Addie: Frank D. Roosevelt said we're all feeling a lot better.
Moze: He did, did he?
Addie: Made me feel good when he said that.
Better than l've felt in a long time.
Moze: Bet old Frank sure does wish he was 21.
Addie: You don't like me, do you?
Moze: No, l don't like you.
That last is the most painful part of the movie to me. But that is not the point of this post. I don't know the meaning of FDR wishing he were 21, I assume, years old. But that's not the point either.
The point is Franklin Roosevelt and the bond he had with the American people. I noticed it the first time I saw the movie as a freshman at Pitt. There are at least two separate scenes where FDR's portrait is hanging on the wall in the background, and a song plays at one point that mentions "Hoover," who Roosevelt overwhelmingly defeated in 1928. This movie is set in 1936, by the summer scenery, before Roosevelt's even more overwhelming reelection in November of that year. The film is based on the novel, Addie Pray, by Joe David Brown. The novel is set in the Deep South. The frequent admiring mentions and allusions to Roosevelt are not 1973 political messaging. Roosevelt really did have this level of hold on the American people, especially the poor. There are photographs of poor people in their homes in the '30's and on the walls in the background are framed photos of President Roosevelt. He was the peoples' savior. Roosevelt, of course, did not get around the country as much as he might have had he not been crippled by polio, so I, at least, do not know how much of this personal affection he felt or knew about. He sent others, his wife Eleanor was a principle stand-in, for him and to report back to him. But even Mrs. Roosevelt was surprised by the affection that she witnessed as his funeral train made it back from Warm Springs, Georgia to Washington. People, poor people, Black and white, lining every mile of that final journey--Mrs. Roosevelt said that she did not know that her husband was so beloved.
