Friendly Persuasion

Prestige films made in the fifties were often adaptations of novels and, so, these movies don't have narratives that are readily assimilated to our expectations today.  These movies contain a wealth of events and characters intended to convey the impression of an entire world.  Accordingly, films of this sort are loosely constructed, episodic, leisurely -- it is often not entirely clear what the movie is supposed to be about.  In this regard, William Wyler's Friendly Persuasion (1956) resembles pictures like John Ford's My Darling Clementine  or How Green was my Valley-- the focus is on a community of people and the actual dramatic conflict motivating the film seems secondary for much of the movie's running time.  In Friendly Persuasion, the conflict between the pacifist Quakers and their neighbors who are embroiled in the Civil War is central to the movie, and, given its release eleven years after the Second World War, afforded the theme of principal interest to contemporary audiences -- presumably, veterans of World War Two were interested in whether there were other peaceful ways to resolve conflict.  Indeed, near the climax of the film, a non-Quaker neighbor salutes Jess (played by Gary Cooper) for refusing to join the fighting -- the man says:  "I'm glad that you're refusing to fight.  Maybe, it will show us another way of solving these things."  This is a generous sentiment, intrinsic to the film's simple humanity, and, probably, reflects the viewpoint of many Americans who had experienced war first-hand in Europe or the Pacific and, now, wanted no part of further conflict.  And the film's pacifist narrative is mirrored by its structure and digressive plot -- Friendly Persuasion, based on a best-selling novel by Jessamyn West, is really about peace and its humble pleasures and conflicts; the movie is a war film only briefly and  incidentally.

Friendly Persuasion focuses on a Quaker family lives in an idyllic setting among orchards and ponds in southern Indiana.  The film's camerawork is extraordinary -- the trees around the Quaker homestead have the soft, luminous quality of landscapes by Corot and the rivers and lakes have a particularly moist, intensely liquid quality, mirroring the bucolic fields and barns and mills like gorgeous Impressionistic canvases.  Wyler is capable of staging action in depth -- in some scenes, there is foreground action, people in the middle distance, and, then, horsemen, for instance, approaching or receding in the shadowy distance.  The interiors are softly lit and, again, feature different zones of action -- in one memorable scene, husband and wife and their eldest son are debating the boy's determination to join the war effort when the family's daughter, still aroused from a romantic encounter, sweeps into the house and climbs some wooden stairs with languorous yielding step.  The combination of the family crisis with the young woman's sexual awakening creates a powerful emotional effect, all accomplished by staging the two events in one continuous, well-defined space.  The action is logically developed, playing out over terrain that has certain features to which the camera returns again and again -- the meeting houses, dirt lanes where Gary Cooper races his buggy against his neighbor, a covered bridge.  The movie is quite bawdy for its time -- there is an overtly sexual encounter between the Quaker youth (played by Anthony Perkins) and three sex-starved farm girls at an isolated farm governed by a leering matriarch, the Widow Hudspeth, played by Marjorie Main.  The "friendly persuasion" named in the title seems to be sexual in nature -- for instance, Jess who is enamored with music persuades his straitlaced Quaker wife (she is actually the preacher and leader of the sect) to allow an organ in their home after a sexual rendezvous in the barn to which she has retreated in anger after the sinful instrument was delivered to her home.  We see Gary Cooper pathetically grateful to his wife after this encounter, his shoulders covered with straw from the barn where they have spent the night.  After some initial scene-setting in which the Quaker opposition to the Civil War is established -- the Quaker priestess says:  "I will not kill one man to free another" -- the movie concerns itself with the rivalry between Jess and his neighbor about the speed of their trotting horses, the daughter's romance, a trip to the county fair in which one Quaker youth wrestles a professional fighter called "the Billy Goat," and Jess' business trip to Ohio that results in his meeting with Marjorie Main and her sex-starved family of nubile young women -- the young engage in flirtation while Jess horse-trades with the matriarch.  Jess buys an organ at the fair, a purchase that puts some strain on his marriage, but repairs the breach with his tryst with his wife in the barn.  There is a pet goose named Samantha and a little boy who, in classic Hoosier fashion, is shown fishing from a ramshackle dock his head covered in a tattered straw hat -- he looks like a figure from a James Whitcomb Riley poem. (The little boy is the enemy of aggressive goose, Samantha, a big, loud creature that harasses the child mercilessly and that the boy also relentlessly teases, an allegory for the conflict between human beings that results in warfare -- a pointless, mindless conflict that everyone enjoys until the play gets a little too rough.)  The family harbors a runaway slave and, when the war comes close to the farm, the Black man takes up a rifle and joins the irregular forces who plan to repel a rebel invasion at the ford in the river.  The last 25 minutes of the film -- and it is about 145 minutes -- concerns the Confederate invasion.  The Quakers find themselves plunged into the war and, of course, their pacifist values are compromised when real violence engulfs them.  The son, played by Anthony Perkins, impetuously joins a civilian force of guerillas poised to ambush the Confederates at the river and, when a man is killed next to him, joins in the battle.  His father later finds him wounded on the battlefield, grief-stricken and unable to leave the side of the Confederate boy that he has killed in hand-to-hand combat.  When a foraging rebel tries to snatch Samantha the goose from the family's farm, the Quaker woman beats the soldier with a broom, appalled at her own violence.  The Confederate soldier, filmed from an angle that suggests rape (we see his crotch and his big belt buckle emblazoned with the confederate emblem) reacts in a courtly manner, doffing his hat to the enraged woman and advising her that he wished he had known before-hand that the goose was a family pet.  The film is politically conflicted about pacifism in a realistic and compromising way-- it acknowledges the nobility of the Quakers' beliefs but, also, suggests that they can not be implemented in the real world. 

I saw this film on the night after ISIS claimed responsibility for massacring over a hundred civilians in Paris.  The French have vowed to "punish severely" those responsible for the attacks.  In Friendly Persuasion, the Quaker woman-preacher did not allow music in her home, notwithstanding the fact that we learn that she was once a good dancer -- indeed, her husband wooed and won her on the dance-floor -- and we see her tapping her foot to music at the county fair, watching the couples dancing with a wistful look until she sees her own daughter among them, dancing with a handsome Union soldier on leave.  Of course, the Taliban were famously against music and instituted an auto da fe of musical instruments when they seized power in Afghanistan.  The pressure of themes in Wyler's Friendly Persuasion remains with us today -- and, indeed, is, perhaps, even more significant in November of 2015 than in 1956 when the film was made.