The Eleanor Roosevelt Story

Two weeks ago, Bosley Crowther called The Eleanor Roosevelt Story the best documentary ever made. For perhaps the first time in his professional life, Mr. Crowther is right.

The life of Mrs. Roosevelt presents two major obstacles to the moviemaker: the first half of it is recorded only in faded still photographs, and the last half is inextricably bound up with the far more photogenic career of her husband. Producer Sidney Glazier has cleared both obstacles so cleanly that the viewer is hardly aware they exist. Sifting through more than 3000 stills, he has found a handful of early shots that reveal all the sadness, isolation, and boredom of Eleanor's childhood in Mrs. Astor's New York. The film clips of the later years are edited with such spirit and precision that the viewer rarely wonders how FDR and the War are doing: the energetic First Lady more than fills the time and screen.

Ezra Laderman's original score makes the pictures literally cohere, flow together, and progress. For the childhood melancholies, he has devised a haunting leitmotif that occurs again and again to enhance the glory and meaning of later triumphs.

But the music and photography, for all their beauty and aptness, are only corollaries to the script. The author, Archibald MacLeish, wisely insisted that Glazier and Laderman work from it without changes. It is simple and poetic, yet within the eulogistic lyricism, MacLeish offers dozens of fresh insights into the motives and character of Mrs. Roosevelt. He makes her humanity human. And at the end we know the woman, not as a psychiatrist or a political admirer would, but as her friends must have.