The Magnificent Yankee

There's not much substance here, at least in terms of the legal side of Oliver Wendell Holmes. This is more about the man as husband, with a few doses of patriotism. It'd downright sentimental.

I've always liked Louis Calhern in old films, but I'm not quite sure. He's, at best, a good character actor. It is said that he was given the title role here as thanks from the studio for being a good soldier and accepting so many character roles. Perhaps the best acting in this picture comes from Ann Harding as the wife.

The social importance of Holmes' years on the Supreme Court is mentioned, but almost in passing. But, as Bosley Crowther put it in his review at the time, it's a "gentle screen drama". It really is more about marital companionship than law, as Crowther pointed out. It is most touching as Mr. & Mrs. Holmes reach their sunset years.

First, the casting of Lewis Calhern as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ann Harding as his wife, Fanny Bowditch Holmes, is perfect together. The film is set around Holmes' life as a Supreme Court Justice with the late Louis Brandeis who was the first Jewish member of the supreme court. The film is first rate and the script could use a little work. This film is an example of old Hollywood at it's brilliance with class, style, and a terrific cast and crew. The film's historical basis allows the story to be told easily. You can't help but enjoy Harding and Calhern on the screen as a loving couple. They don't make such high quality films anymore where it's character driven. I watched this film this morning and I couldn't take my eyes off Calhern as he played the late Oliver Wendell Holmes nor Ann Harding as his wife. The film is a perfect example of what thrived in Old Hollywood in it's golden era. It's never recovered from days where veterans like Harding and Calhern and many others worked five films per year.

I had never even heard of this film until I saw it yesterday on TCM. Louis Calhern does an excellent job portraying Holmes, and Ann Harding does a creditable job as his wife, although she is saddled with lines of insufferable banality. Eduard Franz is quite good as Brandeis, and judging from pictures I have seen, he looks quite a bit like Brandeis as well.

All this having been said, it was astonishing to me that this film tells us almost nothing about Holmes' professional life, even though he spent over 30 years as a Supreme Court Associate Justice. Holmes is 61 years old when the film begins! The only hint we get of his life before this is a couple of mentions that he fought in the US Civil War, and that he went to Harvard. There is no mention of his having been Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. There is no inkling of why Teddy Roosevelt appointed him to the US Supreme Court, and we are left with very little notion of why Roosevelt was disappointed with Holmes, other than that Holmes wrote a few opinions that Teddy didn't like.

The film seems totally unwilling to tackle weighty or controversial subjects. We get a few glimpses of Holmes' rulings on free speech issues, and his willingness to restrict free speech when it may present a clear and present danger to the public good. Holmes' notorious opinion in Buck v. Bell, upholding the right of the state to sterilize 'mentally defective' people, in which Holmes made the statement that 'three generations of imbeciles is enough, is never mentioned. The focus of this film is almost entirely on Holmes' domestic life and the fact that he and his wife devotedly loved each other but regretted not being able to have children. The film also depicts how Holmes' court clerks were in effect surrogate sons. Louis Brandeis is a significant character in the film, but he is there only to show that he and Holmes had a close friendship and often voted alike. The film depicts that the appointment of Brandeis by Wilson in 1916 was controversial, and that 22 senators voted against confirmation, but we are never told exactly why Brandeis was controversial, other than that his being Jewish may have been a factor. Finally, I was irritated by the fact that there is a recurrent character named Adams, whose first name is never mentioned. We learn that he is a grandson of John Quincy Adams, but who is he? Is he Henry Adams or Charles Francis Adams? We never find out.

This film was released in 1950. That is surprising, because it must have been an anachronism even then. It has much more of the flavor and feel of the biopics of the 1930s, e.g., the biographies of Pasteur and Juarez starring Paul Muni, although it is nowhere near as good as either of those. In short this is an entertaining film worth watching for Calhern's performance, but don't expect to learn anything of substance about Holmes.

I had never seen this film before until I saw it on TCM TV the other day. It is really an extraordinarly drama of the life of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes portrayed by Louis Calhoun and his wife played by Ann Harding, and directed by John Sturges. Judge Lewis Brandeis is played by Eduard Franz. Holmes always wanted a son and he called all 30 of his secretaries "his sons". One of the sons I recognized but just couldn't think of his name, so I looked it up; sure enough he was played by child actor Jimmy Lydon whom I always loved in films. Lydon played the part of Secretary Clinton. This truly is a well acted and enjoyable biography. Highly recommended!

Louis Calhern was a good all around actor. Besides playing villains like De Villefort in THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO opposite Robert Donat, he played comic villains against Wheeler and Woolsey in DIPLOMANIACS and "Ambassador Trentino" against the Marx Brothers in DUCK SOUP. He had vast stage background, and Vincent Minelli used him as an adviser in THE BAND WAGON in staging the sequence of OEDIPUS REZ with Jack Buchanan as Oedipus, and as the voice of Lana Turner's famous actor father in THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL. He only had one lead role in any film he appeared in - it was as Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in THE MAGNIFICENT YANKEE. He had been appearing in it on Broadway, and MGM bought it for him to star in as a reward for all of his great journeyman work. It is for that reason that his stage performance was preserved.

I can't say if it is his greatest role. His moment of truth in THE ASPHALT JUNGLE is far more gut wrenching, but he shares the honors with Sterling Heyden, Sam Jaffe, Jean Hagen, Marilyn Monroe and the rest of the cast there, not to mention the direction of John Huston. But his is a steady, likable, and intelligent Holmes (who ages from 61 to 91: he was on the court form 1902 - 1932). He is not shown to disadvantage - the typical problem of "classic biography" from Hollywood's golden age. A biography in that period showed the basic achievement of the hero or heroine, but none of the bad points of their characters: Henry Stanley in STANLEY AND LIVINGSTON is shown as the brave and determined reporter/explorer who finds Livingston and is converted to his attempt to bring Christianity to the continent - actually Stanley would be a great explorer, but helped exploit the natives for profits. Thomas Edison is shown as the great inventor in EDISON THE MAN, but they fail to discuss his patent fights and his stealing credit from some of his co-workers (or employees).

In Holmes case they do not mention BELL v. VIRGINIA, where he supported sterilization for idiots ("Three generations of idiots is enough!"). Fortunately that moment is captured by Maximilian Schell in JUDGMENT AT NUREMBURG, when he reads part of Holmes decision (not a dissent, by the way, but the decision) to show Nazi policy on sterilization was common in other countries. Another odd decision was one where Holmes came out in favor of a state statute allowing peonage to pay off debts. He could make peculiar decisions occasionally.

But most of his famous dissents are the ones we do recall him for. He and Brandeis would craft the law of the middle and late 20th Century with their dissents to the predominantly conservative brethren. Oddly enough not all the dissents by Holmes are always "liberal" in spirit either. In 1904 Theodore Roosevelt was angered when the court's decision in the "NORTHERN SECURITIES" Case that destroyed a railroad monopoly was met with a dissent by Holmes, who could not see how the creation of a large holding company proved to be an interference with commerce as envisioned in the Sherman anti-trust act. Most people probably feel that the decision by Rufus Peckham was important in helping destroy the use of business trusts in this country, but Holmes was willing to look into the reality of the situation. Roosevelt did not care for that, and suggested he could have carved a man with more backbone out of a banana (or a chocolate éclair, according to some accounts of the statement - it has also been attributed to former Speaker of the House Thomas Reed regarding President McKinley).

On the whole, though, the film is quite good in recapturing a great jurist's career. But I find it significant that since 1950 no other film biography about a Supreme Court justice has been made. We still have none about John Marshall, Earl Warren, Felix Frankfurter, Joseph Story. A television movie about Brown v. the Board of Education, starring Sidney Poitier as Thurgood Marshall, was made (Burt Lancaster was the lawyer for the Board of Education of Topeka, John W. Davis), but Marshall was not a justice on the court at the time. Henry Fonda appeared in a film about Clarence Gideon, GIDEON'S TRUMPET, but Gideon was the appellant in that case that helped determined the right to counsel in a criminal case. Cases could be subject to films, but not judges. I find that sad.

Calhern was nominated for an Oscar for best actor in THE MAGNIFICENT YANKEE, but lost to Jose Ferrer as CYRANO DE BERGERAC. But he got roles that were more in the quasi-lead rather than support category from then on, like THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, his money-man snared by his plans in EXECUTIVE SUITE, and his performance in the title role of JULIUS CAESAR. He was playing Col. Purdy III in the film version of TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON when he died in 1955. He was in demand until the end of his career, which was the end of his life.