Saturday Night at the Movies: When You’re Not Interested In War, But War Is Interested In You

The American Way

As you can probably guess after the recent deep dives into adaptations of Little Women and Anne of Green Gables, I left my manly war movie genes in my other pants. I suppose I can put on some false machismo, pretend I know the difference between a B52 and a B57, and take the occasion of Memorial Day to recommend classics like The Longest Day and Tora! Tora! Tora! – but my heart wouldn’t be in it. To put it in modern movie terms, I can respect the amazing technical filmmaking feats that go in to making a movie like Saving Private Ryan, but I wouldn’t want to watch it. I note that even Turner Classic Movies is celebrating this Monday with picks like Kelly’s Heroes and The Dirty Dozen – tons of fun, endlessly rewatchable, but not exactly ‘serious’ war movies.

              My kind of war movie isn’t a war movie at all, at least not at first. We meet the Birdwell family on their farm in beautiful rural Indiana, where the principal preoccupations are the upcoming county fair, finding horses fast enough to beat your neighbors in the race to church on Sunday morning, and an aggressive goose run amok. Hardly the Battle of the Somme. Yet this charming, sweet portrayal of American country life takes a turn when someone new walks in to the family’s church: a soldier. He is a Union officer, there to recruit for the war; it is 1862, and the Confederates are on the march. The recruiter faces a tall task, for there is something different about the Birdwells: they’re Quakers. Quakers who adhere strictly to nonviolence, even when the enemy is closing fast.

Americans of late think of war as something that takes place in faraway lands – the sands of Iwo Jima, the jungles of Vietnam, and of course, Paree. The Civil War, however, was no foreign affair, as these Indiana Quakers soon discover; it marches right into their farmhouse.

Friendly Persuasion is about what happens when the home front becomes the battle front. It has, in its depictions of that home front, all the family joy, drama, and adventure you could hope for. There is more than enough material in there to make a movie exclusively out of the Birdwell’s pre-war life, as these Quakers, so strange to their fellow citizens, try to navigate the devilish temptations of county fair boxing matches, organ sing-alongs, and overly amorous locals. William Wyler – rightfully up there in debates about the greatest director of all time, with too many unforgettable classics to list here – captures the loves and sorrows of daily life on the farm so skillfully that even a viewer over a century after the war would be willing to lay down his life for this piece of quintessentially American paradise. What about the Quakers themselves? Will they fight to preserve their ways, or stick true to those ways and in so doing let the enemy destroy all? You’ll have to watch to find out!  

              Wyler would do something similar – a portrayal of war’s effects on the sympathetic home front – for Britain, with another all-time favorite, Mrs Miniver. Yet this Monday is an American holiday, and Friendly Persuasion is, fittingly for this patriotic occasion, one of the most fundamentally American of movies. I’m not just talking about the county fairs and the religious freedom and the natural beauty, but about the deeper themes of the film. America as a whole may never have been as strictly pacifist as its Quaker minority, but we were, in President Washington’s famous words, historically wary of foreign entanglements. Or you could say, to return to Tora! Tora! Tora!, that we were a sleeping giant. I’m no foreign policy expert, and this is not the place to get into debates about the pros and cons of isolationism, but I think it’s fair to say that, these past several decades, the giant has been battling a real nasty case of insomnia. Yet even as certain political leaders of both parties seem happy only when arguing for even more ‘boots on the ground’ in even more faraway lands, the American people look at their home front and notice it is getting further and further from the Wyler ideal. The Birdwell’s home front was certainly worth fighting for; is ours? Without going so far as to endorse the radical pacifism of the Quakers, should we be bringing some of those soldiers home to rebuild our own family farms? Some food for thought as you watch this beautiful movie.

              If you want to get even more patriotic, this is the movie that President Reagan picked over all others to famously give as a gift to Gorbachev in a goodwill gesture, explaining to the Soviet leader that it was about “not just the tragedy of war, but the problems of pacifism, the nobility of patriotism, as well as the love of peace.”

              The acting could not be better: Gary Cooper is a legend for a reason, and Dorothy McGuire and Anthony Perkins (who sadly lost a lot of work because he was too good as the creep in Psycho) are fantastic as well.

I hope you enjoy it, and don’t forget say a prayer this weekend for all our soldiers, pacifist or not, who gave their lives fighting to preserve the joys of life on the home front.