A Woman Remembered

The Eleanor Roosevelt Story. "What we have to recall for ourselves," said Adlai Stevenson at her graveside, "is what she was herself. And who can name it?" This intimate, uncritical documentary is an effort to do so in film and in the feelingly written words of Archibald MacLeish, as narrated by

MacLeish, Eric Sevareid, and Eleanor Roosevelt's first cousin and childhood friend, Mrs. Francis Cole.

Story begins with a poignant collection of stills and family photographs. Staring disconsolately from nearly all of them is the vulnerable "ugly duckling" whose beautiful, indifferent mother died young and whose doting father provided meager solace to her. "He began drinking when she was quite small," Mrs. Cole recalls chattily. "Eventually he was sent off to a little town in Vir ginia." A painfully unpromising New York debutante, Eleanor became the bride of her cousin F.D.R. and seemed destined for a life of no particular distinction as a self-effacing wife, a frequent mother, a perfectly conventional matron of her day. The rush of great and terrible events in World War I jolted her into a realization that she herself might wield some power for good in public affairs. To keep pace with her deeds, Director Richard Kaplan had to resort to some familiar film, but he stresses the warmer glimpses of Eleanor, speechmaking in her uncertain falsetto or literally "running, flying, dancing" through election campaigns, the Depression, the White House years and World War II until her mileage became an American legend. Upon F.D.R.'s death in 1945, she told reporters, "the story is over," then went on to achieve mature distinction as a U.S. representative at the United Nations. "The figure that emerges in those last full years is without likeness in our history," MacLeish concludes. "The lonely little girl in the dark parlor had become a woman known by sight to millions of human beings and by repute to nearly all the world, a woman who stood for compassion and hope in every continent of the earth."

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