Louis Calhern • The Magnificent Yankee

as Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Magnificent Yankee is our first toe-dip into 1950, and it's undoubtedly a residual remnant of the decade which preceded it - it is a prestige, feel-good, stage-rooted biopic that plays to nationalist tendencies. In this case, this is a biopic focused on Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Justice whom I suspect few in 2016/2017 are familiar with. Yet more broadly, the concept of an entire film dedicated to the life of a Supreme Court Justice is baffling to me, and in this particular film's case, there's a heavy air of irrelevancy that looms over tale and performance.

The vast majority of Supreme Court Justices live what I would assume are noble and respectable lives. In the case of Oliver Wendell Holmes and The Magnificent Yankee, this assumption is confirmed. This is a vastly insignificant film about a significant yet very un-cinematic man, and the viewer is to endure a film without any sort of exciting or provocative drama. There are no in-depth dives into the landmark decisions Justice Holmes took part of (the film chooses to skip over these decisions with a naive aloofness), so you'll really just be witness to his normal domestic life across the span of 30 years.

Louis Calhern - whom I'd love to have admired more here for the sheer fact that this was to be his sole leading performance in a sound picture - turns in a good performance as Justice Holmes - one can sense the effort and the passion he instills into his acting, but one also can't help but feel aggressively underwhelmed by it all.

The Magnificent Yankee is a pretty stagey production, and Calhern spends much of the picture bellowing his lines with a firm familiarity as though he were still performing the role on Broadway, but there's just not enough juice in this creaky jalopy of a flick to find anything from Calhern that's worth being excited about. Still, he carries the film with a steadfast dedication and he has some very touching quiet moments that are performed rather nicely.

It's said that a number of actors were in the running for the role of Holmes, but MGM opted to give the part to Calhern as a thank you for his years of service as a supporting actor. That the Academy gave Calhern a nomination might also be a testament to his standing in the industry. But it unfortunately screens as what it has become - a really ordinary, boring, and forgettable footnote of an era that haphazardly produced bland biopics for people who probably didn't need one.