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PAST ARTICLE

WHEN THE SUN SHONE ON CAMPOBELLO

By Fredericton based Film Co-op member David Folster

July 2003

Forty-nine years ago, something rare and exciting happened on the New Brunswick Island of Campobello: A Hollywood production company came to the island to fim parts of a big blockbuster movie.

The picture was "Sunrise at Campobello," and it was an adaptation of a Broadway play from a couple of years earlier. It was the story of former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been stricken with polio while vacationing at his family's summer home on the island in 1921, and his remarkable recovery to begin a political comeback that would lead to his becoming the Demoncratic Party's candidate for president 11 years later.

Filming had begun in April, 1960, in Los Angeles whre a political convention scene that would be the movie's dramatic climax was reenacted. Then the production crew moved on to New York for more shooting at the five-storey city home where Roosevelt had once lived. And finally, in early June, the company arrived on Campobello Island to film some of the story's pivotal scenes, including the moment when he became ill and his later careful removal from the island by boat for hospitalization in the States.

There was still no bridge between the island and the mainland in 1960 (by coincidence, the sod-turning that began construction of he span that today links Campobello with Lubec, Maine, would take place just as the film crew completed its work.) So the entire Hollywood entourage and panoply-actors, production people, technicians and equipment-had to be ferried across the water to the Island.

The stars, naturally, caused the biggest stir when they arrived at the island's little Canada Customs house, especially Greer Garson, who played Roosevelt's wife Eleanor. Garson has been one of Louis B. Mayer's English "discoveries" in the 1930's, and she had become well-known and much beloved for her other devoted-wife roles in films like "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" and "Mrs. Miniver" (playing opposite New Brunswick's Walter Pidgeon in the latter). From the moment she stepped onto the island, Garson cast an aura of charm that did not dissipate until long after she left.

The others included Ralph Bellamy, who was reprising his performance as Franklin in the Broadway play, and Canadian-borne Nume Cronyn, another veteran actor (and husband of Jessica Tandy). Also in the entourage were Dore Schary, producer and author of both the play and the movie, and the director, Vincent J. Donehue, whose stage credits, in addition to "Sunrise at Campobello," included the Broadway version of "The Sound of Music."

The filming lasted nine days and took place at several locations on the Island and at nearby Eastport, Maine. The Roosevelt summer "cottage," which had been meticulously restored by its then-owners, the family of Amercian industrialist Armand Hammer, figured prominently in the shooting. And it was also where Messrs, Bellamy and Schary stayed, coming under the careful tending of Mrs. Linnea Calder, who also had a small part in the movie, playing her mother Anna McGowan, the Roosevelts' long-time housekeeper.

Greer Garson, meanwhile was accommodated at the island's historic Owen House, where she and her retinue, which included a personal maid, two hair stylists and a pair of make-up artists, took over the entire first floor and basked in the attentions of the owner, Evelyn Morrell, who served them tea and sweets on an elegant platter. "She {Greer Garson} has the gift of making you feel like an old friend while you are still a stranger," said Mrs. Morrell.

Other case and crew members were put up in private homes, and, for meals, the hall of St. Anne's Anglican Church was commandeered, and a catering outfit from Bangor, Maine, brought in to handle the cooking. Local women were hired to serve the tables, including one whom the movie-makers spottted and asked to be a stand-in for Garson during a sailing scene. She accepted, and it became a lifetime memory. the actress herself sometimes came into the church hall, sweeping into the room, remembered another of the serving ladies, "a little airily."

The was the first time in nearly four decades that a feature film had been shot in New Brunswick, and perhaps only the second time in its history up until then. The earlier movie has been a Canadian production of a story called "Blue Water," shot in Saint John and environs in 1922 and now long lost.

The filming of "Sunrise at Campobello" got a lot of local newspaper coverage in New Brunswick and Maine, but also a fair amount of national coverage. It may seem a little quaint today, when Hollywood regularly comes to town in Canada, and occasionally to New Brunswick. But in 1960 this was big news, and both of Canada's major weekend newspaper supplements, Weekend Magazine and Star Weekly, carried major articles about it, the latter's appearing in October, shortly after the movie had its world premiere at the Palace Theatre in New York.

The critics generally liked the film. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called it a "sincere and gracious picture" and Brooks Atkinson said "the glorious blue of the limitless sea" shown in the opening scene was "like a prologue: it establishes a point of comparison between the unbounded world of the healthy and the constricted world of the maimed." Later Greer Garson received an Academy Award nomination for her role.