When Hollywood comes to a quiet college town
Sweet Liberty, released in 1986 and written and directed by Alan Alda, is a comedy about what happens when a serious book meets an unserious movie business. Alda plays Michael Burgess, a history professor at a small college, who has written a carefully researched historical novel about the American Revolution. The book, also called Sweet Liberty, tells the story of Mary Slocumb, a North Carolina woman whose husband fought for the Patriots, and her complicated relationship with the British general Banastre Tarleton. Hollywood has bought the rights, and a film crew has arrived in town to shoot it. Michael is thrilled, and then, very quickly, he is horrified.
The horror begins with the screenplay. The writer, Stanley Gould, played by Bob Hoskins, has turned Michael’s sober history into a steamy romance, full of invented passion, anachronisms, and scenes that never happened. The director of the film-within-the-film, Bo Hodges, played by Saul Rubinek, wants spectacle, sex, and explosions, not accuracy. The star, Elliott James, played by Michael Caine, is a charming, ageing lothario who is more interested in his leading lady, Faith Healy, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, than in the Battle of Cowpens. Michael watches his life’s work being rewritten in front of him, and he must decide whether to fight for the truth or to accept that a movie is not a history book.
Alda plays Michael as a man caught between two worlds. He is an academic, precise and a little pedantic, but he is also a romantic, a man who believes that history matters because real people lived it. His Burgess is not a stuffy caricature. He is funny about his own fussiness, and he is genuinely upset when he sees a real woman’s story turned into a costume fantasy. Alda gives him a dry, self-deprecating humour that makes his outrage sympathetic rather than shrill. When Michael argues with Stanley or Bo, he is not just defending a book. He is defending the idea that the past deserves respect, even when respect does not sell tickets.
A town turned upside down by a film crew
One of the pleasures of Sweet Liberty is its portrait of a small town invaded by Hollywood. The town in the film is a place of quiet streets, college buildings, and ordinary routines. Suddenly there are trailers, cameras, extras in Revolutionary costumes, and a film star holding court in the local bar. The townspeople are delighted, confused, and a little starstruck, and Alda captures that mixture beautifully. Lillian Gish, in one of her last film roles, plays Michael’s mother, Cecelia Burgess, with a twinkle that reminds the audience why she was a legend of silent cinema. Lise Hilboldt plays Gretchen Carlson, Michael’s colleague and girlfriend, a fellow professor who is more pragmatic about Hollywood than he is, and who loves him enough to tell him when he is being impossible.
The comedy in Sweet Liberty comes from collision: between scholarship and show business, between a quiet professor and a loud film set, between what happened and what looks good on screen. Caine is superb as Elliott James, a star who knows exactly how the game works and who enjoys playing it, even as he grows fond of Michael’s stubbornness. Hoskins’s Stanley is not a villain either. He is a working writer trying to survive in a system that rewards sensation, and his friendship with Michael, uneasy as it is, gives the film warmth. Rubinek’s Bo is the most obvious caricature, a director who wants a battle scene to look like a Marx Brothers routine, but even he is played with enough energy to be funny rather than merely hateful.
The climax, a re-enactment of the Battle of Cowpens, brings all these tensions together. Michael wants a historically accurate battle. Bo wants a spectacular one. The townspeople, dressed as soldiers, want to have fun. The result is chaos, comedy, and a small victory for Michael, who realises that he cannot control the film, but he can control his own response to it. He learns, as Alda’s characters often do, that principles matter, but so does letting go. A book can survive a bad movie. A friendship can survive a disagreement. A professor can learn something from a film star, just as a film star can learn something from a professor.
Alda’s second film as writer-director-star
Sweet Liberty was Alda’s second feature as writer, director, and star, after The Four Seasons, and it shows his growing confidence behind the camera. He stages the film-within-a-film scenes with a keen eye for Hollywood absurdity, and he gives his ensemble room to shine. The film is not as commercially successful as The Four Seasons, and some critics found its satire too gentle, but its gentleness is part of its charm. Alda was not interested in making a bitter attack on Hollywood. He was interested in a humane comedy about people who love stories and who disagree about how stories should be told.
For Alda, Michael Burgess is a close cousin of Jack Burroughs in The Four Seasons and Joe Tynan in The Seduction of Joe Tynan: an intelligent, well-meaning man who discovers that good intentions are not enough, and that the world will not arrange itself to suit his ideals. What distinguishes Michael is his subject. He cares about history, about Mary Slocumb and the real men and women of the Revolution, and his caring is not academic in the cold sense. It is personal. He believes that remembering people accurately is a form of respect, and that turning them into cartoons is a form of forgetting. That belief gives the comedy a backbone, and it makes Michael’s small victories feel earned.
Watch Sweet Liberty for its affectionate satire and for Alda’s performance as a man trying to keep his temper in an impossible situation. Notice how he listens to Caine’s Elliott, how he argues with Hoskins’s Stanley without losing his humour, and how his scenes with his mother, played by Gish, reveal a son who is still, at heart, a boy trying to make his family proud. It is a film about the difference between history and Hollywood, and about a professor who learns that both, at their best, are ways of telling the truth about people.