Friendly Persuasion
Directed by William Wyler
Gary Cooper – Jess Birdwell
A Quaker family live a peaceful and productive life in a prosperous Indiana farming community during the Civil War. Jess Birdwell, his wife Eliza and their children live their faith and their beliefs every day. They are friendly, open, honest and welcoming. They live an almost idyllic life. They also preach non-violence and remain neutral as far as the war and fighting goes. They are against slavery but don't feel men should be killed over the issue. Their eldest daughter Mattie is sweet on Gard Jordan who is now a Union Lieutenant but they think no less of him for that. Their peaceful coexistence with the war is tested, along with their faith and their beliefs, when a Confederate army threatens their area.
Also starring Dorothy McGuire, Anthony Perkins, Richard Eyer, Robert Middleton and Phyllis Love
This was President Ronald Reagan's favourite film. In May 1988 he presented Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev with a VHS copy.
Nominated for 6 Oscars, winner at Cannes Film Festival
Maria’s Notes
Friendly Persuasion is a film my father, Gary Cooper, was not at all sure he should do because it would have been the first time his role was as a father and he strongly questioned the wisdom of that as a career choice. The wonderful Director William Wyler, had wanted to do this picture for years with Cooper but had to postpone making it because previous film commitments made my father unavailable. Thank goodness they finally got together.
The Wylers and the Coopers were friends and the chance to work together made my father very happy. The story itself was written by Jessamyn West but the writer for the script was Michael Wilson. This was a resonance to a darker time in Hollywood when Michael Wilson’s name was withheld from the credits because the studio chose, “their right to deny credit to a writer who had been accused of being a member of the Communist Party or refused to answer charges of Communist affiliations.” Wilson had invoked the 5th Amendment when summoned to be a witness by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. This script was even nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adaptation but was judged ineligible! It’s quite an irony this story actually was based on an article written by a cousin of President Richard Nixon about their great great-grandparents – how strange – a pacifist screenplay written by a blacklisted writer about the ancestors of President Nixon.
The beautiful music score was composed by the Academy Award winning composer of High Noon, Dimitri Tiomkin. My father loved the music for the film and went around the house humming the theme song Thee I Love. The studio never asked Gary Cooper to sing it, they got Pat Boone instead and tried my father out on a song called Marry Me, Marry Me about which he said, “I hope all of this won’t ruin my career!”
It is interesting that this film along with Sergeant York and High Noon has as part of its essence a person’s conflict between civic and religious duty and how the lead character handles those decisions. In preparing for his role as Jess Birdwell, the head of a Quaker family, Jessamyn West took my father to several Quaker meetings so that he would have the experience of the fervor and simplicity of the meetings and get to know some members of the congregation. I remember my father saying, “I really like going to those meetings, they are still and they are quiet. I like being with them.” My father was asked how he felt about his role in the film and he answered with a smile, “Well, I played a backsliding Quaker.”
His eldest son, played by Anthony Perkins, is a young man again dealing with a conflict of conscience versus religious conviction and in the film they have a very touching relationship. One day my mother and I visited the set when they were filming a country fair. In a perhaps prescient moment, considering my 53-year long marriage to the world renowned concert pianist Byron Janis, my father went to one of the booths where there was a wonderful glass blower and after about a half hour he presented me with a box with 2 intricately designed glass figures – a concert piano and a man sitting playing it!
Maria Cooper Janis