By Mark Tooley (@MarkDTooley)
Bill Murray would seem an unlikely Franklin Roosevelt. But the promos for Hyde Park on Hudson show him surprisingly persuasive, amid the charm and beauty of FDR’s upstate New York estate. There he famously entertained the King and Queen of England in 1939 as part of his stagecraft for persuading Americans eventually into another wartime alliance with Britain against Germany. It was a sort of hot dog summit, with the somewhat surprised royals enjoying mustard on casual American fare in a picnic.
But I’ll be skipping this movie, thanks to reviews from the New York Post and the Washington Post, which outline, respectively favorably and unfavorably, how the film is more a sex farce than biopic.
Supposedly the film is based on the diary and letters kept by FDR’s cousin and friend Margaret Suckley, which were found in 1991 after she died at age 99. But the filmmakers evidently were dissatisfied that none of the documents show Suckley as more than an attentive companion to both FDR and Eleanor. So they turned her into his mistress who performs a sexual act on the President while he drives about the countryside, waving off the Secret Service.
Read the full article at American Spectator.
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