We watched "Hyde Park on Hudson" over the weekend

Very well done. The contact between FDR and the King & Queen of England on the first ever visit to the US is great (researched and accurate) viewing of history. I recommend it as a renter at least. The blu-ray.com review: http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Hyde-Park-on-Hudson-Blu-ray/63175/#Review




Hyde Park on Hudson Blu-ray Review
(Four) terms of endearment.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, April 2, 2013

Franklin Delano Roosevelt fascinated me when I was a child, and while a number of my youthful contemporaries were for example examining the carcass of the Nixon presidency for history or social studies reports, I was voraciously reading everything I could get my hands on about our 32nd President and writing voluminous papers on the only man to be elected four times to the highest office in the land. I came rather late in my parents' lives, so they had in fact been alive during Roosevelt's presidency (though rather young at least in his first couple of terms), and they fostered my interest through a number of personal anecdotes, including their childhood memories of Roosevelt's inimitable "fireside chats". One thing that repeatedly struck me as I read various historians' accounts of Roosevelt's presidency is how the public at large wasn't generally aware that he was paralyzed. This just seemed incomprehensible to a kid raised in a world of mass media where seemingly every jot and tittle of a politician's life is public knowledge. What's really ironic about this is back when I was a kid reading about Roosevelt, FDR's personal peccadilloes were not generally discussed, even in exhaustive biographies of the man. It wasn't until much later in life that I finally started reading about FDR's rumored affair with Lucy Mercer, who was evidently at his side the day he died from a cerebral hemorrhage. Even less known until relatively recently was another affair—perhaps more of the heart than of the flesh—that Roosevelt engaged in with his sixth cousin, Daisy Suckley. (History buffs will know that Roosevelt's own wife Eleanor was also a cousin of his, something that seemed to raise nary an eyebrow during their long and somewhat tumultuous marriage.) There's some question as to exactly what kind of relationship Suckley and Roosevelt had, but it's clear that Hyde Park on the Hudson wants to combine a surreptitious love story with a sort of "King's Speech lite" approach to history, using a 1939 visit by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to Roosevelt's expansive New York estate on the eve of World War II as the fulcrum around which several salient plot points ultimately hinge.


FULL review at link.