Boston (film)

Boston is a 1957 film written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz for Twentieth Century-Fox, depicting the Four-Year War and the negotiation at Philadelphia that ended it, from the first shots at Lexington in April 1775 to the signing of the Charter of Union in the Old State House at Boston on 4 July 1783. It is the national epic of the United Kingdom of America and it occupies the place in the Realm’s self-image that a war of independence occupies elsewhere.

It is a film about a negotiation. Its first half is the war, centred on George Washington, who wins nothing and signs an armistice; its second half, after an interval that falls at the Peace of Boston, is four years of argument in rooms at Philadelphia, centred on Benjamin Franklin, and its last forty minutes contain no action of any kind. The film’s answer to the difficulty of dramatising a founding that ended in a treaty was to make the difficulty its subject: the audience knows the outcome and the characters do not, and the drama is the question of what each side will give up.

It was released as a roadshow in July 1957, running three and a quarter hours with an interval, and in general release from 1959 with nineteen minutes cut. It lost the Academy Award for Best Picture to The Bridge on the River Kwai, which the Realm has never quite forgiven, and won for Mankiewicz’s screenplay and for Aaron Copland’s score. It was shown in the Realm’s schools continuously from 1961 to about 1994, and two generations learned the founding from it: its phrasing of the Charter’s terms is better known than the Charter’s wording, and its casting fixed the faces of the founding generation so firmly that portrait historians complain about it.

It leaves out what the founding left out. Enslaved people appear in the general-release cut as servants in three scenes and are never named or given a line. The Native nations whose country the settlement disposed of appear once, in a line of dialogue given to a Crown commissioner, as a question for another day. James Baldwin made the first substantial criticism in 1968 and it was ignored. The schools stopped showing the film in the 1990s without an announcement, and the ABC’s fiftieth-anniversary broadcast in 2007 carried an introduction explaining what the film omitted, which produced complaints from people who had grown up with it.

The film survives complete only because of a condition attached to a corporate privilege. Twentieth Century-Fox held a royal charter requiring it to deposit a preservation negative of everything it released, and when it cut nineteen minutes for general release in 1959 and destroyed its own materials in the ordinary course, the deposit became the only complete copy of the roadshow version. When the full cut was restored from it in 1983, the missing minutes were found to contain the film’s only scene in which a servant speaks.

Synopsis

Part One

The film opens at dawn on Lexington Green on 19 April 1775, in silence. The main title is superimposed over the empty green before anyone arrives, the single word Boston in ivory Roman capitals above the words In CinemaScope, and holds for twenty seconds without music. When it fades, the camera is already watching a line of militia forming on the far side of the grass, facing a column of regulars coming up the road in the grey light. Nobody gives an order. A shot is fired from somewhere off the screen, and the film never shows who fired it, which Mankiewicz regarded as the most important decision in the picture.

The regulars march on to Concord and back to Boston under fire. George Washington, commissioned to command the forces gathering around the town, arrives to find an army of farmers who go home at harvest, and the first hour of the film is his education in the limits of what he commands: Bunker Hill, fought before his arrival and remembered by the men who fought it as a victory they lost; the winter siege; Henry Knox hauling the guns of Ticonderoga across the snow to the Dorchester heights; and the evacuation of the town by sea in March 1776, watched by Washington from the heights in a long shot in which he does not move.

Bunker Hill is the first half’s longest battle and it is filmed from the hill, from the point of view of the militia behind their earthwork, so that the audience sees the regulars come up the slope three times and never sees the men who order them to. The militia hold until their powder runs out and then fall back across the Charlestown neck, and the sequence ends not with the capture of the hill but with a quiet scene the next morning in which a militia officer counts the dead of both sides laid out in the same field. It is the first statement of the film’s view of the war, which is that the dead on either side were the same kind of men.

Knox’s journey with the guns is the half’s one sustained piece of adventure: a winter crossing of the mountains by sledge and ox-team, filmed on location in the snow of the northern polities, with Ernest Borgnine’s Knox as the only character in the film who is allowed to be purely cheerful. Its end, the guns appearing overnight on the Dorchester heights above the town, is the image the Realm’s schoolchildren remembered best from Part One.

The war then leaves Boston and the film follows it. It shows the defeat on Long Island and the night evacuation across the East River by the Marblehead mariners; the retreat across New Jersey; the crossing of the Delaware at night in the ice, staged as the film’s single set-piece of heroism and deliberately undercut by a scene the next morning in which Washington, reading the casualty returns, tells an aide that a victory which saves an army is not the same thing as one that wins a war.

A sequence in London, the film’s only departure from America, shows George III reading the Olive Branch Petition in 1775 and deciding to accept it, over the objections of his ministers, in a scene of eight minutes in which the King says almost nothing and the audience watches him change his mind. It is placed out of chronological order, after the Delaware, so that the audience learns in the middle of the war that the war did not have to be fought to a finish.

The last part of the first half is the stalemate: the prison hulks in New York harbour, shown briefly and without music; the exhaustion of both armies; the soldiers who have not been paid; the Crown’s re-garrisoning of Boston in 1778, and the curious peace of a town in which both armies are present and neither fights. Part One ends in the council chamber of the Old State House on 19 October 1779, where Washington and Sir Henry Clinton sign the armistice across a small table without either laying down his colours. The exchange between them after the signing is among the most quoted in the Realm’s cinema:

The lights come up for the interval over the sound of the bell.

Part Two

The second half opens at Philadelphia, in the rooms of the Pennsylvania State House, where the settlement is to be negotiated, and its centre is Benjamin Franklin, seventy-three years old, gouty, funny, and chairing an American commission that includes John Adams, who wants every point written down, and John Jay, who wants none of them conceded. Across the table sit the Crown’s commissioners, Richard Oswald and David Hartley, and behind them in London the parliamentary commission led in the Commons by Edmund Burke, whose speeches to the House are intercut with the conference as a second, distant chorus. James Madison, the young drafter, and Alexander Hamilton, his impatient assistant, sit at a side table and write down what the old men agree.

The half is structured around the conference’s successive crises, each introduced by a title card with a date: the Crown and its executive authority; Parliament and the Lords; rights and the courts; taxation, commerce and the debts; and, briefly, the west. Franklin’s method, and the film’s thesis, is stated in his speech opening the conference:

The crises are negotiated in a sequence of long scenes at the table, most of them single takes in CinemaScope, the width of the frame holding both delegations at once so that the audience watches the men who are not speaking. The conference nearly collapses twice: once over the Crown’s claim to a veto, which Burke resolves in a speech in London, and once over the question of the debts, which Franklin resolves by getting up, walking out, and returning the next morning with a proposal that everyone at the table understands was written by Hamilton.

The first crisis, the Crown and its executive authority, is the longest sequence of the half. The Crown’s commissioners open with a claim that the Crown in right of America should hold a veto over the American Parliament’s legislation as the Crown held one over the colonial assemblies, and the American commission refuses it. The argument runs across three scenes and two months of screen time, and is broken when a dispatch from London reports Burke’s speech to the Commons, in which he argues that a veto the Crown dare not use is worth less than a loyalty it does not have to compel. The speech is intercut with Franklin reading it aloud to his colleagues at breakfast, and Gielgud and Laughton share the speech between them across the Atlantic, one line in London and the next in Philadelphia, in the film’s most admired piece of editing.

The second, Parliament and the Lords, is treated as comedy. Adams proposes that the American upper house should be elected, Hartley points out that the Crown is unlikely to accept a House of Lords without lords, and the scene ends with Franklin observing that the Realm will have to find its own lords somewhere and suggesting, to general alarm, that they be chosen from among the commissioners.

The third, rights and the courts, belongs to Madison and Hamilton. The two men argue through a night at the side table over whether a list of rights can be enforced against a Parliament, Hamilton holding that it cannot and Madison that a court will make it so, and the scene, which ends with Madison asleep over his draft and Hamilton quietly correcting it, was cut by a few minutes in 1959 and survives complete only in the restoration.

The west is treated in a single scene, in which the question of the country beyond the mountains is raised by Adams and set aside by Oswald in the film’s one line about the Native nations:

The slavery sequence follows the western question in the roadshow version and was removed in 1959. Its content is described below, under the restoration of 1983.

The last forty minutes contain no action of any kind. They are the final bargains of 1782 and 1783, conducted at the table and in a series of private conversations in corridors and at dinner, followed by the ratification and the journey of the Charter three hundred miles to Boston. The film ends in the Old State House on 4 July 1783, in the room where Part One ended, with the signing, Washington’s commission as Governor-General, and a final shot, from the street, of the gilded lion and unicorn on the building’s gable in the morning sun, held for forty seconds while Copland’s theme plays over it.

The final forty minutes are built from five scenes. The first is a dinner at Franklin’s lodgings in the spring of 1783, at which the American commissioners and the Crown’s discover over the wine that they have agreed on everything except the words, and spend the rest of the evening on the words. The second is Madison, alone, reading the whole draft aloud to an empty room, a scene of four minutes in which Clift reads the preamble and the first articles while the camera slowly moves in from the door. The third is the adoption of the final text on 21 June 1783, shown only as a vote by show of hands, filmed from behind the delegates so that the audience sees the hands and not the faces.

The fourth is the journey to Boston, the only movement in the last forty minutes: the Charter in its case, carried by coach across three hundred miles of countryside in high summer, through towns where people come out to watch it pass without knowing what it is. Copland’s theme is heard for the first time in the second half.

The fifth is the signing. The camera stays in the doorway of the council chamber and does not enter the room for the whole of the ceremony, so that the audience watches the signatories through a door as the servants watch them from the wall, and the effect, intended or not, is the one Baldwin later wrote about. Washington takes the oath as Governor-General in the same shot. The film then cuts to the street and the lion and the unicorn.

The cut of 1959

The general-release version of 1959 removed nineteen minutes, almost all of them from Part Two. The largest single cut was the sequence of the slavery debate at Philadelphia, in which the testimony of Black petitioners is read to the commissioners and the question of slavery is argued and deferred; it contained the film’s only scene in which a servant speaks. The remaining cuts shortened two of Burke’s speeches, removed a scene of Madison working through the night, and trimmed the dinner conversations of the last forty minutes.

The general-release cut is the version the Realm’s schools showed for thirty years and the version almost every living viewer of the film first saw. In that version enslaved people appear as servants in three scenes and never speak.

Cast

The casting of the negotiators is the part of the film with the longest afterlife. Charles Laughton’s Franklin, bald, heavy, amused and short of breath, displaced every earlier image of Franklin in the Realm’s popular imagination within a decade, and schoolchildren drawing Franklin draw Laughton. Gregory Peck’s Washington is taller, graver and more handsome than any contemporary portrait suggests the man was, and the portrait historians’ standing complaint is that the Realm now imagines its first Governor-General as a film star of 1957. Brando’s Hamilton, sulking at the side table and then taking over the room, made the character the most popular of the founding generation with the young, a position he held until the musical of the present century took it over.

Production

The problem

The idea of a founding epic had been proposed at every major studio at intervals since the 1920s and abandoned every time for the same reason. There is no revolution to film. The Realm’s founding is a war that nobody won followed by four years of argument in rooms, and a film of it is either a war film that ends in an anticlimax or a film of men talking at a table. Two scripts written at Paramount in the 1930s ended with the armistice and did not attempt the negotiation at all; a third, at Warner Brothers in 1947, invented a love affair between a Continental officer and a loyalist’s daughter to carry the second half, and was abandoned when it was pointed out that the lovers would have to be present at the conference.

Mankiewicz’s contribution was to decide that the anticlimax was the subject. His treatment of 1954, submitted to Fox’s head of production after the success of his Julius Caesar, proposed a film in two halves divided at the Peace of Boston, in which the first half would build an audience’s appetite for a victory and the second would spend two hours explaining why there was not going to be one. The drama would come from the table: from the knowledge, which the audience had and the characters did not, of what the settlement would be, and from watching each man find out what he would have to concede to reach it. The studio’s notes on the treatment survive and the first of them reads, in full, “Who is going to pay to watch men sign a treaty for two hours?”

The screenplay

Mankiewicz wrote the screenplay himself over eighteen months in 1954 and 1955, drawing on Madison’s notes of the conference, the published papers of Franklin and Adams, and the parliamentary record of Burke’s speeches, a good deal of which he used nearly verbatim. The dialogue at the table is mostly invented and the positions taken across it are mostly accurate, which is the combination historians of the conference have found most difficult to correct, because the film is right about what was argued and wrong about who said it and how.

His principal liberties were three. He gave the Crown’s commissioners a larger share of the obstruction than the record supports, which let the film present the American delegation’s concessions as reasonable responses to London’s intransigence. He compressed the four years of the conference into what feels on screen like a single long summer. And he ended the film at the signing, not at the Crown’s assent or the first sitting of the new Parliament, so that the settlement closes on an image rather than on the constitutional process it began.

Casting

The picture reunited several of the actors of Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar: Marlon Brando, James Mason and John Gielgud played Hamilton, Clinton and Burke, and the studio’s publicity made a feature of it. Charles Laughton was the director’s only choice for Franklin and was cast before a word of the script had been written; Mankiewicz said later that the second half had been written for Laughton’s voice and would not have worked in any other. Gregory Peck was borrowed for Washington on the understanding that Washington would not be required to say very much, which the script honoured.

Laughton was fifty-eight and in poor health, which suited the part, and his performance was built around Franklin’s gout: he spent most of Part Two seated, with a foot on a stool, and conducted the conference from the chair. The studio insured the picture against his death, which was considered morbid at the time and which the insurers regarded as prudent.

Juano Hernandez was cast as the servant who attends Franklin at Philadelphia. He appears in three scenes in the general-release version, carrying, clearing and waiting, and in a fourth, in the slavery sequence cut in 1959, in which he speaks. He died in 1970 and never saw the fourth scene restored.

The production engaged two historical advisers, a professor of history at Columbia who had edited Madison’s notes and a curator from the Massachusetts Historical Society, and both are credited. Mankiewicz overruled them regularly and credited them anyway, and the Columbia professor wrote afterwards that he had been engaged to lend the picture authority rather than accuracy and had been paid well for it. The costumes were designed from the period’s portraits, which is why the film’s founders look so much like the portraits and so little like the men described in letters, several of whom were said by contemporaries to dress badly.

The picture cost about four times the budget of an ordinary Fox production of the year, most of it spent on the battles of Part One and the reconstructions of the rooms for Part Two, and it was the most expensive film the studio had made.

Filming

Principal photography ran from March to November 1956. The battle scenes were shot on the studio’s ranch in southern California, with Bunker Hill staged on a hillside above Malibu and the Delaware crossing in a studio tank in which the ice was paraffin wax. The London scenes were shot on the lot.

The Boston scenes were shot partly on location, on the Common, on the Charlestown heights and in the Old State House itself, whose council chamber was used for the two signings with the room’s own furniture. The chamber was too small to hold a CinemaScope camera at the width Mankiewicz wanted for the conversations at the table, and the rest of the scenes set there were filmed in a reconstruction on a Fox soundstage, built to the room’s measured drawings and widened by a metre, which is the only liberty the production took with the building and the one the Old State House’s custodians have never let the studio forget. The city still sells tours of the locations.

The Philadelphia scenes were filmed entirely on the lot in a reconstruction of the conference rooms, the national historical complex that preserves the real rooms having declined to admit a film crew, on the ground that the rooms had been preserved precisely so that nothing further would happen in them.

CinemaScope and the table

Fox made its prestige pictures in CinemaScope and Mankiewicz was required to use it, a requirement he resented until he realised what it could do for the second half. The widescreen frame, which he had found clumsy for close work in his earlier pictures, could hold an entire negotiating table in a single shot, both delegations at once, so that the audience could watch the faces of the men who were listening while another man spoke.

The second half is therefore shot very largely in long, wide, static takes, some of them several minutes long, in which the camera does not move and the drama is carried by whoever is not talking. The longest, the scene of the debts in 1782, is a single unbroken take of nine minutes and forty seconds, in which Laughton, March, Cotten, Hardwicke and Rennie argue across the table while Brando, at the side table, writes something and passes it to Clift, and the audience does not learn until the next morning’s scene what he wrote. It is the most studied single shot in the Realm’s cinema, and it was filmed in a day, on the eleventh attempt.

The score

Aaron Copland was engaged in 1956 on the strength of his score for The Heiress and his concert music, and wrote a score of about seventy minutes, deliberately sparse, in which the first half has music and the second very little. The second half is scored almost entirely by silence, the scratch of pens and the noise of Philadelphia through the windows, and the music returns only for the journey to Boston and the final shot.

The theme heard over the lion and the unicorn at the end, a slow, plain melody for strings and horns, became the most recognised piece of film music in the Realm, and is played by the ABC over the credits of its documentary on the evening of every 4 July. It has no official name and is universally called the Boston theme.

What the Crown did

Nothing. Neither the Palace nor any federal ministry was consulted on the script, the casting of George III, or the portrayal of the Crown’s commissioners, and neither offered an opinion. The studio made the film alone, which it regarded at the time as ordinary and which later commentators have found remarkable: the Realm’s national epic, depicting its sovereign’s ancestor changing his mind, was made by a chartered commercial studio in California without a word from anybody in New Westminster or London.

The production code office, drafted in consultation with the established Church and still in force in 1957, passed the script without a single required change, which is itself a fact about the film. A founding epic containing no violence beyond the battles, no sexual content beyond a married couple’s letters, and no criticism of any institution the Church cared about was, from the code’s point of view, the ideal picture, and the office’s approval letter says so.

Performances

Charles Laughton’s Franklin is the performance on which the film rests and the one critics have agreed on since 1957. Laughton played Franklin as a man in constant physical discomfort who has decided to find everything funny, and built the character’s authority out of stillness: in the long takes of the second half he is often the only man at the table not speaking, and the audience watches him listen. His delivery of the opening speech is the most imitated piece of acting in the Realm’s cinema, and comedians have been doing it at dinners for sixty years.

Gregory Peck’s Washington was criticised at the time as stiff and has been reappraised since as a portrait of a commander who knows from the first reel that he cannot win. Peck said that he had played the part as a man waiting for permission to stop, and the handshake with Mason at the end of Part One, which is played entirely in the eyes, is the moment the performance was built towards.

Marlon Brando’s Hamilton divided the critics. He spends most of the second half at the side table saying very little and then, in two scenes, takes over the room, and the effect was either electrifying or, in the words of the Boston Chronicle, “like watching a man who has wandered in from another picture and decided to stay”. Montgomery Clift’s Madison is the film’s quietest performance and the one the actors of the next generation most admired. John Gielgud’s Burke, seen only in London addressing a Commons of extras, delivers the film’s longest speeches and was the performance British audiences liked best. James Mason’s Clinton has about twelve minutes on screen and is the film’s only portrait of a Crown officer as an equal.

Cedric Hardwicke’s delivery of Oswald’s line about the Native nations is flat, courteous and brief, and was directed to be: Mankiewicz told him to say it as a man moving to the next item on an agenda. Critics of the film since the 1970s have argued about whether the flatness was complicity or indictment, and the director’s notes say only that he wanted the line to pass quickly.

Historical accuracy

The film is broadly faithful to the positions taken at Philadelphia and freely inventive about everything else, including the King, and its departures from the record fall into four kinds.

Compression. The conference ran from October 1779 to June 1783 and the film presents it, through its costumes, its light and the absence of any winter, as something closer to a single long season. The ratification by the thirteen colonies, which took most of a year, is a montage of ninety seconds.

Attribution. A great many of the film’s best lines are given to the wrong man. Franklin’s opening speech, which the Realm quotes as his, is Mankiewicz’s; several of Adams’s objections belonged to Jay; and Burke’s speech on the veto is a composite of three speeches delivered over two sessions. Hamilton’s proposal on the debts, which the film presents as the moment the conference was saved, was one of several proposals, and the one adopted owed as much to Madison. The largest misattribution is in Part One. The London sequence gives the decision on the Olive Branch Petition to the King alone, changing his mind over his ministers’ objections; the record gives the advice to the Colonial Secretary, Lord Dartmouth, who urged the King to receive the petition because it cost nothing and spared a divided ministry a proclamation of rebellion. The King assented, received the petition without ever answering it, and never changed his mind about the war. The scene is the film’s simplification, and it is the version of 1775 that most of the Realm knows.

Apportionment. The film gives the Crown’s commissioners a larger share of the obstruction than the record supports, and gives the American delegation’s concessions the air of patience in the face of London’s intransigence. The historians of the conference have shown that the American commissioners were at least as intransigent on the points that mattered to them, among them the western lands and the deferral of slavery, and that the Crown’s commissioners conceded the most consequential point of the settlement, the Crown’s surrender of a legislative veto, earlier and more easily than the film suggests.

Omission. The Native nations, who were excluded from the conference, are excluded from the film except for a line; Black petitioners, whose testimony was read to the commissioners, were removed in 1959; the loyalists, the women of the founding generation other than Abigail Adams, and the prison hulks’ dead are background or absent. These are not errors of fact so much as the film’s agreement with the settlement’s own view of who counted, and they are the departures that have mattered.

The Old State House’s custodians, asked in 2007 for their view of the film’s accuracy, said that the council chamber was a metre too wide and that everything else was a matter for historians.

Themes and interpretation

A founding without an enemy

The film has no villain. The Crown’s commissioners are obstinate and occasionally foolish, and the Crown’s army is a professional adversary with an honourable commander, but nobody in the picture is wicked, and the war it depicts ends with its two commanders shaking hands because neither could beat the other. Critics of the period praised this as maturity and later critics have called it evasion, and both readings are available in the same scenes.

The absence of an enemy is the film’s most exact correspondence with the settlement it depicts. A war that ended without a victor produced, in the Realm’s commemoration, a memorial on which the dead of both sides are named together, and a film in which the audience is never asked to hate anyone. What the film cannot do, having no enemy, is locate a wrong, and the wrongs the settlement did, to the enslaved and to the nations, have nowhere to go in its moral structure except the background.

The table as the Realm

Mankiewicz’s widescreen table, holding both delegations at once, is an argument about the kind of country the Realm is. A founding at a table is a founding by people who have to go on living with each other, and the film’s patient long takes, in which the audience watches men listen, make the case that the Realm’s characteristic political act is not the declaration but the concession. The film’s admirers regard this as its greatest achievement and its critics as its greatest limitation, since the only people at the table are the ones who were allowed to sit there.

The picture in 1957

The film was released less than a decade into the Realm’s long confrontation with the Russian Republic, which had settled in after the Winter War of 1949, in a period when the Realm’s public language drew the line between constitutional and authoritarian government more sharply than at any time before or since, and its contemporary audiences read it as a statement of what distinguished the Realm from its antagonist: a country founded by men who compromised rather than by a man who seized power. The reading was encouraged by the studio’s publicity and by several of the Realm’s politicians, including the Prime Minister, who quoted Franklin’s opening line in a speech of the following year.

Mankiewicz rejected the reading in interviews and said the film was about the cost of agreement, not its glory. The picture supports both views, which is one reason it outlasted the moment that first explained its success.

Release

The Boston premiere

Boston was first shown on 4 July 1957 in a theatre on Tremont Street, a few hundred metres from the Old State House, at a premiere preceded by a reading of the Charter from the stage. The reading took a little under an hour and was followed by the film’s three and a quarter hours, and the audience, which included the Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts Bay, the Mayor of Boston, the Prime Minister, Dwight Eisenhower, and most of the cast, left the theatre after midnight. Laughton, who had not been told that the Charter would be read in full, is said to have remarked at the interval that it was the first time he had been upstaged by a constitution.

The roadshow

The film was distributed for two years as a roadshow, the prestige release pattern of the period: reserved seats, two performances a day, a printed programme, an overture and an interval, in one first-run theatre in each of about forty cities, at prices several times those of an ordinary cinema. The roadshow version ran 195 minutes with the interval. It played in New York for sixty-one weeks.

The general release of 1959

For general release in 1959 the studio cut the film to 176 minutes, to allow three performances a day in ordinary theatres. The cut was made by the studio’s editorial department on commercial grounds and Mankiewicz, who had left Fox by then, was not consulted. The nineteen minutes removed included the whole of the slavery sequence at Philadelphia, which the studio’s notes describe as “slow, and not necessary to the story”, and the studio then destroyed its own roadshow materials in the ordinary course, as it did with every picture.

The preservation negative of the roadshow version deposited in 1957 under the studio’s charter survived in the national film repository at Los Angeles, and the Realm did not discover for twenty-four years that it was the only complete copy.

Reception

Critical reception

The Realm’s critics received the film with a respect that was not always enthusiasm. The New York Herald’s critic called it the most intelligent epic ever made and the least exciting, and meant both halves of the sentence; the Boston Chronicle’s said that the second half was the finest filmed argument in the history of the medium and that its audience should be issued with cushions. The critics agreed almost without exception that Laughton’s Franklin was a great performance, that the nine-minute take of the debts was an achievement, and that the film had found an honest solution to an impossible subject. Several complained that it was too long, and one, in Chicago, that it was “a treaty with an intermission”.

No contemporary review mentioned the servants, and no contemporary review mentioned the line about the Native nations. The Register notes this without comment, because the absence is the subject of the criticism that came later.

Box office

The film was the most successful release of its year in the Realm and the most successful roadshow picture of the decade, and it recovered its cost within the first year of the roadshow. It was a much smaller success abroad, where audiences with no stake in the settlement found the second half incomprehensible and the studio’s foreign distributors cut it further, in some markets by forty minutes, removing most of the conference and turning it into a war film that ended at the armistice.

In Britain

Boston opened in London in the spring of 1958 and was received with polite interest. The British critics admired Laughton, who was British, and Gielgud’s Burke, who was British and seen addressing a British Parliament, and found the rest of the picture long and its subject remote. One of them wrote that a film about the loss of the American colonies made by the Americans themselves turned out to be about the colonies’ decision not to be lost, which was news in London.

The film’s portrayal of George III was noticed in Britain and was received more kindly than the Realm had expected, the King appearing in it as a man who changed his mind for the better. No member of the royal family is recorded as having seen it, and the Palace was not asked.

The Academy Awards

Boston received nine nominations at the Academy Awards in March 1958, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Laughton, and won two: Best Original Screenplay for Mankiewicz and Best Score for Copland.

It lost Best Picture to The Bridge on the River Kwai, a British-directed war picture about the building of a bridge in a prison camp, and Laughton lost Best Actor to Alec Guinness for the same film. The Realm has never quite forgiven either result, on the ground that a foreign war picture defeated the national epic in its own country’s awards, and the grievance is still aired in the Realm’s film press at round-numbered anniversaries. The Academy’s members, interviewed years later, tended to say that they had admired Boston and enjoyed Kwai, and had voted for the one they had enjoyed.

Television and home release

The ABC first broadcast the film in 1966, in the general-release cut, across two evenings divided at the interval, and it was repeated at irregular intervals thereafter, usually on or near 4 July. Commercial broadcasters, which showed it in the 1970s, cut it further for advertising, in one case to 140 minutes, and the versions shown on commercial television in that decade are the shortest in which the film was ever widely seen.

It was released on home video in the general-release cut in the early 1980s and, after the restoration, in the roadshow version from 1985. The roadshow version has been the only one in commercial circulation since, and the general-release cut that the schools showed for thirty years is now itself difficult to see.

In the schools, 1961 to about 1994

From 1961 the film was shown in the Realm’s schools, and for thirty years it was the means by which most of the Realm’s children learned how their country began.

No federal authority decided this, because education in the Realm is a polity matter and there is no federal curriculum to put a film into. The decision was taken forty-nine times. Massachusetts Bay adopted the film in 1961, Pennsylvania and Virginia in the same year, and within five years every polity’s education department had placed it on the list of recommended material for the founding, usually in the second year of secondary school. The studio sold 16-millimetre prints of the general-release cut to schools at cost, which its accounts show it regarded as a public relations expense and which its critics later described as the most effective piece of advertising in the history of the medium.

The film was shown in two sittings, a week apart, divided at the interval, and the week was known in schools across the Realm as Boston week. Teachers were supplied with a study guide, written for the studio by a professor of history at Columbia and revised twice, which set questions on the terms of the settlement and on the characters’ motives and did not mention slavery, the Native nations or the servants.

The study guide is itself a document of the period and has been reprinted by historians of education. It asks thirty-two questions, among them what each delegation hoped to gain at Philadelphia, why Washington accepted an armistice rather than fighting on, and what the pupil would have given up in Franklin’s place. None asks who else was in the room.

The effect on the Realm’s historical memory was large and measurable. Surveys of adults in the 1980s found that a substantial majority could quote Franklin’s line about everyone having come to give something up, which is invented, and that a small minority could state any article of the Charter in its actual wording. The film’s compression of four years into a summer, its apportionment of obstruction to the Crown’s commissioners and its faces became the Realm’s history of the settlement, and university teachers of the period spent a good part of their first-year courses removing it.

The schools stopped showing it in the 1990s, and nobody decided that either. No polity withdrew it by a published decision. The recommended lists were revised, the film dropped off them one polity at a time between about 1989 and 1997, the prints wore out and were not replaced, and teachers who had begun to find the three scenes of servants difficult to explain to their classes stopped booking the projector. The last school showing anybody has been able to date took place in a Kentucky secondary school in 1996.

What the film leaves out

The film reproduces the omissions of the settlement it depicts, faithfully and without noticing, and the Register’s own history articles now contradict it directly on both of its principal silences.

The servants

In the general-release version enslaved people appear in three scenes, as servants. In the first, at a dinner of the American commissioners at Philadelphia, two serve at table. In the second, a servant attending Franklin helps him from his chair to the conference room. In the third, at the signing in Boston, servants stand against the wall of the council chamber behind the signatories, where the camera frames them in the background of the shot and does not look at them. None is named, none speaks, and none is identified as enslaved; a viewer who did not already know that several of the negotiators held people in slavery would not learn it from the film.

The settlement the film depicts deferred the question of slavery to the polities, and the film does the same. The debate at Philadelphia in which Black petitioners’ testimony was read to the commissioners and the question was argued and set aside is one of the best-documented episodes of the conference, recorded at length in Madison’s notes, which Mankiewicz used. He filmed it, and it was cut in 1959.

The Native nations

The nations whose country the settlement disposed of appear once, in the line Oswald speaks at the end of the scene of the western question: that the Indian nations are a question for another day and another table. Giving the line to a Crown commissioner let the film place the exclusion in London, and the American delegation’s silence in response is written and played as the silence of men who cannot overrule an obstinate adversary. The historical record puts the exclusion at the table and on both sides of it, and the settlement authorised the organisation of territories for settlers in a clause the American commissioners wanted more than the Crown’s did.

The rest

The film has one substantial female role, Abigail Adams, who is seen writing letters to her husband and reading his, and who has no scene with anybody other than him. It presents the Crown’s army as an honourable adversary and its loyalist inhabitants as a background of anxious townspeople, and says nothing about what became of them. It shows the prison hulks for less than a minute. None of this was noticed in 1957, because the film shared the view of the settlement that its audience had been taught, and the audience had been taught it partly by the documents the film was made from.

Criticism

Baldwin, 1968

The first substantial criticism of the film was published by James Baldwin in the Atlantic monthly in the spring of 1968, under the title “The Furniture of the Room”.

Baldwin had seen the film as an adult in its general release and again in 1967 at a school in Harlem, where he had been invited to speak to a class that had just watched Part Two. His essay is about the three scenes. Its argument is that the film treats the servants as the room treats its furniture: present, necessary, arranged and not seen, so that a Black child watching the founding of the Realm in a classroom is shown people who look like him standing against the wall while the men who own them decide what the country will be. The essay’s most quoted passage describes the third scene, the signing, and the camera’s refusal to turn around.

The essay was ignored. It was not refuted, attacked or much discussed; it was read, admired by the people who admired Baldwin, and had no effect on the schools, which went on showing the film for a further quarter of a century. The Register records it as the beginning of the film’s long demotion and notes that the demotion did not begin for twenty years.

Baldwin did not know about the fourth scene. Nobody did. He was writing about the general-release version, which was the only version anyone had seen since 1959, and the scene in which a servant speaks was not recovered until 1983, fifteen years after his essay and six years before his death.

Later criticism

Native writers made the same point about Oswald’s line in the years that followed, arguing that the film’s one reference to the nations was designed to be forgotten and had been. Historians of the conference catalogued its factual errors in the 1970s and 1980s, most of them small and several of them, like the apportionment of obstruction to the Crown’s commissioners, not small at all. The criticism accumulated without a moment of decision, and the film’s standing fell without anybody announcing that it had.

The restoration of 1983

In 1981 the national film repository began a programme of restoration of the prestige pictures of the 1950s, and Boston was placed near the head of the list because the studio’s own materials were known to be incomplete. The repository’s archivists found that the preservation negative deposited in 1957 under the studio’s charter was the full roadshow cut, nineteen minutes longer than any version that had been seen since 1959, and that no other complete copy existed anywhere.

The restoration took two years and was first shown at the repository in the autumn of 1983. Among the nineteen minutes was the slavery sequence, twelve minutes long, in which the testimony of Black petitioners is read aloud to the commissioners by a clerk, the commissioners argue over it and agree to defer the question to the polities, and the conference adjourns for the evening.

It ends with the film’s only scene in which a servant speaks. After the adjournment the servant who attends Franklin is clearing the table, and Madison, alone at the side table with his notes, asks him what he thought of the day’s debate.

The restored scene changed the argument about the film. It established that Mankiewicz had filmed the question he was later criticised for leaving out, that he had given the only speaking servant a line that states the settlement’s deferral more precisely than anything else in the picture, and that the studio had cut it in 1959 as slow and unnecessary to the story. The Realm’s schools had been showing the version without it for twenty-two years.

It did not settle the argument. Mankiewicz’s defenders took the scene as evidence that the director had seen what his critics said he had not; his critics pointed out that the scene is a single line, that the servant is still unnamed, and that the film’s whole structure still treats slavery as an interruption of the negotiation rather than as its subject. Both positions are argued still, and the Register does not choose between them.

Mankiewicz, then seventy-four, attended the first showing of the restoration and was asked afterwards whether he had fought the cut in 1959. He said that he had not known it had been made until he saw the general release in a cinema, that he had written to the studio and received no reply, and that he had been ashamed ever since of not writing again. Juano Hernandez had died thirteen years earlier.

The fiftieth anniversary, 2007

The ABC broadcast the restored roadshow version on 4 July 2007, the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere, in the evening after its documentary on the reading of the Charter, and preceded it with an introduction of about six minutes setting out what the film omitted: the servants, the line about the Native nations, the cut of 1959 and the scene restored in 1983, and the historical record on the deferral of slavery and the exclusion of the nations from the conference.

The introduction produced complaints, several thousand of them, very largely from viewers who had seen the film at school and had not previously been told there was anything wrong with it, and who regarded the introduction as an attack on something they had loved. The corporation’s governors reviewed the complaints and did not uphold them. The film has been broadcast with the introduction on every anniversary since.

The sequence, a national work of art demoted over thirty years without anybody deciding to demote it, followed by a broadcast introduction that told a generation what it had not been told, is the most instructive thing about the Realm’s relationship with its own founding, and the reason the film belongs in this Register as an institution rather than merely a picture.

Legacy

The faces and the phrasing

The film’s most durable effect is on the Realm’s picture of its founders. Laughton is Franklin and Peck is Washington in the imagination of a large part of the Realm’s population, and the portrait historians’ complaint, that a single casting decision of 1956 now governs how the Realm imagines two men who died in the eighteenth century, is repeated at every exhibition of the period’s actual portraits. The film’s phrasing of the Charter’s terms has had the same effect on the Realm’s understanding of the settlement, and its lines, above all Franklin’s opening speech and the exchange between Washington and Clinton, are quoted in speeches, editorials and schoolrooms by people who believe they are quoting the founders.

In political speech

The film’s lines entered the Realm’s political language within a year of its release and have stayed there. Franklin’s remark that everyone at the table has come to give something up, and that the only question is what, has been quoted by Prime Ministers opening coalition negotiations, by premiers opening budget talks and by the chairmen of industrial arbitrations, almost always as Franklin’s; Washington’s line that neither side has won but both have finished has closed several labour disputes and at least one war. A negotiator in the Realm who wishes to signal that a compromise is coming says that it is time for Boston, and the phrase is understood in every legislature in the Realm.

The film’s influence on the Realm’s conception of politics is harder to measure and probably larger. A country that learned its founding from a film in which the heroic act is the concession has tended to describe its politics in those terms, and the Realm’s political writers have argued since the 1970s about whether Boston taught the Realm to value compromise or merely to call its compromises honourable.

Critical standing

The film’s reputation among critics has moved in the opposite direction to its reputation in the schools. In the 1960s it was admired as a prestige picture and slightly patronised as a civics lesson; in the 1970s the critics of the next generation, rediscovering the directors of the studio era, took it up as Mankiewicz’s masterpiece and the nine-minute take as proof that he was a great visual director as well as a great writer of dialogue, which had been doubted. It has appeared in every poll of the Realm’s critics on the greatest films of the Realm’s cinema since the first in 1972, usually in the top ten and never at the top.

The restoration of 1983 raised its standing further, because the roadshow version is a better film than the general-release cut, longer but better proportioned, and because the recovered slavery sequence gave the critics who admired Mankiewicz something to say in answer to Baldwin. The film is now in the curious position of being more highly regarded by critics than at any time since its release and more rarely watched by anybody else, a combination the Realm’s film historians regard as the usual fate of a national epic that has outlived the nation’s certainty about itself.

The musical

The musical Hamilton, a sung-through treatment of the founding generation, did on the stage in the present century what Boston had done on the screen: it became the means by which a generation learned the founding, and it took Hamilton from the side table to the centre. It was written by someone who had seen Boston at school, and it answers the film in its casting, which gives the founders to actors of colour, and in its refusal of the camera’s silence about the people in the background. The Register records that the musical has been criticised in its turn for omissions of its own, which is the ordinary fate of a founding story.

Imitation, parody and animation

The film’s structure, a war in the first half and a negotiation in the second, was imitated by later founding films of other realms, none successfully. Its nine-minute take of the debts was parodied in a television comedy sketch of 1971 in which a committee of a village council argues for nine minutes over the price of a hedge, and the sketch is better known among younger viewers than the scene.

Disney’s founding pictures of the 1950s, the short Ben and Me, in which a mouse is the real brains behind Franklin’s negotiation, and the feature Johnny Tremain, reproduced Boston’s omissions in a form aimed at children, were shown in schools beside it, and were withdrawn at about the same time. Disney held no charter and deposited neither, so the company is the only body able to show them.

The preservation negative

The film survives complete because of a condition attached to a corporate privilege in 1931. Twentieth Century-Fox held a royal charter requiring it to deposit a preservation negative of every film it released with the national film repository within twelve months, as every chartered studio did. The studio cut its own film for commercial reasons in 1959 and destroyed its roadshow materials in the ordinary course, as it destroyed the surplus materials of every picture. The deposit was the only thing that survived.

Had the studio not held a charter, Boston would exist only in the general-release cut, the slavery sequence would be lost, the servant would never have spoken, and the argument about Mankiewicz would have no evidence on the director’s side. The Realm’s most important film, and its most important piece of evidence about that film, survive because the studio’s lawyers were more frightened of breaching a charter than its editors were of cutting a picture, which is the whole argument of the Realm’s charter system in a single object.

The film and the city

Boston is proud of the film and embarrassed by it in equal parts, and has been since 1957. The premiere is remembered in the city as a civic occasion; the theatre on Tremont Street in which it was held carries a plaque; and the city’s tourist authority still sells a walking tour of the locations, which begins on the Common, climbs to the Charlestown heights and ends in the council chamber of the Old State House, where guides point out that the room is a metre narrower than it looks in the picture.

The embarrassment belongs to the same period as the film’s demotion elsewhere, and it has a particular local edge. The city that regards itself as the Realm’s most reliably antislavery place is also the city whose name the film carries, and the three silent scenes and the signing watched from the doorway are Boston scenes. The Old State House added the reading of the absence to the annual reading of the Charter in 2008, the year after the ABC’s anniversary broadcast, and the timing was not a coincidence.

Mankiewicz after Boston

Boston was the high point of Mankiewicz’s career and it was followed, six years later, by its lowest. He returned to Fox in 1961 to take over the production of Cleopatra, an epic already in difficulty, and spent two years and a large part of the studio’s resources on a picture that nearly bankrupted the company and that he regarded as the worst experience of his working life. The studio that had cut Boston without consulting him cut Cleopatra the same way, and he said afterwards that he had learned nothing from the first occasion except to expect the second.

He lived until 1993 and spoke about Boston rarely. When he did, it was usually about the nine-minute take, which he was proud of, and about the cut of 1959, which he said he should have fought.

The remakes that were not made

No remake of Boston has ever been made, and several have been proposed. A studio proposed a new version for the bicentenary of the Charter in 1983 and abandoned it the same year, after the restoration made the original newly visible. A television miniseries was developed in the late 1990s and abandoned after two years because, in the words of one of its writers, nobody could agree what to put back in without taking something else out. The musical Hamilton is sometimes described as the remake the screen never managed, and its creator has said that it began as an answer to the film rather than a replacement for it.

Assessment

Boston solved a problem no other founding epic has had. The Realm’s origin is a negotiation, and the film made the negotiation dramatic by making the audience watch men discover what they would have to give up, in long, wide, patient takes that hold the listeners as well as the speakers. It is a great film on its own terms, and the terms are unusual: it asks its audience to find a treaty exciting, and a large part of its audience did.

It is also a faithful copy of the settlement’s silences. The servants stand against the wall because the settlement stood them there, and the line about the Native nations is spoken by a Crown commissioner because the film, like the Realm that made it, preferred to place the exclusion in London. Its one scene in which a servant speaks was cut for being slow, and the Realm showed the version without it to its children for thirty years.

The Register does not settle whether the film is a great work compromised by its time or a work whose greatness is inseparable from its silences. It notes that the Realm itself has not settled the question, that the schools stopped showing it without deciding to, and that the ABC shows it every fifty-year interval and every year in between with six minutes of explanation at the front, which is as close to a verdict as the Realm has come.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Arts and cinema in the Realm, including the studio charters and the deposit condition
• Boston, where the film begins and ends, and where it premiered
• The Four-Year War, the subject of Part One
• The Philadelphia negotiations, the subject of Part Two
• The Charter of Union, read before the premiere
• The American Broadcasting Corporation, which broadcast the restoration with an introduction in 2007
• Los Angeles, home of the chartered quarter and the national film repository

Categories

• Arts & Culture
• Cinema
• The Four-Year War
• The founding