The Road to Wellville: a Kellogg's biopic with snap, crackle and crock

Director: Alan Parker Entertainment grade: E History grade: C– John Harvey Kellogg was the proprietor of a health farm in Battle Creek, Michigan, and the inventor of Kellogg's Corn Flakes. Philosophy John Harvey Kellogg (Anthony Hopkins) begins the film on an exercise machine, explaining to journalists his philosophy of health. It seems to revolve around vegetarianism, defecation, the avoidance of masturbation … and cornflakes. "The cornflake, sir, is just one of 75 of my creations for healthy living, among them peanut butter and the electric blanket," he says. Kellogg did invent an electric blanket and held an 1897 patent for a preparation of peanut butter, though other people also invented those things around the same time. As for the other obsessions: his vegetarianism wasn't as militant as the film implies, but the rest is accurate. There isn't space here to quote at length from Kellogg's wacky 1881 treatise, Plain Facts for Young and Old, but it is available online . Readers are directed to the chapter "Solitary Vice", which includes such gems as: "The habit is by no means confined to boys; girls also indulge in it, though, it is to be hoped, to a less fearful extent than boys, at least in this country. A Russian physician, quoted by an eminent medical professor in New York, states that the habit is universal among girls in Russia." Ah, those Russians. Must be something in the vodka. Family One of Kellogg's 40 adopted children, George (Dana Carvey), has become a boozed-up vagrant. Kellogg did indeed adopt a reported 42 children, but George was not a boozed-up vagrant. Meanwhile, the fictional Eleanor and William Lightbody (Bridget Fonda and Matthew Broderick) arrive at the sanitarium hoping to save their marriage as well as their health. The lust-crazed Will is assigned a sexy female nurse and given a room opposite a sexy female patient. These plot points are historically impossible: men and women were segregated at the sanitarium. Dialogue Once this historian dined with, among others, a five-year-old child. Throughout three courses the child sat stern-faced, doggedly repeating the words "Poo, bum, willy." He seemed to take no pleasure in this act. He was merely playing out a grim compulsion to keep saying the words in front of a group of adults too liberal to give him a clip round the ear. Were this five-year-old child to write a screenplay, it would come out just like The Road to Wellville. Poo is flung at characters. Bums are wobbled around full-screen. Will Lightbody obsesses about his willy. In one excruciating scene, during which he undergoes colonic irrigation, all three elements are combined. Another scene is constructed solely so that fictional entrepreneur Charles Ossining (John Cusack) can say: "With friends like you, who needs enemas?" Some scatological content is historically justified. Still, the film's joyless repetition of "poo, bum, willy" soon becomes like Chinese water torture. Which, history fans may like to know, is not Chinese at all. It was invented in Italy during the early 16th century by the lawyer Hippolytus de Marsiliis. People The film comes up with historically inaccurate endings for all the characters. To avenge himself on his martinet father, George burns down the Battle Creek Sanitarium. The real sanitarium did burn down in 1902 (though not as a result of arson by one of Kellogg's children), but the film is set in around 1907, by which time it had been rebuilt. Kellogg dies attempting to demonstrate a high-dive (in fact, he died peacefully in his bed). Charles Ossining invents a cola containing cocaine (Coca-Cola contained substantial quantities of cocaine until about 1891, but by the 1910s – when the scene is set – it contained virtually none. Cocaine distribution was regulated in 1914 by the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act). Verdict The Road to Wellville makes John Harvey Kellogg even more smutty and ridiculous than he made himself. That's quite an achievement.