WHEN representing, in enormous technicolored vistas, the Demo- cratic Party
Convention of 1912 or Wilson's Declaration of War speech to the House of Representatives, Wilson has the spectacular courage of its convictions, but round the White House fireside the President and his family are impersonated with timidity and awe. The acting in the principal parts is wooden and the dialogue often comically stilted. Though Wilson was an unanimated character, there is no reason to suppose that the members of his intimate circle were all fashioned from the same timber. The answer is no doubt that Wilson hlti to be a Respectful Picture. Yet in spite of its curious inhumanity (the people of the world are somehow not a party to it), this is a worth whilejob. For almost the first time that I cad remember, enormously expensive settings do seem to justify their cost. Times Square on Election Night, a Princeton football game, such spectacles set a new standard for the cinema in a film which struggles with its emotional inhibitions to strike a blow against Amer'can isolationism. It is true that history has been distorted, not by inaccuracy in individual episodes but by their selec- tion, and that Europe and European statesmen scarcely figure at all (Lloyd George appears as a silly little waxwork). Yet in America the film can do little but good. It places squarely on the shoulders of such figures as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (excellently played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke) the responsibility for fatally injuring at birth the League of Nations on which depended the world's hope of peace. And the moral for today is obvious. Outs.ide America the effect of the film may be to arouse suspicions about American post-war participation in international peace-building, but balancing this will be a more realistic understanding of the American political machine. Wilson is not the great screen tragedy it might have been, but it is first-rate propaganda for. the indivisibility of peace. The idea of using an almost unknown actor (Alexander Knox) in the name part was theoretically sound, but I found his performance unsubtle.
EDGAR ANSTEY.
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