1776

Plot

John Adams, representing Massachusetts in the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, laments the body's refusal to debate his motion to declare the colonies' independence from Great Britain and instead to discuss more trivial matters. Disliked by most of his fellow Congressmen, he frequently seeks advice and comfort from his wife, Abigail. Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, one of the few who enjoys Adams' company due mainly to their shared dream of independence, suggests someone else propose the independence resolution. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia eagerly agrees, and he rides home to get authorization from the state legislature to do so.

Lee returns, proposes the resolution and, over the objections of John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, leader of the Conservative faction seeking reconciliation with Britain, Congress agrees to debate the question, which becomes heated as tempers flare. Caesar Rodney of Delaware, suffering from cancer, collapses and is forced to leave during the debate, depriving Adams of Delaware's vote. A new delegation from New Jersey arrives and votes in favor of independence (Franklin receives word that his son William, the Royal Governor of New Jersey, has been arrested). Seeking to kill the motion, Dickinson successfully moves that an independence vote be unanimous on the grounds that "no colony be torn away from its mother country without its own consent." To salvage the motion, Adams asks for a postponement to draft a declaration of grievances. President of the Congress, John Hancock, breaks the tie vote in favor of a declaration and appoints Adams, Franklin, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Robert R. Livingston of New York, and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia to a Committee of Five to write it. Despite his determination to go home to his wife, Martha, Jefferson reluctantly agrees to be the primary writer. After a full week passes without Jefferson's being able to complete the task, Adams summons Martha to Philadelphia; Martha charms both Adams and Franklin, and Jefferson finishes the draft.

To convince Samuel Chase of Maryland to support independence, Adams agrees to accept General George Washington's plea to visit the army encampment in New Brunswick, New Jersey, taking Franklin and Chase with him. After the members return to their lodgings, a young military courier arrives and sadly relates to Congressional custodian Andrew McNair how his two best friends were killed in battle at Lexington.

After Adams and Franklin return from New Jersey, the Declaration is read to the full Congress, which begins accepting many amendments. Jefferson agrees to almost all of the changes, except striking language referring to King George as a "tyrant" and objecting to slavery. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina leads the Southern members in walking out in protest just as Chase returns with Maryland's vote supporting independence. Frustrated at Adams's refusal to compromise, Franklin tells him that to achieve the primary goal of independence Adams must accept that those with opinions contrary to his will be part of their new nation. Badly shaken, Adams again seeks counsel from Abigail, and thanks to a delivery of much-needed saltpeter from her and a sudden decision from Georgia delegate Lyman Hall to support independence, Adams finds the strength and will to continue.

Cast

Delegates

An asterisk (*) indicates an actor or actress who was also in the original Broadway cast.

Others

Cast billing per on-screen opening and closing credits

Soundtrack

An original motion picture soundtrack album was released in 1972 by Columbia Records on vinyl LP records. It contains all the musical numbers, with the exception of "Cool, Cool Considerate Men" and "Compliments". The soundtrack also contains the edited versions of some of the musical numbers that were presented in full on the laserdisc and DVD releases. Although the Original Broadway Cast recording was released on CD in 1992, the film soundtrack remains unavailable in any digital format as of 2026.

Production

Jack L. Warner bought the film rights to the musical for $1.25 million.

Many members of the original Broadway cast, including William Daniels, Ken Howard, John Cullum, and Howard Da Silva, reprised their roles for the film. Ralston Hill, Ron Holgate, David Ford, Charles Rule and others repeated their roles from the Broadway production, marking their only appearances in feature film. This was a decision Warner made himself after feeling he made a mistake by turning down Julie Andrews for the 1964 film adaptation of My Fair Lady in favor of Audrey Hepburn.

1776 was also the only film of Donald Madden, who was not in the original Broadway cast.

Exteriors were filmed at the Warner Ranch in Burbank, California, the former Columbia Pictures backlot, where they built an entire street of Colonial Philadelphia. Most of the Colonial sets were destroyed by a fire in the mid-1970s.

The water fountain seen during the musical number "The Lees of Old Virginia", with Ben Franklin, John Adams, and Richard Henry Lee, became known to television viewers as the fountain seen during the beginning credits of the TV series Friends. This fountain for years sat directly across the street from the Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie houses, until it was relocated to the main entrance of the nearby Warner Studios lot.

Interiors were shot at the old Columbia studio on Gower Street in Hollywood. 1776 was among the final films shot at Gower Studios before the Warner/Columbia merger in 1971.

"Cool, Cool, Considerate Men" was cut from the film prior to its release and not included on the soundtrack recording nor on the first VHS tapes and laserdiscs. The Los Angeles Times stated "The song 'Cool, Cool, Considerate Men' depicts Revolutionary War–era conservatives as power-hungry wheedlers focused on maintaining wealth." According to Jack L. Warner, the film's producer and a friend of President Richard Nixon, Nixon requested the song be removed. He apparently saw it as an insult, as it suggested the conservatives were hindering American independence as they danced a minuet singing the song that included the stanza,

Historical accuracy

According to The Columbia Companion to American History on Film, historical "[i]naccuracies pervade 1776, though few are very troubling." Because Congress was held in secrecy and there are no contemporary records on the debate over the Declaration of Independence, the authors of the play created the narrative based on later accounts and educated guesses, inventing scenes and dialogue as needed for storytelling purposes. Some of the dialogue was taken from words written, often years or even decades later, by the actual people involved, and rearranged for dramatic effect.

The film particularly omits the views of the mid-Atlantic Quaker population, represented by Dickinson. Although Dickinson is portrayed as loyalist in the film, and John Adams is seen making points of objection about the tax abuses of George III including regressive taxes and "taxation without representation", all to fund wars and the King's lifestyle, not to benefit the people, it was Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania that had originally made these points. A supposed physical fight between Dickinson and Adams is portrayed, in which Dickinson calls Adams a "lawyer" as an epithet, despite the fact that Dickinson was a lawyer himself.

Despite the film's inclusion of Martha Jefferson and Abigail Adams, Dickinson's wife, Mary Norris Dickinson, was the only spouse actually present in Philadelphia during the convention. (Franklin's common-law wife, Deborah Read, had died a year or so earlier. Martha Jefferson had suffered a miscarriage and was dealing with complications of gestational diabetes in Virginia.)

Another departure from history is that the separation from Great Britain was accomplished in two steps: the actual vote for independence came on July 2 with the approval of Lee's resolution of independence. The wording of the Declaration of Independence—the statement to the world as to the reasons necessitating the split—was then debated for three days before being approved on July 4. The vote for independence did not hinge on passages being removed from the Declaration, since Congress had already voted in favor of independence. For the sake of drama, the play's authors combined the two events. In addition, some historians believe the Declaration was not signed on July 4, but on August 2, 1776. Others note that the final copy of the document was signed by the delegates over several weeks and months, commencing in July and not completed until as late as September.

Reception

Vincent Canby of The New York Times observed, "The music is resolutely unmemorable. The lyrics sound as if they'd been written by someone high on root beer, and the book is familiar history—compressed here, stretched there—that has been gagged up and paced to Broadway's not-inspiring standards. Yet Peter H. Hunt's screen version of 1776 ... insists on being so entertaining and, at times, even moving, that you might as well stop resisting it. This reaction, I suspect, represents a clear triumph of emotional associations over material ... [It] is far from being a landmark of musical cinema, but it is the first film in my memory that comes close to treating seriously a magnificent chapter in the American history."

More enthusiastic was Wanda Hale of the New York Daily News, who called it "at once an amusing and stirring record of fiery debates, stalemates and compromises of the Second Continental Congress trying to break colonial allegiance to the Crown before the revolution."

Writing from New York, Frances Taylor of Newark, New Jersey's Star-Ledger paper called it "the perfect movie for every one, no exceptions of any kind for any reason. You'll have to stand in line but you'll be glad you did and you'll want to see 1776 again, it's that great."

In The Boston Globe, Kevin Kelly called it "a faithful adaptation of the award-winning Broadway musical but, for some reason I find difficult to define, it lacks the stirring appeal of the original. I've seen 1776 now four times and it may well be that the repetition has worn grey my true-blue patriotism. The movie is a good technical copy but rather than adding to the original in any meaningful way it merely fills it out with the usual superfluity of second-hand screen work. If you haven't seen 1776 in its previous form, this perhaps won't bother you; if you have, it will."

Scott Cain of the Atlanta Journal wrote that he felt disenchanted by the earlier comic scenes, but liked its concluding sequences, and said that "for those who can stand it, 1776 has at least been handsomely produced by Jack L. Warner. The movie is beautiful visually. Peter Hunt has directed with a view to maximum expenditure of energy. There is absolutely no chance that anyone will go to sleep during 1776. Most of the actors were brought to the film from the hugely successful stage version and they all know how to milk a scene for full value."

Philadelphia

In Philadelphia, the film opened to significantly different reactions across two of its daily newspapers. William B. Collins of The Philadelphia Inquirer called the film "an affront because it trivializes a big subject without any redeeming satirical intent. The Founding Fathers are not cut down to human size, they are reduced to subhuman dimensions. They are made into singing clowns whose boobish behavior somehow produces one of the most eloquent expressions of the human spirit ever to come from the hand of man."

On the other hand, Joe Baltake of the Philadelphia Daily News called it "a pompous, roguish, disarmingly charming movie musical. Its original freshness is retained largely because its 1969 Broadway ancestor never attained the household-word popularity of, say, My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music. Its storyline still comes across as something delightfully novel, as does its spirited score. Unlike other stage-to-screen adaptations, this 'new' entertainment is free of the usual telltale staleness. [...] Under director Peter Hunt's guidance, the off-beat material works surprisingly well in musical form. A heavy hand could have been disastrous. In fact, even with Hunt's light touch, "1776" occasionally gives way to a sluggish stuffiness. Some forbearance is necessary for total enjoyment. Sherman Edwards' unusual songs remain the work's high point, especially 'The Egg,' 'He Plays the Violin,' 'Sit Down, John' and the haunting 'Momma, Look Sharp.' Technically, the film is visually enchanting—a giant kaleidoscope of sprawling sets, period costumes and gobs of color. The production design is equalled only by the admirable ensemble acting. Each performer, from the witty Howard DaSilva as Franklin to localite Blythe Danner as dewy Martha Jefferson, offers a reasonably human characterization poignant, robust, but properly distant."

Chicago

The film got similarly mixed reviews in Chicago. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave 1776 two stars and declared, "This is an insult to the real men who were Adams, Jefferson, Franklin and the rest ... The performances trapped inside these roles, as you might expect, are fairly dreadful. There are good actors in the movie (especially William Daniels as Adams and Donald Madden as John Dickinson), but they're forced to strut and posture so much that you wonder if they ever scratched or spit or anything ... I can hardly bear to remember the songs, much less discuss them. Perhaps I shouldn't. It is just too damn bad this movie didn't take advantage of its right to the pursuit of happiness."

His competitor, Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune, gave it three stars, conceding that the music was "forgettable" but stated that "if you are in the pursuit of happiness, 1776, the film of the musical stage play about our Declaration of Independence and the people who so declared, will provide it [... through] the majestic spirit of what these men are about."

United Kingdom

The movie received generally positive reviews in the United Kingdom. Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard said, "It ought to be heavy going and yet the surprising thing is I didn't find it so. The energy is infectious." He also stated that "since it was written into the record, 1776 could hardly ignore the moment when the reference to the slave trade was shamefully, but conveniently, struck out of the Declaration of Independence in order to carry the vote. Superfly [which opened in the same week in London] shows what the long-term result was."

Philip Strick of The Times wrote that "if 1776 does have its moments of charade, the film as a whole, adapted from the New York stage hit, is an unexpected pleasure: the traumatic, not to say indigestible events that led to the Fourth of July have been most acceptably converted into humor, charm, and energy. After this example, we should perhaps be giving more than passing thought to the show-stopping qualities of Magna Carta and the Domesday Book."

Arthur Thirkell of the Daily Mirror wrote that "on the evidence entertainingly served up in the new Hollywood musical 1776 [...] the British colonies in the New World might never have cut ties with the mother country but for the agitating Mr. Adams—a fine role for William Daniels."

It was not without its detractors in England, however. Derek Malcolm of The Guardian called it "a rather stagey and overweight rehash of" the musical, remarking that he "found most of the songs, and all of the frigging about that passes for choreography, completely amorphous—though there is one fine ditty about slavery and the North's hypocritical attitude to the South that's a notable exception." He concluded his review by saying that "perhaps because one does eventually get used to the stylized, uncinematic presentation, perhaps because the argument grows genuinely tense and informative, I was held by the last hour so. But that leaves the first 70 minutes unaccounted for, and one can hardly recommend patrons to walk in halfway through."

George Melly of The Observer said "the film isn't boring, or at least I didn't fond it so, and for those, like me, who know regrettably little early American history, it's even instructive; but it is very bland, the carefully tailored image of what America hopes it's like, with even its flaws shown in such a light as to appear virtues."

Rotten Tomatoes

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 68% score, based on 19 reviews, with an average rating of 7.1/10.

Box office

The film was the Christmas attraction at Radio City Music Hall in New York City and performed very well, grossing $1,743,978 in its first six weeks. It did not perform as well in its other opening engagements in Philadelphia, Boston and Washington. It returned to the Music Hall for two weeks starting June 3, 1976 in honor of the United States Bicentennial.

Accolades

The film was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy but lost to Cabaret. Harry Stradling Jr. was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography but lost to Geoffrey Unsworth for Cabaret.

The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:

2006: AFI's Greatest Movie Musicals – Nominated

Home media

The film was first released on videocassette, which runs 148 minutes, and on Laserdisc in the 1980s. The Laserdisc version runs 180 minutes and is rated PG.

The DVD, issued in 2002 as a "Restored Director's Cut", runs 165 minutes. It trims up some scenes and contains previously unreleased scenes, including the "Cool, Cool Considerate Men" musical number and accompanying dialogue. However, it excludes the previously released Overture (heard on laserdisc but not in cinemas).

The film was released on Blu-ray from a 4K-master on June 2, 2015. It contains two commentaries: an all-new commentary, with director Hunt, Daniels and Howard, and also the DVD commentary with Hunt and Peter Stone only. With two versions: the prior "Director's Cut", and a further "extended cut" (167 minutes), the release also includes two deleted and alternative scenes with filmmaker commentary, screen tests, and original theatrical trailers.

On May 31, 2022, Sony Pictures released a three-disc 50th anniversary Blu-ray. The release includes four different cuts: the two major 165-minute and 167-minute versions (from the 2015 DVD release), on 4K with a Dolby Atmos soundtrack, and on a third, bonus Blu-ray disc, the original 148-minute 1972 theatrical cut that was previously only available on VHS (now in HD with the original mono soundtrack) and the 180-minute 1992 LaserDisc release (in SD with stereo soundtrack) (both on Blu-ray for the first time).

Comic book adaptation

Charlton Comics: 1776 (March 1973):