Roosevelt Retrospective

The show is only a few minutes old when a wonderful snapshot appears briefly on the screen -- of a 1907 car broken down under a canopy of sycamores somewhere on a road in Europe, with 25-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt grubbing in the dust beside it, fixing a flat. The shot is characteristic of the best moments in a new, 27-part ABC series called F.D.R., which promises to be about as complete a review of the President's life as television has yet provided. Using family albums and home movies made by his daughter, Anna Halsted, fully a third of the program's edited footage consists of material that has not previously been published or broadcast. The series begins this weekend and, judging from screenings of the first two episodes -- which follow Roosevelt from birth through his election as Governor of New York --F.D.R. has all the elements needed for an excellent presentation of modern history.

Arts & Causes. It is hard to fault a program that provides so much interest and, for many younger people, education. The program deserves praise just because it exists. With that understood, it must be reported that the producers have unfortunately glossed their good material with a veneer of embarrassingly bad taste. The first and worst offense is the voice of Charlton Heston, who speaks for the President. Roosevelt's own recorded voice will be used wherever possible, but in the interim Heston's St. Grotlesex mimicry is offensive, especially when heard beside the true voice of Mrs. Roosevelt, who recorded her own lines for the series before she died.

Scenes of Roosevelt's summer home on Campobello Island are delightfully period piece, full of shots of Roosevelt in his most informal hours--that is, with his jacket off, perhaps, but never his tie. But when the moment arrives to say that F.D.R. suffered his attack of polio there, lightning flashes in the sky, grey horses standing in the pasture neigh with terror, and ominously choppy waters are shown in whipping rain. The narrator tells how Roosevelt, on the day he fell sick, became overheated fighting a brush fire, and the producers stage a brush fire to illustrate. F.D.R. later cooled off by taking a deeply chilling swim in the Bay of Fundy. The inference is that these imprudences were the primary cause of his disease. Some people may have thought so in 1921, but these days even a TV audience has heard that polio is caused by a virus.

Troubles & Perquisite. As Roosevelt recovers and tries to learn to walk, a cameraman with a hand-held camera attempts to illustrate the ordeal by walking along the gravel driveway at Hyde Park photographing the ground in jerks, sways and clumsy lurches. Later, when Roosevelt becomes a gubernatorial candidate, the narrator points out that Republicans raised the cripple issue but Al Smith killed it, saying "A Governor does not have to be an acrobat." And what do you suppose leaps to the screen? A whole big top full of circus acrobats who swing and soar and throw triples for what seems like five solid minutes while the point sinks in, and in.

Despite the phony dramaturgy of the script and narration, F.D.R. is one more victory for F.D.R. His warmth, his charm, his wit and his arrogance are everywhere in the pictures of him. When the raw material is left alone, it is most eloquent. There is, for instance, a splendid home-movie clip of a dozen or so of his fellow polio victims, all youngsters, surrounding him and eventually inundating him in a water-polo game at Warm Springs. And there is a delightful illustration of Roosevelt's jaunty sense of perquisite as he is being piped aboard a light cruiser. He stands importantly at the head of the gangway in his capacity as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, noting his own flag, designed by him, flying above the bridge. He is obviously using the warship as the most agreeable means he can think of to journey up to his vacation retreat at Campobello.

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