Two Movies Named After 20th Century World Leaders

Now that I have caught up on making a record all of the movies I've seen I can see that I'm down to seeing about one a month. I'm going through a stretch now of seeing a few from the periods and categories that I have always liked. I am sure that there are probably a lot of movies from this century that I would like, but I haven't devised a system yet to consistently lead me to them (and I love operating off of systems), so for the time being I still get much more enjoyment out of what I am accustomed to. In any event the idea of generally preferring novel things, or that would even be able to make much of an impression on me, seems more and more strange to me as I get older.  I grasp the argument that one must grow tired of endlessly revisiting familiar things, but I guess I have not experienced in person enough of the tired images and activities and encounters that crowd my imagination to have had my fill of them such as to be always craving novelty. This will be the subject of some upcoming posts.


Tito and Me  (1992)

Another movie in that early-90s European arthouse vein that I have discovered of late enough positive associations that I have grown fond of it. This is a somewhat light-hearted Yugoslavian film about a chunky 10 year old set in 1954 that was made during the period when that country was in the act of violently breaking apart. The description on the DVD box that I bought it in order to watch it, since it isn't streaming anywhere, identifies it as being in the tradition of other wistful European films about childhood such as My Life as a Dog, Small Change, and a third one I had not heard of before the name of which escapes me. The appeal of this to me, and I did largely like it, lies in the details of its depiction of what looks like a fairly tranquil childhood in a minor European capital in a minor and I suppose even backwater European country under communism. The adults, especially those in their prime years, are all pointedly living in despair, from the two married couples and two children and one grandmother living together in a single one bathroom flat, to the artistic parents who frequently have to perform for party officials, to the teacher who writes on the chalkboard with great violence and flings the chalk on the floor afterwards, to the miserable leader of the student pilgrimage to the various sites around the country associated with Tito. The boy who is the main character I would not say loves Tito but develops an oddly vapid fascination for him that leads to his inadvertently winning an essay contest, the prize for which was to be a pilgrim on the aforementioned trip. I think this is supposed to be a metaphor for the absurdity of leader-worshipping political systems. There is a subplot involving a gangly girl from an orphanage who is the object of the protagonist's fledgling attempts at romance that I found oddly endearing. Having had a little glimpse of some of the less threatening remnants of that communist world when I lived in Prague I liked all of the parts that reminded me of that, such as when the student travelers camped out in the main hall of an old mansion on their trip (we did things like that!) or the easier familiarity of people who seem socially accessible to me with the worlds of arts and humanistic learning in general.  Also like many of the European films I am discovering from this time its way of understanding and engaging with the greater world whether via school or walking or traveling or the arts are just familiar to me in a way that I have had great difficulty finding anywhere in contemporary life.

Wilson (1944)


Big budget biopic of the now seriously downgraded 28th President of the United States, who is presented here as the near heroic but ultimately tragically over-idealistic figure that the popular histories of my youth still depicted him as. This flopped at the box office upon its initial release and I had never heard of it nor seen it come up in any discussion of Golden Age Hollywood, though it did get 10 Oscar nominations, including best picture, and won 5. I found it interesting and liked it, even though as a narrative it hits on all the points of the standard story of Wilson. There is Princeton, there is the governorship of New Jersey, the 1st Presidential campaign, the early progressive legislative successes, the contention with the Republican faction led by Henry Cabot Lodge, the death of his first wife, the courting of his second wife, the narrow re-election, America's entry into World War I, the Fourteen Points, the Versailles Peace Conference, the frantic tour around America to win support for the Treaty, the final collapse and debilitating stroke that left him bedridden for the final year of his Presidency. Filmed in technicolor with fairly loose restraint on expenses, it's a great-looking movie, almost worth seeing for the sets alone, and it has a cast full of very distinguished-looking though not especially well-remembered actors--the most recognizable to modern audiences (or at least audiences of my raised-on-TV 70s and 80s generation) would likely be Thomas Mitchell and Vincent Price, who appear here in minor roles. Wilson himself was played by Alexander Knox, a Canadian-born actor, in what appears to be by far his most prominent film role. Geraldine Fitzgerald, a very handsome Irish actress who had a solid career in the 30s and 40s, appearing frequently in adaptions of literary classics, portrayed the 2nd wife of the President. The 3 Wilson daughters were played by the kind of wholesome looking 1940s all-American girls I like, and the English actor Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who was pretty celebrated in his day, was striking as Henry Cabot Lodge. The notable French actor Marcel Dalio, who appeared in several of Jean Renoir's 30s classics, appeared as Clemenceau, along with Henry Cabot Lodge the traditional villain foiling Wilson's noble plans. It was directed by the longtime Hollywood stalwart Henry King, several of whose pictures I have written about here, mostly positively.

As someone who is generally a fan of the aesthetics of the periods of American history covered in this movie (those being the 1910s as they were remembered in the 1940s) I was able to get a lot of pleasure from being able to revisit that alone. The beautiful fashions and hairstyles and rooms of the time, the confident energy of the still-rising American nation. There is a scene where the student body of Princeton (all-male at that time of course) serenades Wilson outside his house on the night of his election to the presidency which I suppose would be regarded by most sentient people as corny but which always evokes to me something attractive about the spirit of that time. I liked the football game scene and the golfing scenes as well.


Given the recent controversies surrounding Wilson's evidently severe racism and the demands that places that still publicly honor him, at Princeton and elsewhere, stop doing so, there is an amusing scene at the end of the movie when the ailing Wilson laments to his wife that his grandchildren and the generations of the future will judge him hardly for his failures at achieving disarmament and getting the United States to join the League of Nations and so forth. That 100 years after his Presidency the most salient aspect of him to these people of the future, and one that was essentially universally regarded as negative, would be that he was an enthusiastic supporter of segregation and other appalling racial attitudes, probably never occurred to him. It certainly doesn't seem to have occurred to the script writers of the 1940s or most critics up to modern times who disliked the film for other reasons either.