Friendly Persuasion (B-M Productions, Allied Artists Pictures, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (June 18), Turner Classic Movies continued its “Star of the Month” tribute to Gary Cooper with the 1956 film Friendly Persuasion, produced by B-M Productions in association with Allied Artists – which sounds like a knock-off competitor to United Artists but was really our old friends, Monogram Pictures. Monogram spun off Allied Artists in 1947 as an outlet for higher-quality “A” productions, and their first release under the Allied Artists name was It Happened on Fifth Avenue, a rather strange movie directed by Roy Del Ruth after the original producer-director, Frank Capra, gave up on it and made It’s a Wonderful Life instead. (My husband Charles and I saw it last December, and I reviewed it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/12/it-happened-on-fifth-avenue-roy-del.html.) Charles came home while Friendly Persuasion was about halfway over and he immediately recognized it as something we’d watched together years before – though I had no prior memory of us having seen it as a couple. To the extent that I had any prior recollection of it, I remembered it as a much better movie than it seemed to be last night. The story began as a series of short tales published between 1940 and 1945 by author Jessamyn West, who like the central characters was a Quaker from Indiana. She collected them into a novel in 1945 and it got made into a movie in 1956, when there was a big market for homey family stories that nostalgically portrayed rural life at a time when rural life was quickly disappearing from America.

It takes place in 1862 and stars Gary Cooper as Jess Birdwell, Quaker paterfamilias and exemplar of the church’s pacifist values, who’s suddenly confronted by the need for his family to fight back or die against a band of Confederate marauders who are sweeping through the local territory, stealing livestock and crops and then burning everything they leave behind. Friendly Persuasion was a personal project of director William Wyler, who was hired by Allied Artists production chief Steve Broidy at a time when Broidy was mounting a push to end Monogram’s low-ball reputation once and for all by signing “A”-list directors William Wyler, Billy Wilder, and John Huston to make major films with major stars. Ironically, as Billy Wilder’s biographer Maurice Zolotow pointed out, Broidy’s announcement was met with a sudden drop in Allied Artists’ share price, as investors realized that by abandoning the sure income of Monogram’s “B” business and sailing in the more troubled waters of “A”-level filmmaking, Broidy was risking the company’s solvency. Wilder made Love in the Afternoon for Broidy and Huston embarked on a production of Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King with Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart – only by the time Huston actually made that film, it was 20 years later, both Gable and Bogart were dead, and his stars were Sean Connery and Michael Caine.

For the first two-thirds of Friendly Persuasion, nothing much happens except a couple of carriage races between Jess Birdwell and a non-Quaker local farmer, Sam Jordan (Robert Middleton); a festival that comes to town at which Jess buys an organ from traveling salesman Professor Quigley (Walter Catlett, whose dry wit briefly enlivens this movie even though he’s in only two scenes) and then stashes it in his attic because Jess’s wife Eliza (Dorothy McGuire,who was actually 15 years younger than Cooper: he was born May 7, 1901 and she on June 14, 1916) disapproves; and the predictable complications involving their three children. The oldest, Josh (played by Anthony Perkins in his first major role), is an almost terminally “good” boy who seems content to stay on the farm, do chores (in one scene he’s enlisted into service to midwife the birth of a new calf). The middle one, Maddie (Phyllis Love), falls in love with a Union servicemember, Gard Jordan (Mark Richman), who’s there to organize a Home Guard of the farmers of this community, Vernon, against the Confederate raiders. The youngest is a pre-pubescent boy named Jess, Jr. (Richard Eyer, a popular child actor in the 1950’s and, like most child actors of either gender in the wake of Shirley Temple’s enormous success in the 1930’s, he copies her horrendous sweetness and cuteness) who’s in a constant war with Samantha the Goose (who actually gets a line in the credits as playing herself!), Eliza’s beloved house pet. Friendly Persuasion begins to go wrong from the opening credits, which feature a song called “Friendly Persuasion (Thee I Love),” written by Dimitri Tiomkin (music) and Paul Francis Webster (lyrics) and sung in the deep, rich, soulful voice of … Pat Boone. Tiomkin also composed the film score, and it’s mostly him at his treacly worst.

For the first 90 minutes or so Friendly Persuasion plays like an episode of the TV show The Waltons inexplicably expanded to feature-film length. Then the war comes to town and Mattie sends off Gard to fight (he proposes to her just before he leaves and she accepts, so it’s no surprise at all that he doesn’t come back alive from his first battle). Josh decides to join the Union Home Guard and confronts the Confederates across a river; at first he’s reluctant to shoot, but when his buddy gets it he fires back. (It’s ironic indeed to see Anthony Perkins play someone so squeamish about killing other people when his most famous role, as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho four years later, cast him as a mad serial killer.) Even Eliza joins the conflict when a Confederate raiding band shows up at their home and she invites them to dinner and to help themselves to their stores of food – only to get angry and club a Confederate soldier in the back of his head with a broom because he was about to capture and kill Samantha, her pet goose. Even Jess, Sr. ends up taking his long rifle out of the closet and joining the fight, cornering a Confederate soldier but then sending him on his way and refusing to shoot him. The conflict between Quaker values and the need to fight was done a good deal better in Cooper’s other films, most notably the two which won him his Academy Awards for Best Actor: Sergeant York (1941) and High Noon (1952). In both those films he’s trapped between pacifism (his own in Sergeant York, his wife’s in High Noon) and the need to fight back against evil.

Friendly Persuasion is an O.K. movie, brilliantly photographed in 20th Century-Fox’s home color system, DeLuxe, by Ellsworth Fredericks. It’s a nice souvenir of the days when color films were actually colorful; the carnival scenes are a riot of bright colors and even the subdued brown tones of the Birdwells’ farmhouse are obviously an artistic choice (it’s the filmmakers’ idea of what a rural scene would have looked like before electric light) instead of the default look for virtually everything the way it is today. I also appreciate Wyler’s desire to slow down the tempo of his movie to reflect the slower pace of rural life – especially rural life in 1862 – though 14 years earlier he’d made Mrs. Miniver, a much better film about life on the home front during a major war.