunrise at Campobello—along with Catholicism there is mention of the Klan and the presence of meek African American servants, an uncomfortable reminder of the bubbling Civil Rights movement at the time of the film’s release. One startling scene, where FDR battles his suddenly Agrippina-like mother, is filmed with lurid close-ups that are closer to the socially conscious TV plays and juvenile delinquent films of the era than the sedate heritage drama we have been watching. It is worth noting that in an earlier Schary-scripted horror film, Robert Florey’s amazing Outcast (1937), a wheelchair-using man is a villain, terrorizing his wife, trying to ruin the life of a doctor; he appears in just one scene, but his malevolence spreads over the film like a spider’s web. In between the premiere of Sunrise on Broadway and its cinematic adaptation, Schary and Donehue made a version of Nathanael West’s scabrous 1933 novel Lonelyhearts (1958) with a harrowed, post-car accident Montgomery Clift. Filmed in sharp black-and-white Academy ratio in comparison to the lush widescreen Technicolor of Sunrise (brightly reproduced on this disc), it serves as a dark double of the later film, with its televisual style, “naturalistic” acting, toxic marriages, tyrannical or Mephistophelean authority figures and murderous fathers, orphaned children, and a “cripple” character who doesn’t triumph. Together, Lonelyhearts and Sunrise at Campobello offer an intriguing glimpse of the divided liberal American mind at the end of the conformist Eisenhower era, and on the brink of the 1960s. Both films indicate why that mind wasn’t best equipped to cope with that turbulent era. 

Darragh O’Donoghue works as an archivist at Tate Britain in London.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 2