Magnificent Yankee, The (1950)
Louis Calhern played Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on Broadway for a couple of years in the Emmet Lavery play. When MGM decided to make this screen version, Lavery wrote the screenplay and John Sturges directed it. Calhern received his only Academy Award nomination (Best Actor) playing the titled justice (Walter Plunkett received his first, for his B&W Costume Design). Ann Harding plays Holmes’s longtime wife, the former Fanny Bowditch. The rest of the credited cast includes Eduard Franz as Judge Louis Brandeis, Philip Ober as Owen Wister (the supposed writer of this biography, and the film's narrator), Ian Wolfe as "doom & gloom" Adams (descended from two Presidents), Edith Evanson as Annie Gough, the Holmes’ housekeeper, and Richard Anderson, Jimmy Lydon, & Herbert Anderson as three of the Justice's top Harvard law school graduate secretaries, each of whom served for one year. John Hamilton, appearing as Chief Justice White, Selmer Jackson as Mr. Amboy, a lawyer who appears before the court, Hayden Rorke as Graham, a reporter from the Boston Transcript who's invited in by Mrs. Holmes, and Dan Tobin, as the real estate agent who sold the Holmes’s their Washington, D.C. home, are among the many actors who appear uncredited.
If you're expecting much insight into Justice Holmes’s judicial philosophy, landmark decisions, or courtroom action, you'll have to find it somewhere else. Other than a brief reference near the beginning about President Theodore Roosevelt's dissatisfaction with Holmes’s first dissenting opinion and a few general comments from the narrator about Holmes, who later worked with Justice Brandeis as these two outsiders regularly offered disparate opinions that were eventually reconsidered (e.g. became more accepted), the story is strikingly apolitical. In fact, it's more about Holmes long loving relationship with his wife and the surrogate parenting role they played in the lives of his many secretaries over thirty years. This historical drama begins in 1902, right after Boston judge Holmes (Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice) was appointed by Roosevelt to the Supreme Court, and continues for 30 years, through Fanny's passing, and shortly after the time that he retired from the court at age 90 as the oldest serving Judge in the court's history.
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