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The Indomitable Teddy Roosevelt (Churchill Films, 1983) color; 93 min. The opening shots of producer-director Harrison Engle's new film on Theodore Roosevelt show us an American spectacle circa 1905; numerous marchers in a holiday parade troop by while the narrator, actor George C. Scott, intones that, "A parade is usually clear evidence that the marchers know where they are going." If one could only say the same thing about this film. Ninety minutes long, having taken up four years of Engle's life and costing about $400,000 to produce (financially aided by the Gannett Broadcasting Group), The Indomitable Teddy Roosevelt suffers from a lack of focus and an ambivalence about the audience it is addressing . Theodore Roosevelt undoubtedly was a "master of communication" and radiated "the energies that capture[d] the country"; there is little doubt that he was "the most entertaining man in America" and that the American people loved him, as the film maintains. Notwithstanding the great contribution the filmmaker has made in retrieving old footage of the Progressive Era, however, one does not get a clear picture of either Roosevelt or his time from this production. It is an idolatrous film that dangerously simplifies history in its attempt to reach a larger public . At times, it almost seems to project the roseate view of American history emanating from our current President. The film is broken up into three reels (from birth in 1856 to 1901; 1901-1909; 1909-1919). One of Engle's main points is that until the death of his own son during World War I, Roosevelt never escaped being a boy. His departure to the Badlands after the tragic deaths of his wife and mother in February 1884 allowed him to return to the primal world of nature with which he ,had been so immersed as an asthmatic youth. He was an "Ivy League swell parading in a frontier myth," Scott tells us without any additional analysis. His physically draining trip up the River of Doubt in Brazil after his loss of the 1912 Progressive Party candidacy was, as Roosevelt himself related, his "last chance to be a boy." The film finds Roosevelt's trip to the Pelican Island Bird Sanctuary to have been another occasion to seek "the winged companions of his childhood." These and other similar references were a strong part of Roosevelt's identity, as numerous historians have pointed out, but Engle's film overemphasizes them. Together with the extensive treatment of Roosevelt's military exploits , the viewer is given no understanding that there were any labor 68 disorders during Roosevelt's life or that there were serious political issues with which this child-man had to grapple. It reduces the White House years of Roosevelt to images of (a) the Presidential children playing on the lawn, (b) fascinating artifacts of his popularity with the consuming public, (c) the glories of his sponsorship of the Great White Fleet, the Panama Canal, and the peace between Russia and Japan, as well as (d) his ride in a submarine and shots of his 1905 inaugural parade. After relating Roosevelt's well known comment that, "I took the canal and let Congress debate," George C. Scott comments that "others see it as a naked attempt at gunboat diplomacy." There is no evidence in this film that the filmmaker has consulted the recent historical work on Roosevelt which would have given his subject the depth it deserves. Neither Roosevelt 's racism nor his sexism is deemed worthy of mention in this film. John Gable of the Theodore Roosevelt Association is credited for his assistance, but if attention had been given to books such as Thomas Dyer's account of Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (LSU Press, 1980) or George Juergens' News from the White House (U. Chicago Press, 1981) this film would have been vastly improved. Especially disappointing is the sound track which endlessly features the martial music of John Philip Sousa (even when buffaloes are seen confronting each other in the Wild West). The era of Theodore Roosevelt produced a rich variety of music (see Mark Sullivan's Our Times for specifics) that could have been used to great...

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