The Friendly Persuasion

The Friendly Persuasion is a quiet little exercise in nostalgia that somehow turns out to be one of the most pleasant motion pictures to come out in ever so long. If not great drama-in fact, as far as construction is concerned, scarcely drama at all-the film still admirably achieves its small goal of recreating the life of a Quaker family in southern Indiana during the Civil War.

The argument is simple enough: should the men of the family, by conviction all confirmed pacifists, fight a band of Confederate raiders who are invading the territory? Mother Birdwell, a woman of strong convictions and an ordained minister of her church, is all against the idea, but her husband, who has already demonstrated a somewhat "worldly" tendency by his predilection for horseracing, can't quite make up his mind. He finally stays home but lets his teen-age son go off to take a few potshots at the rebels. The admirable thing about all this is not so much that the picture manages to say that it is much more difficult to make peace than to fight a war, but that it does so with a minimum of pretentious talk.

The second great virtue of the movie is the excellent quality of the acting on the part of all the principal performers. Gary Cooper, in the part of the father, is not an actor noted for the range of emotions which he can project, but this time he has found a part which can exploit his taciturn talents. He manages to suggest the battle going on in his character's soul, and a suggestion is really all the script requires. Dorothy McGuire, as the mother, must, on the other hand, show such divergent feelings as straight-laced devotion to duty and strong love for her family. She does so with great assurance. But the most impressive performance is contributed by Anthony Perkins, as the son who wants to go to war. In his first motion picture role, he shows himself an actor capable of rare skill and-as this picture requires-restraint.