1776 (1972)
One of the best Broadway to Hollywood musicals ever made.,
Director
Peter H. Hunt

Writers
Sherman Edwards
Peter Stone

Cast
William Daniels
Howard Da Silva
Ken Howard

Review by Wayne Malin

Film takes place in June and July, 1776, and shows how the Continental Congress came to create and sign the Declaration of Independence. And it’s a musical too! I saw this in 6th grade–it was released then and our teacher took the entire class to see it. She hoped it would help us learn history. Unfortunately getting a bunch of 6th graders to see a 2 1/2 hour movie did not work. I remember being bored silly and I couldn’t wait for it to end. But, seeing it as an adult, I was totally engrossed.

The story is never boring. You obviously know how it’s going to end but I found all the debates and discussions fascinating. The songs themselves are excellent. There are a few clunkers but most work especially “The Lees of Old Virginia” and “He Plays the Violin” (even though Blythe Danner’s singing can’t match Betty Buckley’s from the original Broadway show). Also the DVD version has 25 minutes of extra material including an entire song (Cool Considerate Men) that was deleted by the request of then president Richard Nixon! The acting is uniformly great. They got almost the entire Broadway cast to do this so they had their roles down pat. No one is bad but special mention must be made of William Daniels (John Adams),; Howard Da Silva (Benjamin Franklin) and David Ford (John Hancock).

This may not be for the kids. There is some mild cursing and plenty of sexual double ententes and crude humour–but that will probably fly over their heads. They’d probably just be bored! I’m really surprised this got a G rating in 1972 (it’s PG now).

My only real complaint is it gets a little long (especially in the 3 hour version) and most of the songs come at the end–they weigh the film down a little. Still this is well worth seeing. A huge bomb in 1972 but now considered a great movie.

There are tons of very funny lines in this but here’s one of the best–John Adams is complaining to Franklin about his crude humour. Franklin’s response is “Don’t worry John. The history books will clean it up.”