Screening Politics; The Politician in American Movies, 1931-2001

STUDIES IN FILM GENRES edited by ANTHONY SLIDE 1. Rottintitic 715. Scrt?i1hnll Cotndy: Clmrfitiy: f l i t ?Viferetice, by Wes D. Gehring. 2003 2. Scrwtiinq Politics: Tlre Politiciuti iti Americuti Movres, 1931-2001, by Harry Keyishian. 2003

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Screening Politics The Politician in American Movies, 1931-2001 Harry Keyishian

Studies in Film Genres, No. 2

The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Lanham, Maryland, and Oxford 2003

SCARECROW PRESS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.scarecrowpress.com

PO Box 317 Oxford OX2 9RU, UK Copyright 02003 by Harry Keyishian

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Cataloging in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData Keyishian, Harry. Screening politics : the politician in American movies, 1931-2001 / Harry Keyishian. p. cm.-(Studies in film genres; no. 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8108-4581-4 (hard : alk. paper) 1. Politics in motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures-Political aspects-United States. 3. Motion pictures-United States. I. Title. 11. Series. PN1995.9.P6 K46 2003 791.43'658-dc21 2002153431

W MThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO 239.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America.

To Five Great Women

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Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

... xi11

Introduction Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940)

1

Abraham Lincoln (1930)

4

Ada (1961)

7

Advise and Consent (1962)

9

Air Force One (1997)

12

Alias Nick Beal (1949)

15

All the King’s Men (1949)

18

The American President (1995)

21

Eking There (1972)

25

The Best Man (1964)

28

Bob Roberts (1992)

31

Bulworth (1998)

33

‘36

The Candidate (1972) The Cat’s Paw (1934)

39

Citizen Kane (1941)

41 vii

viii

City Hall (1996)

44

The Contender (2000)

47

The Dark Horse (1932)

51

Dave (1993)

53

Deterrence (1999)

56

The Distinguished Gentleman (1992)

59

A Face in the Crowd (1957)

62

Fail Safe (1964)

65

The Farmer’s Daughter (1947)

68

Gabriel over the White House (1933)

72

The Great McCinty (1940)

76

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)

79

Judge Priest (1934)

83

Kingfish (1995)

88

The List Hurrah (1958)

91

A Lion Is in the Streets (1953)

95

The Man (1972)

98

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

101

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

105

Nixon (1995)

109

The Phantom President (1932)

113

Politics (1931)

115

I’olly T i x in Washington (1932)

117

The I’resident Vanishes (1934)

119

Primary Colors (1998)

121

Running Mates (2000)

126

Secret Honor ( 1 984)

129

Corrtt*rrts

ix

The Seduction of Joe Tjman (1979)

133

The Senator Was Indiscreet (1947)

136

State of the Union (1948)

138

The Sun Shines Bright (1953)

144

Sunrise at Campobello (1960)

148

Tanner ‘88 (1 988)

152

Thanks a Million (1935)

155

Thirteen Days (2001)

157

True Colors (1991)

162

Under Western Stars (1938)

164

Wag the Dog (1997)

167

The Washington Masquerade (1932)

170

Washington Merry-Go-Round (1932)

172

Wild in the Streets (1968)

174

Wilson (1944)

180

Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)

184

Notes

188

Bibliography

191

Index

193

About the Author

199

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Acknowledgments

Special thanks for assistance, advice, and insights to Alan Alda, Sasha Alpert, Bernard Dick, Peter Fuss, Matthew Hirsh, the Margaret Henick Library, Marjorie Deiter Keyishian, Thomas Moisan, Todd Murphy, Bruce Peabody, T. J. Ross, and Anthony Slide.

xi

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Introduction

The movies discussed in this book are about politicians and the political process in America. I call them “political films,” and I think they form a distinct genre, with its own characteristic themes and conventions. Of course all movies are in some sense ”political,” in that they exprcs assumptions about class, conduct, values, and the social order, but the films covered here are concerned more narrowly with electoral politics. They deal with elections and the choices politicians make when running for office and when governing. Therefore, these films have something to say about the character of the politician and the nature of the electorate-they portray the dilemmas faced by p e e ple in public life and the social context in which the dilemmas are resolved. The underlying subject of these films, it seems to me, is the American republic as an endeavor and as a culture. Thcx. movies are mainly concerned with the struggle between principle and politics, and they look especially hard at the relationsfup of personal integrity and political success. Like all germs, however, the political film has evolved. A “classic” phase (centered in the 1930s)was succeeded by a revisionist period (from the mid-1940s through ‘the 198Os), which produced several offshoots and variations. The 1990s were marked by a revival of the classic phase, in modified form.

ANGELS, DEVILS, VAMPIRES: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL FILM In the classic phase, heroes and heroines tend to succeed in their struggle to remain principled in the face of political cormption, retaining ...

Xlll

xiv

Inhoductim

both personal integrity and political power. In fact, they hold onto power precisely because of their integrity; a grateful and discerning electorate rewards them for their dedication to principle. Films of the classic phase are grounded in religious or m@c symbolism: their h e roes have divine approval-literal or symbolic-for their actions, as they redeem institutions and administrations that have lost sight of their founding principles. This optimistic view of the bond between politician and the public (especially characteristic of Frank Capra movies) fades over the years as historical conditions and public perceptions change, but for all our disillusionment and disquiet, the myth of the redeeming hero and the supportive electorate haunts our political culture like a faith abandoned in childhood. Films that feature a redeeming politician generally start with a M tion, state, city, or institution in distress, sickened by corruption and despair. Career politicians are usually characterized negatively in these films, as clowns, stuffed shirts, sell-outs, or downright criminals. The cure frequently requires an outsider, a redeemer not implicated in the system-an amateur to politics, a youth, or a womansomeone who seems to lack the usual requirements for the task. In the end, however, those very untraditional qualities, the fresh talents and perspectives that the protagonist brings to the challenge, enable him or her to succeed. Often the redeemer experiences a moment of consecration-when taking the oath of office, for e x a m p l e t h a t transforms an imperfcxt individual into a worthy champion of enduring and sacred political principles. The protagonist is frequently subject to trial, temptation, and self-doubt. A seductress employed by the forces of corruption may temporarily sidetrack the (male) protagonist, but a “good” woman will reinvigorate his ideals, restore his confidence, and provide him with practical strategic help. The redeemed protagonist in turn redeems the community. Political films with redeeming heroes were common in the 193Os, when audiences yearned for leadership that would end the moral decay and economic hardship of the Great Depression. In Charles Reisner’s Politics (1931; with Marie Dressier), a housewife discovers that the politicians of her town are shielding local criminals, and fights back by running for mayor. The women of the town, in a Lysrstrata variation, help her to win by refusing to serve the men in any way. In Charles Brabin’s Washington Masquerade (1932; with Lionel Barrymore), forces of corruption employ an alluring socialite to cor-

Introduction

xv

rupt an idealistic congressman. Awakened to her deception, the congressman ultimately exposes the guilty, though he dies in the process. In Norman Taurog’s The Phantom President (1932; with George M. Cohan), a flamboyant pitchman (played by Cohan) is asked to campaign in place of a colorless presidential candidate who is his exact double (also played by Cohan). Using the magic of his entertainment skills, he cheers up the despairing nation, wins the election, and marries the politician’s fiancee (who prefers him to her real fiance and connives to bring him to power). Similarly, in Roy Del Ruth’s Thanks a M i h n (1935; with Dick Powell), a singer hred by a politician as an entertainer discovers the ineptitude of the actual candidate, runs for office himself, and gets elected governor. In John Ford’s judge Priest (1935; with Will Rogers), a genial, unorthodox judge, up for reelection in 1890s Kentucky, invokes the spirit of the Old Confederacybenevolent institution, revered by w h t e and black alike, as the movie portrays it-to combat modem bigohy and injustice. In several films, the redeeming politician goes outside the law to get justice. In James Cruze’s Washington Merry-&-Round (1932; with Lee Tracy), Congressman Button Gwinnett Brown is unseated by a fake count, but defeats his enemies by force of arms, with the help of former army friends who are bonus marchers. In Gregory La Cava’s Gabriel Over the White House (1933; with Walter Huston), the spirit of the angel Gabriel enters the body of a political hack who then, by terror and implacable will, reforms an America paralyzed by depression, crime, and narrow partisanship. In William Wellman’s The President Vanishes (1934; with A. S. Byron), the president stages his own kidnapping in order to thwart a cabal of prowar businessmen attempting a coup. His action has the effect of discrediting his enemies and developing support for his pacifist policies. In Sam Taylor’s The Cut’s Paw (1934; with Harold Lloyd), corrupt big-city politicians install as mayor a missionary‘s son who was raised in China, assuming that his ingenuousness will make him easy to control. When he instead takes the reins of the city and runs it honestly, they remove him, but he routs them, in turn, by applying the strategies of an oriental general whose strategies he had studied. As many film historians have noted, these “strong man” films have fascistic implications, and reflect the desperation felt by many over worsening economic conditions that seemed beyond control.

Carson Kanin’s T h G ~ m Mnn t Votes (1939; with John Banymore), though outside the scope of the genre, nevertheless expresses its central idea well. In the film a derelict professor, finding that an election hinges on his single vote, uses his power both to redeem himself (and thereby retain custody of his childwn), and to reform his town. After casting his ballot, he proclaims the dignity of the democratic process and quotes, movingly, from John Greenleaf Whittier’s “The Poor Voter on Election Day”: To-day, of all the weary year, A king of men am I. To-day alike are great and small, The nameless and the known; My palace is the people‘s hall, The ballot box my throne. The notion stressed by Whittier, and manifested in the films covered here, is that the ideals of democracy compose a civic creed that stands equal in spiritual power to the dogmas of religion, and superior to the rituals of royalty. The film that perhaps most perfectly manifests the pattern of the redeeming political hero is Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Cws to Wnshin,qtcitr (1939; with James Stewart), in which a corrupted Senate is reformed by a yokel with no knowledge of politics but a deep grounding in American tradition and the help of a knowledgeable insider, Clarissa Saunders (Jean Arthur), whom he had earlier rescued from cynicism. In John Ford’s Young MY. Liricoln (1939; with Ifenry Fonda), the future president, beset by tragedy and trials, slowly discovers his greatness and grows into his role as martyr and redeemer. Postwar pessimism took the political film in other directions, but the redeeming hero returned in H. C. Potter’s Thc, Fnrttwr‘s Daiqhter (1947), in which Loretta Young (in a performance for which she won an Oscar) plays an independentminded Swedish housemaid with strong New Deal principles who takes on a corrupt political system, redeems a failing political dynasty, and wins a seat in Congress. To this development John Ford also contributed by remaking judge Pricsf as The Sufi Slriws Bri,qlit (1952; with Charles Wininger). Again, as in judge Priest, thc Confederacy is represented as a benign, idealistic institution that fostered affection between the races and decency in the citizenry at large.

hrtroducfion

xvii

In the political film’s revisionist phase, which took hold in the years after World War 11, the protagonist cannot have both integrity and power: he-it almost universally becomes “he“-must choose between them. Thaw who keep their integrity include industrialist Grant Matthews, in Frank Capra’s Stnte of the Uniorr (1948; with Spencer Tracy), who withdraws from politics when he finds he is being corrupted by his ambition for office. Candidate Bill Russell makes a similar choice in Franklin Schaffner’s The Brst Mntr (1964; with Henry Fonda). Both characters spare their honor, but pay the price of leaving politics. If they are to redeem society (as Grant Matthews vows to do), it will be from the sidelines. Other cinematic politicians of this era go the other way: they forsake integrity and grab for power. As with the tradition of the redeeming hero (in Gabriel Ouer the White House, for example), this phase of the genre’s history begins with a tale of the supernatural. In John Farrow’s Alias Nick Bed (1949; with Thomas Mitchell) the protagonist literally makes a bargain with the devil, offering u p his soul to gain his political ends. The supernatural touches give the film some imaginative force, but in a “soft” ending the protagonist is rescued from the consequences of his Faustian bargain. In the end, he manages to save his soul, but he must give u p his sullied political car t w . Other films in the corrupted hero tradition include Robert Rossen‘s All the Kin‘q‘s Meti (1949; with Broderick Crawford), Michael Rtchie’s The candidate (1972; with Robert Redford), and Herbert Ross’s Trite Colors (1991; with John Cusack). (Jerry Schatzberg’s The Sfduction ofloe Tynnn [1979; with Alan Alda] presents an ambiguous case: screeenwriter Alda wrote a script about a redeemed hero, but director Schatzberg shot a film about one who succumbs to temptation, and who takes his wife down with him.) In the films mentioned above, the word “compromise” has strong negative connotations. Appeals to pragmatism are treated as mere rationales for corrupt practices, and the protagonist’s first departure from absolute integrity leads inexorably to moral decay. Compromise and pragmatism have positivc functions, however, in films of the 19SOs. In john Ford’s The Last Hurrah (1958; with Spencer Tracy), New England mayor Frank Skeffington adroitly manipulates- the law and cuts comers to get good things done. Humane compromises defeat extremism in Otto Preminger’s Advise nnd Consent (1962; with Henry Fonda), which centers on the Senate of the United States, and in Primary Colors (1998; with John Travolta), which deals with a

xviii

in truduction

presidential candidate who combines low personal morality with elevated social goals (and irresistible charm). These films of compromise connect to a pragmatic streak in American thought: they endorse the idea that it is entirely possible, in an imperfect world, for flawed people to achieve idealistic goals. Another variant of the political film concerns the corrupting politician. Unlike movies in which the politician starts out with good intentions but gets diverted by the lure of power, these films feature inherently evil protagonists who themselves contaminate the political process. They are vampires to the commonwealth. Films in this tradition include Elia Kazan‘s A Face in the Crowd (1957; with Andy Griffith), Barry Shear’s Wild in the Streets (1968; with Christopher Jones), T m Robbins’s Bob Roberts (1992,with Ti Robbins), and Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995, with Anthony Hopkins). In these films, a figure of evil allure fascinates the electorate and corrupts the political process. The figure of the redeeming hero returned, with appropriate embellishments and in a variety of shapes, in such later films as Jonathan Lynn’s The Distinguished Gentleman (1992; with Eddie Murphy), Ivan Reitman‘s Dave (1993; with Kevin Kline), Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996; with Bill Pullman), Rob Reiner’s The American President (1996; with Michael Douglas), Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998; with Warren Beatty), and Rod Lurie’s The Contender (2000;with Joan Allen). The television series Thp West Wing (1999-), a creation of American President screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, has resurrected the tradition with admirable maturity in the early twenty-first century. It is intriguing that most of these films (lndependence Day perhaps excepted) have an overtly liberal and reformist orientation. These approaches to the subject of politics reflect older movements in American culture and hstory. The idea of the redeeming politician has roots in that optimistic vein in American culture r e g resented by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists, who stressed self-reliance and the power of the individual to command systems and conventions. The tradition of the corrupted politician, by contrast, mirrors a more pessimistic countermyth, rooted In Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and others who recognized the capacity for tragedy in American culture and the hazards of self-fashioning. Films of “compromise” may be related to American pragmatism, as represented in the

Introduction

xix

thought of John Dewey and William James, wherein social benefit and concrete results were valued over abstract principles. The film of the corrupting hero, finally, reflects a nativist fear of the "other"the alien, the subversive, the anarchist, or, indeed, our own s u p pressed impulses-infecting the body politic and its institutions. By exploring these traditions, the political film has helped Americans come to terms with longstanding aspirations and anxieties.

POLITICS AND MYTH Always, the political film explores questions at the heart of our identity as a culture and a civilization. Because these films explore moral conflicts in the context of political life-the life of public service and responsibility-they are, ultimately, about the nature of community: what it is, and how it may maintain its spiritual health. The history of American political films suggests that Americans, while cynical about politicians in general, had considerable faith in the moral POtential of the political process and government during the bleak years of the Depression, but lost that faith in the material prosperity (and spiritual disillusionment) of the postwar era. Recent films about redeeming heroes have taken many forms, ranging from thoughtful efforts to explore the nature of leadership to sheer jingoism. The revival of the form suggests, however, that the redeemer tradition represents the core political myth of American culture. It is our persistent dream that a rescuer will appear to save us from our foes and ourselves. It has long been clear that the power of movies in our culture derives from their capacity to embody myths. The hero of Gabriel over the White House is a kind of god. In terms of Northrop Frye's familiar typology, he is, while divinely possessed, a being "superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men."' The laws of nature d o not limit him. Later cinematic heroes, however, are more in the tradition of the Frye's "leader," one who is superior to other men only in degree. They are subject to nature, but they possess special skills or powers that, when the time is right, cbme to their aid in the work of political redemption. The protagonists of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Young Mr. Lincoln, and The Fanner's Daughter are of this order of being. Deploying unusual talents rather than supernatural powers, they redeem societies that have

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Int ruducfion

forsaken or forgotten the sound, essential values upon which they were founded. However limited these “leaders” may be, however, the principles they embody are both sacred and compatible with democratic ideals. Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy, in their valuable study The Hollyrotxld Social Problem Film, observe that in the 1930s ”populism became Hollywood’s favorite ideology, the standard movie device for rationalizing the Depression.” Populism promoted the idea that America’s woes could be traced to its departure from the ideas of the founding fathers, so that the leader who would rescue us from economic and spiritual troubles could assume that ”the system is fundamentally right and only the persons wrong.”2 Such a leader locates the key to national salvation in the sacred words of the founding fathers. That effective bit of film footage used by the Clinton campaign during the 1992 presidential elections-in which the young, later-te be-president Bill Clinton shook hands with the soon-to-bemartyred John F. Kennedy-gained its power by invoking a theme that links medieval theology to the cultural myths that shaped earlier American political films. In that touching of hands we may imagine a transfer of identity, power, legitimacy-what was known in medieval times as dignitas. The theory of divine right declared that kings received their mandate to rule directly from God, and passed that authority to their successors. Despite all our efforts to demystify the executive, Americans still tend to expect their presidents to rise to the demands of office, to be separate and special when required. While the founders of the American nation did not question the necessity for a chief executive, they-and the earliest occupants of that position-had a difficult time defining the nature and tonality of the office. Determined to deny the executive royal status, they made clear that his ultimate responsibility was to the electorate, from and through whom he received his mandate to rule. But the American executive also had to negotiate with kings, and needed to stand equal with them in stature. So how should he conduct himself? Should he behave as a citizen of a republic who has been called, for a limited time, to humble service? Or was he to be treated with the ceremonies associated with royalty, to enhance the dignity of his office before the other nations of the world? George Washington, in his presidential demeanor and attitude, took the latter approach. Benjamin Rush called him “the best Actor

Introduction

xxi

of the Presidency we have ever had" and described his exquisite sense of pageantry: "His address to The States when he left the Army: His solemn Leave taken of Congress when he resigned his Commission: his Farewell Address to the People when he resigned his Presidency. These were all in a strain of Shakespearean and Garrical excellence in Dramatic E~hibitions."~ John Adams approved of Washington's performances; disdaining the very title "president," he was convinced that the executive office needed all the ostentation it could muster: "What will the common people of foreign countries, what will the sailors and soldiers say, 'George Washington, President of the United States'? They will despise him to all Jefferson tried to reverse that tide by taking a simple walk to the capitol to deliver his inaugural address to Conp s , but his example did not capture the imagination of many. It was left to Andrew Jackson to establish the modern sleight-of-hand whereby the president-and, by extension, all Americans who stand for election-ombined populism and pomp in the same figure. And over time, as we know too well, image has replaced dignity as the legitimating factor in political leadership. Attorney General Henry Stanbery, arguing before the Supreme Court in 1867, memorably expressed the victory of the "divine" presidency: So far as the office is c o n c e m e d s o far as the great executive office of this government is concerned4 deny that there is a particle less dignity belonging to the office of President than to the office of King of Great Britain or of any other potentate on the face of the earth. He repnwnts the mdjesty of the law and of the people as fully and as essen-

tially, and with the same dignity, as does MYabsolute r n o n a ~ h . ~

This idea of a sanctified, neverdying sovereignty found expression in redeeming political heroes created in Hollywood cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. For political scientist Michael Rogin, the concept of the "king's two bodies" enters modern American political thought via the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, as appropriated by Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Lincoln and Wilson led the nation during periods of conflict that required extreme sacrifice and a united populace. They meet the challenges facing them; both "sought transcendent authority and immortal identity in the White House, absorbing the body politic into themselves."6 Under the

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concept of divine right, Rogin points out, the king “augmented his human body with a royal body; he aggrandized his mortal person with the immortal body politics.”’ Sometimes, as with Lincoln, the price of this power was martyrdom, a fate Wilson annexed and appropriated in his effort to found the League of Nations and secure permanent world peace in the face of isolationist opposition. Like Lincoln (and Christ), Wilson, in adopting this concept, ”sacrificed his body mortal . . . and gave birth to his mystical body, the regenerate community.”8 Rogin’s analysis suggests that American movies of the redeemer tradition are in part grounded in Woodrow Wilson’s reading of Lincoln’s life, presidency, and death. Wilson “imagined the president as the head of a living body politic. . . a modem version of the doctrine of the king’s two bodies.”9 Although Wilson’s early political rhetoric stressed family relationships, with the president as paterfamilias, it changed as he approached the White House. “Wilson absorbed the people into his own mystic body, himself into the spiritual body of the nation.” With clear sincerity, he enunciated to King George V of England this democratic variation on the idea of the king’s two bodies: ”Whatever strength I have, and whatever authority, I possess only so long and so far as I express the spirit and purpose of the American people.”’O Speaking at Gettysburg on the fiftieth anniversary of Lincoln’s address there, Wilson stressed the idea of ongoing modem sacrifices on behalf of noble goals: anticipating America‘s entry into the Great War, he urged citizens to “be comrades and soldiers yet to serve our fellow man.”” He did not exempt himself from the call to sacrifice; rather, he courted martyrdom as a means of legitimating the sacrifices he was asking citizens to make. Fearing that entry into war would cost h m the love of the nation, he was consoled, Rogin says, by the idea that “violence could be redemptive if it consumed the self as well.”’*Wilson committed his life to the great cause of peace, and was willing to surrender it to that cause: “We desired to offer ourselves as a sacrifice to humanity. And that is what we shall President Judd Hammond of Gabriel over the White House,who dies as his great work nears completion, is one embodiment of Wilson’s vision of sacrifice. Clearly, political movies d o more than entertain. They reflect, engage with, and sometimes affect cultural anxieties and issues. In my discussions of individual films, I have tried to strike a balance be-

In t d u c t ion

xxiii

tween description and analysis. I hope I have provided enough story detail to allow the reader to follow the events of the movie, but I am mainly concerned with the issues raised here in previous paragraphs: what the film has to say about the dilemmas faced by politicians, the nature and consequences of their choices, and their relationship to the communities they represent. Though I realize the practice is problematic, I have assigned ”authorship” of each film to its director. Harry Keyishian Fairleigh Dickinson University Madison, NJ 07940 Harry-Ke [email protected]

NOTES 1. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University

Press,1957),33-34.

2. Peter Roffman and JimPurdy, 73e Hollywood Social Problem Film: Mudness, Despuir, and Politicsfrorn the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981),44. Even the economic disasters of the Great Depression, Roffman and Purdy point out, were seen as having been “precipitated by the abandonment of the origmal pioneer values upon which the country was built.” They call the populist critique “highly reactionary,” since “reformation represents . . . a return to the past and the M tion‘s Jeffersonian origins” (47). In fact, however, appeals to an idealized past can effectively support both progressive and reactionary agendas. 3. Quoted in Clinton Rossiter, The American Presidency, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, l W ) , 92. 4. Quoted in Michael Novak, Choosing Our King: Paverful Symbols in Presidentid Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 21. 5. Novak, 20. 6. Michael Paul Ro@, Ronald Reagan, the Movie,nnd Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press,1987),82. 7. Rogin,83. 8. Rogin,83. 9. Rogin, 92. 10. Rogin, 94. 11. R w n , 96. 12. Rogin,98. 13. Ro@,99.

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ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS Max Gordon Plays & Pictures Corporation; RKO Radio Pictures Inc., 1940,110 mins.

Producer, Max Gordon; director, John Cromwell; screenwriter, Grover Jones, Robert E. Sherwood; art directors, Carroll Clark, Van Nest Polglase, and Casey Roberts; music, Roy Webb; cinematographer, James Wong Howe; editor, George Hively. Raymond Massey (Abraham Lincoln); Ruth Gordon (Mary Todd Lincoln); Gene Lockhart (Stephen Douglas); Mary Howard ( A n n Rutledge); Dorothy Tree (Elizabeth Edwards); Harvey Stephens (Ninian Edwards); Alec Craig (Trem Cogdall); John Cromwell (John Brown); Howard Da Silva (Jack Armstrong); Edmund Elton (Mr. Rutledge); Alan Baxter (Billy Herndon); Elizabeth Risdon (Sarah Lincoln). Though overshadowed in film histories by John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, John Cromwell’s Abe Lincoln in 1llinois has much to recommend it. Based on a Pulitzer Prize winning play by Robert E. Sherwood, it focuses on Lincoln’s life before becoming president and provides a layered, complex portrait of a troubled man pushed against his will to great accomplishments. It also seems, in retrospect, an allegory of America’s reluctant entry into World War 11. Sherwood’s Lincoln (Raymond Massey, who also starred in the stage version) is a most unwilling hero, morose and afraid of engagement with life. Deeply imbedded in his heart are the parting words of his stepmother, Sarah (Elisabeth Risdon): ”The world passes, but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.” These words seem to him to be a charge to achieve greatness, but his disposition rebels against the active life. Though genial and popular, he is subject to morbid fears and avoids conflict. ”I don’t want to be no politician,” he says. ”I only want to be left alone.” When friends like his law partner Billy Herndon (Alan Baxter) urge him to take up the great questions of the day, Lincoln consistently temporizes and “trims” to avoid conflict. He yearns for a life of peace, devoted to poetry. Despite his fears, challenges come his way and sweep him into the life of the community and the nation. He takes on the bully Jack 1

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Abe Lincoln in Illinois

Armstrong (Howard Da Silva) to preserve the peace of New Salem. When his business debts mount, he accepts a government post. Though he does so for the sake of the income it will provide, he finds himself oddly stirred when taking the oath of office, as if his destined vocation were unconsciously asserting itself. He is elected captain of mounted volunteers in the Black Hawk wars, thereby contributing to American expansionism despite his conviction that Indians should not be displaced from their lands. Lincoln's anguish is further played out through the women in his life. In this version of the familiar story, Ann Rutledge (Mary Howard)-Lincoln's early and eternal love, and according to fable, his inspiration-does not reciprocate his feelings. His spirit is permanently darkened by the realization of that fact, and by her early death just as he wins election to the legislature. Enter Mary Todd (Ruth Gordon), whose adventurous streak leads her to seek Lincoln as a partner through whom she can realize her dreams of glory. Lincoln, resisting a life under the whip of her ambition (as he puts it), cancels their wedding and retreats into himself. He is moved to return to her and accept his destiny by a vision of Ann Rutledge and the recollection of Sarah's parting words about the will of God. The movie paints a bitter picture of Lincoln's marriage, within which he plays out his struggle for personal autonomy. Foreseeing his greatness but not his martyrdom, Mary aims to force Lincoln to realize his own power, no matter the cost. The film follows the Senate race of 1858, which Lincoln lost to Stephen Douglas (Gene Lockhart); the presidential race of 1860, which he won; and ends with his departure for Washington. That moment coincides with his first great confrontation with Mary, whose rages have afflicted and depressed him. His angry words embitter her, and she thinks herself a failure at the very moment she has achieved her dream. By speaking up, however, Lincoln has at last asserted the independence he needs to function as a political leader. The film is forthright about Lincoln's religious skepticism and his slick political instincts. His habits of compromise gain him the Republican nomination for Senate, but his underlying convictions emerge through his debates with Douglas. Decrying slavery as the issue that forces good men to undermine the principles of the Declaration of Independence, he endorses human rights over property rights. To Douglas's declaration that the United States should be the "admiration and terror" of the world, Lincoln replies that it should

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be, rather, its ''encouragement''-proof that men are worthy to be free. The movie withholds easy identification with any character. Mary Todd's mental instability and her unconscious drive toward death are mingled with a genuine, even desperate love for Lincoln. Her complexity is well caught by Ruth Gordon's eerie performance. The bully Jack Armstrong, Lincoln's first challenger, becomes his devoted supporter, but retains enough of the hooligan in his nature to threaten to beat up those who fail to vote for his candidate. The electorate is portrayed as fickle and shallow, and denounced as such by an intoxicated Billy Herndon. Lincoln emerges as a martyr to necessity and as a paradox: a man of peace who must embrace war, and a private man who must embody a nation. In his farewell to Springfield, Lincoln stresses what keeps America unified despite its regional, class, and ideological differences: the idea of liberty, which he commends as the hope of the world. The film is photographed richly and rewardingly, from the well-staged crowd scenes to the dynamic close-ups of Massey speaking some of Lincoln's most eloquent words with clarity and resonance.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN Feature Productions; United Artists, 1930,97 mins.

Producer, Joseph Schenck; director, D. W. Grifith; screenplay, Stephen Vincent Bene‘f and Gerrit J. Lloyd; production designer and art director, William Cameron Menzies; music, Hugo Riesenfeld; cinematographer, Karl Struss; editors, John W. Considine, Hal C. Kern, and James Smith. Walter Huston (Abraham Lincoln); Una Merkel (Ann Rufledge); Kay lan Keith Hammond (Mary Todd Lincoln); Herndon (Jason Xobards 3.); (John Wilkes Booth); Fred Warren (General Ulysses S. Grant); Hobart Bosworth (General Robert E. Lee); Edgar Dearing (Armstrong);James C. Eagles (Young Soldier); Francis Ford (Sheridan‘s Aide); Helen Freeman (Nancy Hanks Lincoln); Frank Campeau (General Philip H . Sheridan); Oscar Apfel (Edwin Stanton); E. Alyn Warren (Stephen Douglas). Even in his pro-Confederacy The Birth of a Nation (1915), D. W. Griffith portrayed Abraham Lincoln respectfully, as a born healer whose martyrdom cost the nation its chance for peaceful reconciliation after the Civil War. In Abraham Lincoln, his first sound feature, Griffith focuses on the Lincoln legend directly. Inspired by Carl Sandburg’s reverential biography and scripted (mainly) by the poet Stephen Vincent Benet, Griffith‘s film provides us scenes from the Lincoln legend, stressing his decisiveness and his forgiving nature. Griffith’s Lincoln is part folk hero, part prophet. As a young man, Lincoln (Walter Huston) exhibits many qualities of a frontier folk hero. He has unusual physical strength: he beats the town bully, splits amazing numbers of logs, and drinks whiskey straight from a barrel balanced on his knees. But he also studies law, with the help of an affectionate Ann Rutledge (Una Merkel), and captivates friends and foes alike with his tales-the charm of which only slightly disguises his underlying pragmatism. Further, Lincoln displays clear signs of political greatness. Mary Todd (Kay Hammond) prefers him to the polished Stephen Douglas (E. Alyn Warren): where others see an ”unknown, corn-fed lawyer” in an ill-fitting suit, she sees a future president. So do the leaders of the Republican Party. After his losing Senate campaign (of 1858)has made him a national figure, they offer Lincoln the nomination for 4

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president, having come to see him as the only man able to preserve the Union. As president, he proves them correct: he overbears a temporizing cabinet to take a firm stand against secession. When the fighting against the Confederacy goes badly, Lincoln turns things around by taking charge: “From now on, I’m going to run this war.” Lincoln’s greatness and wisdom come from within, or from above. The decision to appoint Ulysses S. Grant (Fred Warren) to manage the war effort comes to him as an inspiration after a sleepless night: ”I’ve found a man to win this war, and his name is Grant,” he tells Mary. Accepting the appointment, Grant tells the president, in a jocular manner, “Thy will be done.” Lincoln, hearing divine overtones in the careless phrase, repeats it reverentially. Great men lead decisively, but they also forgive magnanimously. Lincoln, while acknowledging the need for discipline, finds grounds to reprieve a condemned soldier who fled from battle by recalling an old folk saying about cowardly legs-legs that cause a man to run when he does not wish to. Robert E. Lee, too, reprieves a Union spy because he doesn’t want the man’s blood on his conscience with the war so near an end. In turn, Lincoln treats the defeated Lee and Jefferson Davis with leniency and dignity. Leaders have distinctive qualities-great hearing, for example. Relaxing with his officers, General Philip Sheridan is the only one among them to detect cannon fire in the distance, evidence of a Confederate attack. Riding wildly to the front, he and his officers rally his dispirited troops to counterattack and gain a victory at Cedar Creek. The episode is classic Griffith: a visually stirring segment in an otherwise stately film. The film was favorably received, but, as Richard Schickel explains in his biography of the director, United Artists made the experience of directing it miserable for Griffith.’ He and Benet had to submit several scripts for approval, and he was not involved in the final edit. How the two-hour version that was originally cut would compare with the ninety-five minute one that was finally released, we cannot know. Notably missing from the final version is a sense of the electorate at large which-in keeping with Griffith’s ”great man” theory of history (according to which powerful individuals rather than impersonal forces determine historical events)-is scarcely a factor in the action of the film. The presence of the electorate might have been felt had the studio approved an early script in which Griffith and Benet tell a parallel

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Abraham Lincoln

story about the experiences of a common soldier in the war (who turns out to be the runaway reprieved by Lincoln in the released version). As Schickel notes, that plot might both have added suspense to the film and put ”great events in human perspective.” The Emancipation Proclamation is mentioned in the film, but black characters are missing except for a comic scene in which a white actor in blackface declares that if given a rifle to gain his freedom, he would simply throw it down and run away. For Griffith, liberty was something granted blacks by righteous white leaders, not something they themselves actually deserved or desired. Lincoln’s love for Ann Rutledge is stressed in the early scenes, and the film even suggests that they consummated their relationship. Later, Lincoln fails to show up at his own wedding to Mary when his eye lights on a picture of Ann. Thereafter, Lincoln‘s marital woes are sketched, however lightly, through Mary Todd’s compulsive neatness and her impatience with servants. The Lincoln myth of the rise from common origins to greatness is conveyed in the film’s closing montage, which carries us from the log cabin in which he was born to the Lincoln Memorial.

ADA Avon Productions; Chalmar, Inc., 1961,109 mins.

Producer, Lawrence Weingarten; director, Daniel Mann; screenplay, Arthur Sheekman and William Driscill, based on the novel Ada Dallas by Wirt Williams; art directors, Edward C. Carfagno and George W. Davis; set designers, Hen y Grace and Jack Mills; costume designer, Helen Rose; music by Wally Fowler, Warren Roberts (songs),and Bronislau Kaper; cinematographer, Joseph Ruttenberg; editor, Ralph E. Winters. Susan Hayward (Ada Gillis); Dean Martin (Bo Gillis); Wilfrid HydeWhite (Sylvester Marin); Ralph Meeker (Colonel Yancey);Martin Balsam (Steve Jackson); Frank Maxwell (Ronnie Hallerton); Connie Sawyer (Alice Sweet); Ford Rainey (Speaker). Ada shares with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and All the King’s Men the plot device of a crooked machine putting a popular incompetent into office for their own nefarious purposes, only to have the tables turned when the boob, with the help of a smart woman, turns the tables on the slick schemers. Bo Gillis (Dean Martin) is an easygoing, guitar-playing sheriff who is nominated for governor of a southern state by a crooked machine run by party boss Sylvester Martin (Wilfrid Hyde-White). After a tough stretch on the campaign trail, Gillis has recreational sex with local prostitute Ada Dallas (Susan Hayward). As she is his kind of ’’people’’-a poor girl who has survived a hard life, but retains a personal and political idealism that matches his own-he falls in love with her. To the dismay of party bosses, they marry, and Gillis is elected as a result of a scandal when his opponent’s wife commits suicide after being revealed by scandal sheets to be a drug addict. In office, Gillis discovers that he is only a pawn, put into office to approve legislation designed to enrich his supporters. ”If a tree leaf blew through those windows, I sign it,” he complains. At the toughminded Ada’s urging, Gillis takes on the crooked politicians, who retaliate by planting a bomb in his car. While Gillis is recovering from his injuries, Ada-who had previously acquired the title of lieutenant governor-becomes acting governor, leading Gillis to believe she has betrayed him. She is, however, energetically carrying 7

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Ada

on his crusade against crooked legislators. They try to stop her by exposing her past, but at the last minute, Gillis leaves his hospital bed to come to her support, and they win the day. Gillis had earlier acknowledged that he ”ain’t got stature,” but, like other heroes in political films, he gains it when called to office. The part of Ada served Hayward’s screen persona well, as another of the courageous women overcoming obstacles with which she was identified in such vehicles as 1’21 Cry Tomorrow (1955),a film biography of troubled actress Lillian Roth. ”I never thought I’d be a lady, let alone a First Lady,” says Ada, as she surveys the governor’s mansion. Her ambitions emerge as she maneuvers herself into the position of lieutenant governor. ”You must have been a tough little girl,” she is told; ”I’m a tough big girl, too,” she answers. To a group of disapproving society women, she declares, proudly, ”I’m a sharecropper’s daughter.” For Dean Martin, the role of Gillis provided a chance to enhance his acting credentials, but he also sings a song suited to his role: ”May the Lord Bless You Real Good.” Reviews were generally dismissive of the film, but Variety aptly pegged Ada as ”a kind of Mrs. and Mrs. Smith Go to Washington” that recalled ”the good Deeds and Does era of the cinema when plain joes and their plain janes come out of the country farmhouse to liberate the nation from thriving political graft and corruption.”* The redeeming political hero and heroine, commonly featured in movies of the 1930s, were updated in Ada by their more ”adult” occupations, but they remained true to the basic movie myth that political regeneration could be accomplished by personal integrity and strength of character.

ADVISE AND CONSENT Columbia Pictures Corporation/Sigma, 1962,140 mins.

Producer and director, Otto Preminger; screenplay, Wendell Mayes, based on the novel by Allen Dru y ; music, Jerry Fielding; production design, Lyle Wheeler; set designer, Eli Benneche; costume designer, Hope B y c e ; makeup, Del Armstrong and Roberf liras; cinematographer, Sam Leavitt; editor, Louis Loefler. Hen y Fonda (Robert Lefingwell); Charles Laughton (Senator Seabright Cooky); Don Murray (Senator Brigham Anderson); Walter Pidgeon (Senator Bob Munson); Peter Lawford (Senator Lafe Smith); George Grizzard (Senator Fred Van Ackerman); Gene Tierney (Dolly Harrison); Franchot Tone (the president); Burgess Meredith (Herbert Gelman); Eddie Hodges (Johnny Lefingwell); Paul Ford (Senator Stanley Danta); lnga Swenson (Ellen Anderson); Paul Mcgrath (Hardiman Fletcher); Will Geer (Senate Minority Leader); Betty White (Senator Bessie A d a m ) ; Lew Ayres (Vice President Harley Hudson). Forty-six weeks on the best-seller list made Allen Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-wining novel Advise and Consent a hot movie property despite, or perhaps because of, its detached view of the political process. Drury described the America of 1959 as “a time of worry and confusion and un~ertainty”~ where ”evil men do good things and good men do evil in a way of life so complex and delicately balanced that only Americans can understand it and often they are baffled.” Character is important in Drury’s political world, but no more than institutions: the balance of power among the branches of government and the moral culture of the Senate anchor the most imperfect of men and women, inspiring them to act in the national interest. Preminger was perhaps the ideal director for such a project. Leonard Quart and Albert Auster remark that his film does not really explore the rights and wrongs of the issues it takes up. Rather, ”Its concern was with honorable behavior, and . . . from understanding that the political world is not built on moral purity and pride but on a sense of ambiguity and c~mpromise.”~ Andrew Sarris cites his ”perversely objective camera viewpoint that keeps his characters in the same frame”5and his tendency to see “all problems 9

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Advise and Consent

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Men of integrity like Senator Bob Munson (Walter Pidgeon) advance the nation’s interests by holding its institutions together. (Advise and Consent, Columbia Pictures, 1962.) Source: Larry Edmunds Bookstore, 10s Angeles, Calif.

as a single take-two shot, the stylistic expression of the eternal conflict, not between right and wrong, but between the right-wrong on one side and the right-wrong on the other.” (These visual qualities are of course utterly lost in the modified VHS version released early on; the film requires viewing in a wide-screen format or DVD.) The effort of the ailing president (Franchot Tone) to nominate distinguished intellectual Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda) for secretary of state is complicated by the fact that the nominee is despised in some circles as an arrogant ”egghead” and accused (accurately, it turns out) of having been a communist while teaching at the University of Chicago. Drury lines both sides of the controversy with honorable men and women who have differing views of what is right for the country. Leffingwell confesses his past to the president, who asks him to press on with the confirmation process anyway because he believes that the country needs the wise leadership Leffingwell can provide. Party loyalist Bob Munson (Walter Pidgeon), despite his own reservations about Leffingwell, works earnestly to

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get the appointment through. However, powerful Senator Seabright Cooley (Charles Laughton) opposes it strongly on grounds that are personal (Leffingwellhad once caught him in a public lie) and ideological (Leffingwellurges negotiations with the communists). Called unwillingly into the debate is Brigham Anderson (Don Murray), a wholesome, happily married young senator who is appointed to chair the nomination hearings. These men may have private agendas, but as senators, they work within a certain framework of rules. (”Brig knows how to be a Senator,” Munson says: high praise.) Outside the framework is Fred Van Ackerman (George Grizzard), an edgy, tactless, unscrupulous liberal who (very improbably) has gained tremendous public support as a peace advocate by declaring it better to crawl to Moscow than to die under the bomb. Ackerman counters Cooley by threatening to expose a homosexual episode in Anderson’s past. The movie wraps up with Anderson’s suicide, Leffingwell’s defeat, and the sudden death of the president. The country will survive all this infighting, however, because the Senate is a great institution whose members pull together for the common good. Munson, the spokesman for honorable compromise, promises to serve the new president as loyally as he served his predecessor. They keep Anderson’s sexual secret and Senator Cooley, after confessing to a perhaps ”outworn” pride, remains in the fold as a necessary “curmudgeon.” Only Van Ackerman remains unforgiven: he has dishonored the Senate, and will be isolated within it. Adviseand Consent thus emerges more as the story of an institution than of the individuals who compose it. The use of many stars disperses its focus, so that no ”savior” is called for. In the end, executive power descends upon Vice President Hudson (Lew Ayres)”charming Harley, the housewife’s delight,” as he self-mockingly calls himself-whom Anderson perceives as perhaps the most underrated man in the country. (A poignant episode has Anderson nearly confiding the secret of his homosexuality to the vice president, whose sympathy at this moment might have made all the difference to him. Instead, and fatally, he keeps it to himself.) Despite the president’s low opinion of him, Hudson clearly rises to the challenge after the president’s death: he determines to name his own secretary of state (some dedicated person, not unique, but qualified for the job) and to chart his own course: the country will survive because its institutions are sound and because its best leaders have the vision and integrity to work within their structures.

AIR FORCE ONE Beacon Communication LLC; Columbia Pictures Corporation; Radiant Productions, 1997,118 mins.

Producers, Armyan Bernstein, Gail Katz, Wolfgang Petersen, and Jonathan Shestack; director, Wolfgang Petersen; screenplay, Andrew W. Marlowe; production designer, William Sandell; art directors, Nancy Patton, Carl Aldana, and Carl Stensel; set designer, Ernie Bishop; costumes, Erica Edell Phillips; music, Jerry Goldsmith, Joel McNeely; cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus; editor, Richard Francis-Bruce. Harrison Ford (President lames Marshall); G a y Oldman (Egor Korshunov); Glenn Close (Vice President Kafhy n Bennett); Wendy Crewson (Grace Marshall); Liesel Matthews (Alice Marshall); Paul Guilfoyle (Lloyd Shepherd); Xander R. Berkeley (Agent Gibbs); William H. Macy (Major Caldwell); Dean Stockwell (Walter Dean); Tom Everett (Jack Doherty); Jiirgen Prochnow (General lvan Radek); Donna Bullock (Melanie Mitchell). While Air Force One is mostly an action-adventure film-a melodramatic contest of wills and strategies between hero and villain-it also expresses a position on democracy and power. The film endorses the ”great man” theory of world affairs, according to which the nation’s fate depends on the actions of superior leaders who can stand up to the forces of fanaticism and tyranny. Air Force One pits our designated hero (in this case, the president) against an equally strong-willed terrorist. The movie opens with an apology to the international community by President James Marshall (Harrison Ford). While American and Russian forces have finally kidnapped and imprisoned a murderous Kazakh dictator, General Ivan Radek (JiirgenProchnow), they did so only after much time and after many horrible atrocities had been committed. Marshall vows to be more proactive in the future and to conduct foreign policy along moral lines rather than purely on the basis of national security: ”Real peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice.” Marshall’s aides warn that this policy will be unpopular with the electorate, but it goes over well with his wife Grace (Wendy Crewson) and his twelve-year-old daughter Alice (Liesel Matthews). 12

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But Marshall is not the only family man in the film: head terrorist Egor Korshunov (Gary Oldman) is motivated by a love of his ”Mother Russia,” which he feels has been betrayed since the end of communism. Marshall had declared that the day of the terrorist was over: “We will no longer negotiate, we will no longer tolerate, and we will no longer be afraid. It’s your turn to be afraid.” However, his tough talk is put to the test when Korshunov and his band of fanatics hijack the president’s aircraft to force General Radek’s release. To Korshunov, Radek is ”a great man, a strong man” who knows how to exercise power. Hustled into an “escape pod” at the first sign of danger, and expected to parachute to safety, President Marshall instead secretly stays on board to defend his wife, daughter, and staff. At the White House, his cabinet must work out the problems raised by his action. Secretary of Defense Walter Dean (Dean Stockwell), declaring that ”the presidency is bigger than any one man” and that ”fifty lives mean nothing in the grand scheme,” believes Marshall should be sacrificed, along with the other hostages, rather than that Radek should be freed to take power again. Vice President Kathryn Bennett (Glenn Close), on the other hand, feels loyalty to a father figure in a jam. She refuses to declare the president incapacitated and to turn power over to the defense secretary: ”No nation can soon survive or face the loss of a great leader.” At first unaware that Marshall is on board, Korshunov sneers, ”He has fled. He is a coward and he chose to save himself.” But action-movie logic and Harrison Ford’s cinematic persona dictate that Marshall (a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor who can fight like fury) has the skills required to baffle, bludgeon, and outwit Korshunov and his terrorists. A grateful staff member declares, in mid-adventure, ”It makes me so proud, Mr. President, that you stuck with us, whatever happens.” Eventually, of course, there is a direct face off between Marshall and Korshunov, which comes down to punches, kicks, and stunts. Surprisingly, the script strives occasionally to go beyond melodrama and introduce a moral level to the conflict. The murderous Korshunov decries “this infection you call freedom, without meaning or purpose” and accuses Marshall of turning Russia over to ”gangsters and prostitutes.” In reference to the Gulf War: ”You murdered 100,000 Iraqis to save a nickel on a gallon of gas.” Indeed, “You kill God in the White House.” When Alice Marshall, under

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Air Force One

threat of death, tells him, "You are a monster, and my father is a great man," he gives her not a slap, but a kiss on the forehead in acknowledgment of her family loyalty. In the end, however, Air Force One stays at the level of melodrama because it gives no moral weight to Korshunov's arguments. They simply explain his determination. We hear little from Radek himself, but it is startling that when he strides from prison, temporarily freed, the other inmates cheer him on with a rousing chorus of the Infernafionale. In this film, it's a totalitarian hymn. When the president, with Korshunov's gun at his daughter's head, orders the release of Radek, the vice president faces a moral dilemma. Should she sign a declaration that would effectively remove the president from power, and give control to the secretary of defense? After an internal struggle, she refuses, and is vindicated when Marshall himself, having physically ejected Korshunov from Air Force One in midair ("Get off my plane!"), personally countermands the order. While the vice president's act defies all military logic, it reinforces the notion of a "royal" presidency or of the great man concept by keeping the designated incumbent in place.

ALIAS NICK BEAL Paramount Pictures, 1949,93 mins.

Producers, Endre Bohem and John Farrow; director, John Farrow; screenplay, Jonathan Latimer; original stoy, Mildred Lord; art directors, Franz Bachelin and Hans Dreier; set decorators, Sam Comer and Ross Dowd; music, Franz Waxman; costumes, M a y Kay Dodson; cinematographer, Lionel Lindon; editor, Edna Warren. Ray Milland (Nick Beal); Thomas Mitchell (Joseph Foster); Audrey Totter (Donna Allen); Geraldine Wall (Martha Foster); George Macready (Reverend Thomas Garfield); Heny O’Neill (Judge Hobbs); Daryl Hickman ( L a r y Price); Fred Clark (Frankie Faulkner). Alias Nick Beal is an important landmark in the tradition of the political film because it makes explicit a point that is only implied or treated symbolically in other movies about corrupted heroes: political success requires a Faustian bargain. In Alias Nick Beal, a politician literally sells his soul to the devil for political gain. Mind you, he means well: Joseph Foster (Thomas Mitchell), a decent district attorney frustrated by his inability to convict an arrogant villain, is incautious enough to declare that he would give his soul to jail the man. Enter mysteriously (with noir touches) Nick Beal (Ray Milland), a stranger who offers to provide the necessary evidence. The price for this aid at first seems negligible: whatever seems ”fair,” Beal says. But soon Beal has Foster enmeshed in more complex situations, and by slow increments Foster becomes more and more dependent on him, and more ambitious for himself. As Nick puts it, ”In every man, there’s an imperfection, a fatal weakness, a seed of destruction. You discovered that, Foster, when you traded principles for personal glory, when you sacrificed integrity for power.” Beal initially entices Foster by arguing that success in politics requires compromise. ”You know it’s funny about reformers,” he says. ”They’re all color-blind. They see everything either in black or white. No in-betweens, no grays. They don’t realize that politics is full of grays, all different shades.” His argument is identical to the one made by Senator Paine to Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to 15

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Alias Nick Beal

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Nick Beal (Ray Milland) entices well-meaning gubernatorial candidate Joseph Foster (Thomas Mitchell) to sacrifice his integrity for political success. (Alias Nick Beal, Paramount Pictures, 1949.) Source: Larry Edmunds Bookstore, Los Angeles, Calif.

Wushingfon: that in the ”grown up” world, one must compromise with evil to achieve good. The ”good” woman in this drama is Foster’s wife, Martha (Geraldine Wall), who represents his conscience and tries to steer him away from Nick. The “bad“ woman is Donna Allen (Audrey Totter), a prostitute who has seen better days and whom Beal hires to entrap Foster by playing on his ego. Donna fills Foster with longings for romance and alienates him from the steady, supportive, but critical Martha. Under Donna’s influence, Foster buys into Beal’s values: he calls Martha’s moral objections ”cant, righteousness, and sanctimony.” Infatuated, he tells Martha, ”I’m fed up with preaching. You’re not a wife, you’re a missionary.” But Martha’s point is the same one made by Mary Matthews in Stafe of the Union: self-corruption cannot be managed; it ultimately undermines any intended good. Another player in the morality drama is Reverend Thomas Garfield (George Macready), who issues dire warnings along the way about Nick’s evil influence and the harm it is doing Foster’s

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soul. Garfield detects Beal’s evil early on. When he asks Nick to read a Bible passage at a boy’s club that Foster sponsors, Beal recoils in fear: “No. It’s your book, read it yourself.” Later, in a melodramatic touch, Garfield prevents Beal from collecting Foster’s soul by dropping a Bible on the contract he had signed. Unable to touch Scripture, Beal must surrender his prize. He remarks that Foster has been lucky-”luckier than I was when I fell’’-but he promises to persevere, to find in someone else the ”seed of destruction,” the “fatal weakness,” that entrapped Foster. Later political films are less literal in their treatment of politics as a Faustian bargain, but they often suggest a satanic element through dramatic or cinematic symbolism. When torches blaze at Willie Stark’s rallies in AIZ the King’s Men, an attractive woman whispers enticingly into Bill McKay’s ear in The Candidate, and John Palmieri beats a shark to death to intimidate Peter Burton in True Colors, Beal is working his wiles in other venues and by other means.

ALL THE KING’S MEN Columbia Pictures Corporation; Robert Rossen Productions, 1949,109 mins.

Producer, director, and screenwriter, Robert Rossen, based on the novel by Robert Penn Warren;art director, Sturges Carne; music, Louis Gruenberg; costume designer, Jean Louis; cinematographer, Burnett Guffey; editors, A1 Clark and Robert Parrish. Broderick Crawford (WilZie Stark);John Ireland (JackBurden);Mercedes McCambridge (Sadie Burke); John Derek (Tom Stark); Anne Seymour (Lucy Stark); Joanne Dru (Anne Sfanton); Shepperd Strudwick (Adam Stanton); Raymond Greenleaf (Judge Stanton); Ralph Dumke (Tiny Dujfy); Walter Burke (sugar boy); H. C. Miller (Pa Stark). Late in the film, a former admirer of Governor Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford) bitterly contrasts the idealism expressed in Willie’s early campaign speeches with his later dishonesty in office. ”Then you made sense. I believed in you. The words are still good, but you’re not,” he tells Stark. He adds, significantly, “I don’t believe you ever were.” The film asks, among other things, whether Willie’s moral downfall is a product of free will or of original sin, whether he is a good man corrupted by the political process, or a bad one whose inherent vice emerges when he gets a chance for power. Willie maintains a Calvinist view of humanity: all have sinned, and their sins may be used against them. Because it assumes that humans are inherently corrupt, the film repudiates a tenet of pre-World War I1 political movies: the bond between electorate and candidate can be a sacred one. As an honest reformer, Willie has obstinate courage; but he is ineffective on the stump, boring his audiences with earnestly compiled statistics. His transformation to flaming demagogue occurs during h s first and failed campaign for governor. To his chagrin and humiliation, he learns that he has been “set up” by the corrupt state machine to split the “hick vote and thereby ensure their candidate’s victory. After a monumental drunk, the embittered Willie thrills a crowd at a country fair by connecting to them viscerally as a scorned fellow hick. He has found within himself a deep well of resentment 18

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that resonates with the downtrodden electorate: “Even a dog can stand up on its hind legs. . . . Nail up anyone who stands in your way. If they don’t deliver, give me the axe and I’ll do it myself.” “My study is the heart of the people,” Willie says. He declares that the people are sovereign, and the state exists to serve them. Free education and free hospitals should be theirs ”not as a charity, but as a right”; farmers should be able to get their goods to market on tollfree roads; the poor should not be taxed. Willie is sincere in some respects, but he also uses his new rhetorical powers to gain the power he seeks above all other things. Asked whether Willie means to keep his promises to the poor, his longtime friend Jack Burden (John Ireland) responds, “Sure he means it. That’s his bribe.” We are a long way from the populist pieties of Frank Capra. When Willie eventually becomes governor, shedding h s morality along with his naivete, he institutes a reign of terror to consolidate his position. Readily admitting he would make a deal with the devil to get his programs through, Willie justifies the many compromises he has made with the powerful in his state by explaining his political philosophy. Evil, he says, is the ultimate reality: all good comes from bad, because ”You can’t make it out of anything else.” Willie is, in all respects, a man of appetite. As a farmer, he gnaws at his food like a beast. When the deaths of some children confirm his warnings about shoddy school construction and gain him electoral popularity, he treats the incident as a personal, rather than moral, triumph. Later, he consumes friends, women, and whiskey with equal gusto: in him, the desire to do good things is fatally intermingled with a lust for personal power. His rise from illiterate farmer to idealistic lawyer to corrupt governor is chronicled by reporter Jack Burden (John Ireland), a man of privileged background who cannot ”find” himself or settle on a career. Jack becomes Willie’s advisor and advocate because he finds in the rough-hewn politician a weapon against his class, and especially from his mother and stepfather, whose indulgent lifestyle offends him. In the end, however, Willie betrays and consumes Jack as well. In order to destroy a political foe (a judge with integrity), Willie enlists Jack to uncover something discreditable in his past. When his investigations reveal incriminating information about a man whom Jack has revered all this life (a corrupt act from his early days as a politician), Jack is further disillusioned, but retains a shred of integrity by withholding the incriminating information from Willie.

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All the King's Men

The women in Willie's life include his wife Lucy (Anne Seymour), a schoolteacher who oversees his education, but who is abandoned when Willie gains power; and seasoned political operative Sadie Burke (Mercedes McCambridge), who becomes his advisor and mistress. Sadie, in turn, is displaced in Willie's affections by Anne Stanton (Joanne Dm), Jack Burden's fiancke and niece of the judge who opposes Willie. It is Anne who makes the Faustian bargain in the film, betraying her uncle for love of the charismatic Willie. After the judge commits suicide, Anne's brother Adam (Shepperd Strudwick) avenges the family by assassinating Willie, who dies dreaming of further consumption: "Could have been the whole world, Willie Stark Why did he do it to me? Willie Stark. Why?" Like its source, Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize novel, Robert Rossen's All the King's Men is a meditation on the career of Huey Long, governor of and then senator from Louisiana. Detested by many as an arrogant, power-mad upstart, and adored by others as a champion of the underprivileged, Long was a serious presidential prospect in the 1930s. His 1935 assassination gave his life the dimensions, or at least the arc, of tragedy. Director Robert Rossen (1908-1966) began his career as a Broadway playwright. For Warner Bros., makers of socially conscious films in the 1930s, he wrote the screenplays of such well-regarded films as The Roaring Twenties (1939),A Walk in the Sun (1945),and The Strange Love ofMarfha h e r s (1946).He went to Columbia in 1947and directed his own screenplay for johnny O'clock (1947). His career was bumpy after AlZ the King's Men because of blacklisting, but he made notable films in the years following, perhaps the best of them being The Hustler (1961). All the King's Men won the Oscar as Best Picture in 1949. Crawford took the best actor award, and McCambridge won best supporting actress. Ireland was nominated for an Oscar, but did not win.

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT Castle Rock Entertainment; Columbia Pictures Corporation; Universal Pictures; Wildwood Enterprises, Inc., 1995, 120 mins.

Producer, Rob Reiner; director, Rob Reiner; screenplay, Aaron Sorkin; art director, John Warnke; production designer, LiZly Kilvert; set decorator, Karen O’Hara; costumes, Gloria Gresham; music, Marc Shaimam; cinematographer, John Seale; editor, Robert Leighton. Michael Douglas (President Andrew Shepherd); Annetfe Benning (Sydney Ellen Wade); Martin Sheen (A. J. Maclnerney); Michael J. Fox (Lewis Rothschild); Richard Dreyfuss (Senator Bob Rumson); Anna Deavere Smith (Robin McCall); Shawna Waldron (Lucy Shepherd); David Paymer (Leon Kodak). In both The American Presidenf and the television series ”The West Wing,” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin frames presidents who combine personal decency with political pragmatism. Shrewd, adept, and combative, Sorkin’s presidents relish a good political fight and are prepared, intellectually and temperamentally, to engage in the messy process of compromise necessary to get their programs through. The greatest challenge they face is to keep their pragmatic instincts in check when fundamental moral issues are at stake. (Located historically, such characters may represent Bill Clinton’s legacy for the cinema of politics.) What differentiates Sorkin’s projects from such worthy but ”softer” films as Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is that he is willing to represent the goodness of his characters by identifying them with specific liberal policies. A widower and a man of decency, President Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas) is a caring father to a precocious daughter (Shawna Waldron) and strives to keep their personal life as “normal” as possible. He surrounds himself with a staff of idealists who encourage him to follow progressive policies. In military matters, he is decisive but compassionate: when he orders the bombing of the Libyan intelligence headquarters, in response to a Libyan attack on an American target, he rejects the compliment that he has acted in a “very presidential” manner. Thinking instead of the innocent Libyan workers on the evening shift who will die 21

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The American President

in the attack, he says rather that such acts represent ”the least presidential thing I do.” At the same time, Shepherd is deeply pragmatic. Grown cautious in office, he has adopted the political motto, “we fight the fights we can win.” Knowing that his power resides in his poll numbers, Shepherd has come to feel that he can do only what the electorate, through its support, permits him to do. Voted in by a small margin but having risen to a 63 percent approval rating in his third year as president, Shepherd has great hope of reelection. In view of an expected challenge by reactionary Senator Bob Rumson (Richard Dreyfuss), however, Shepherd needs to expend his political capital shrewdly. His legislative agenda focuses on a crime bill, weakened by NRA lobbying with regard to gun control, and a bill to reduce fossil fuel emissions by 20 percent in a decade. Observing that “governing is prioritizing,” Shepherd is inclined to press the weakened crime bill, settle for a 10 percent reduction in fuel emission, and hold back, until after the election, other, more liberal, aspects of his agenda. Idealists who urge him to stand up for principle include Domestic Policy Advisor Lewis Rothschild (Michael J. Fox), who is disappointed that the president, for political reasons, dropped from a speech a “kick ass” paragraph detailing just why many Americans “can’t afford to live in a ’great society”’; and lobbyist Sydney Ellen Wade (Annette Benning), who represents an environmental organization promoting the more extreme fossil fuel legislation. Also pressing for bolder political stands is Chief of Staff A. J. MacInerney (Martin Sheen), who urges Shepherd to drop his prudent policy of fighting the fights they can win, and instead ”fight the fight that needs fighting.” MacInerney tells Shepherd, “People want leadership. . . . In the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadershp. They’re so thirsty for it, they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage for it, and when they discover it’s a mirage, they’ll drink the sand.” Shepherd’s response is deeply cynical. Remarking on the many unworthy politicians who have gained power in America, he concludes: ”People don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty. They drink the sand because they can’t tell the difference.” Shepherd tries to retain the support of Wade’s environmental organization at no political cost to himself by asking the impossible of them. He promises to back their more radical fossil fuel bill only if

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Wade can win the support of twenty-four additional Congressmen. In spite of the odds against her, Wade actually manages to do so, but by then Shepherd-his ratings in d e c l i n d e c i d e s to improve the prospects of his anticrime legislation by trading the votes she had gained on the environmental issue. Wade’s efforts, he concludes, have given him the leverage to get only one bill through, and, at the price of betraying her trust, he chooses the one he thinks is more important. The president’s decision is complicated by the fact that he and Wade have fallen in love-Shepherd’s political calculations disrupt their romance, and a ”character” issue has arisen in connection with their romantic relationship. During the close election, Shepherd had gained a considerable sympathy vote when he ran as a grieving widower, his wife recently dead. Now, the ”Sydney problem” precipitates a political crisis when Republicans circulate photographs of Wade taken at a flag burning protest some years earlier. Summoning his integrity and his passion, Shepherd tackles this issue head on at a press conference. Declaring that ”being president of this country is entirely about character,” he describes himself as a “card carrying” member of the American Civil Liberties Union and challenges Republican opponent Rumson to join an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights. Shepherd reminds the public that “America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve got to want it bad.” He concludes, “We have serious problems to solve, and we need to be serious people.” In a democracy, great leaders cannot exist without the support of a great public. After being double crossed by the president, a disappointed Wade-by then widely known as the president’s mistress-loses her lobbyist job: her boss declares, ”I hired a pit bull, not a prom queen.” She leaves Washington to take another position, but returns when Shepherd gathers the courage to send both the crime and the energy bill to Congress intact. (Both president and lobbyist declare, however, that they acted on principle: he didn’t change his policy as a way to get her back; she didn’t come back because he changed his mind. In the end, the political and the personal merge.) As the film is a romantic comedy, much of its humor concerns the president of the United States trying to date in a “normal” way. A running gag is his effort to buy Sydney flowers when he has no credit card. Another signature moment in the film is when Shepherd and Wade break decorum by dancing at a state dinner for the president of

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The Amerian Presidenf

France. But the film also recognizes that an ordinary man is different when in office. Ceremonies of state are important elements in The American President. In the framework of a romantic comedy, they are, of course, a considerable courting advantage: such touches as marine escorts, red carpets, and helicopters really can impress a date. In the political framework, ceremonies symbolize what separates the president from others. The notion that ceremony represents metaphysical power is a central element of the film’s visual strategy. As cinematographer John Seales remarks, “Americans think [that] when they threw the tea in Boston Harbor they also threw out royalty.” In fact, however, ”the pomp and circumstance and the pressure surrounding the president of the United States [are] . . . American [forms] of royalty.”6This effect carries over into the plot. Despite Shepherd’s protests, Chief of Staff A. J. MacInemey (Martin Sheen), though an old friend and the best man at his wedding, insists on calling Shepherd ”M.r. President” or “Sir,” even during games of pool. When Shepherd asks Wade to think of him as something other than ”the president,” she insists, ”This isn’t a state of mind. You are the president.” Sorkin seems well steeped in the conventions of the political film and well able to create for our era nuanced versions of the redeeming political hero. The fact that his portrayals are more prescriptive than descriptive-instructions to aspiring leaders rather than portrayals of existing ones-in no way diminishes his achievement. By reshaping the myth of the redeeming political hero for our time, he advances the collective American project of identifying and cultivating our worthiest qualities.

BEING THERE Enigma; Fujisankei; Lorimar Film Entertainment, 1972, 130 mins.

Producer, Andrew Braunsberg; director, Hal Ashby; screenplay, Robert C. Jones, Ierzy Kosinski, based on the novel by Jerzy Kosinski; production designer, Michael D. Huller; music, Johnny Mandel; costumes, May Routh; art director, James L. Schoppe; set decorator, Robert R. Benton; cinematographer, Caleb Deschanel; editor, Don Zimmerman. Peter Sellers (Chance); Shirley MacLaine (Eve Rand); Melvyn Douglas (Benjamin Rand); Jack Warden (the president); Richard A. Dysart (Dr. Allenby); Richard Basehart (Vladimir Skrapinov); Ruth Attaway (Louise); David Clennon (Thomas Franklin); Fran Brill (Sally Hayes); Denise D u B a r y (Johanna Franklin). In Jerzy Kosinski’s 1971 satiric novel Being There,7 a simple-minded gardener named Chance becomes a political force because people credit him with qualities of mind and spirit that he does not possess. Though he is illiterate and naive, knowing only what he has seen on television, powerful people and the press and public at large mistake Chance’s ingenuous remarks about gardens for deep symbolism. They take his mysterious personal beauty for goodness and his habit of repeating what others say for empathy. Kosinski’s conceit is that Americans, bare of spirit but yearning for transcendence, create icons of emptiness. And all before Ronald Reagan! Hal Ashby’s film, for which Kosinski cowrote the screenplay, alters the novel’s conception somewhat by casting Peter Sellers as Chance and thereby ignoring its references to the character’s youth and unusual magnetism. When the metaphor of beauty as the symbol of our metaphysical yearnings is taken away, the industrialist Benjamin Rand (Melvyn Douglas), his wife Eve (Shirley MacLaine), the president of the United States (Jack Warden), reporters, and the public at large seem merely obtuse rather than enchanted by an unusual loveliness. Sellers gives a fine performance, but not of Kosinski’s original character. Deprived of his physical beauty, Chance retains only a bland blankness. Ejected from the only home he knows, where he has served as gardener all his life, he wanders the streets of the Capitol, 25

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Being There

passing without affect the national monuments that inspired Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.Injured by Eve Rand‘s car, he is taken in by her and renamed ”Chauncey Gardiner.” He becomes part of the Rand household, and Eve’s ailing husband grows fond of him. Rand, a wealthy industrialist, comes to rely on his ”wisdom,” which consists entirely of advice about plants and flowers but seems to be much more. When the president consults him about stimulating economic growth, Rand defers to Chance, who replies with gardening tips: “As long as the roots are not severed . . . all will be well in the garden. In a garden, life has its seasons.” The president translates this into national policy: “As long as the roots of industry remain firmly planted in the national soil, the economic prospects are undoubtedly sound,” he announces to the nation; without government intervention, the ”chills and storms” of economic life will inevitably be succeeded by prosperity. Chance dispenses similar bits of “wisdom” on international issues, as television interviewers fill in the blanks in his statements with their own commentary. Even sexuality is presented as a product of illusion. Physically aroused by Chance’s passivity, which she takes as evidence of an exquisitely delicate sensibility, Eve offers herself to him.But Chance’s only knowledge of sex derives-like all his knowledge--from watching television. When he responds, ”I like to watch”--effectively reduced from the novel’s ”I like to watch you”-Eve satisfies herself autoerotically,while the indifferent Chance keeps his eyes on the screen. Chance is always utterly frank about everything: he describes himself only as a “very serious” gardener; he admits he cannot write and does not read newspapers or magazines. The public takes this for refreshing candor. Only Dr. Allenby (Richard Dysart), the Rand family physician, sees the obvious truth. Noting Chance’s calming effect on the dying Rand, however, he makes no effort to expose him: even if he is only a placebo, he works fine. And this prescription applies equally effectively to the nation as a whole. At Rand’s funeral, the pallbearers-generals and politicians-plot to make Chance president, under their control. Although he lacks desire or agency, and his emptiness is void of evil intent, others believe they can use him for evil purposes. But as they plot, a wandering Chance absentmindedly walks upon the waters of a nearby pond. Critic Roger Ebert responds to the closing scene with many questions:

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What are we to assume? That Chance is a Christ figure? That the wisdom of great leaders only has the appearance of meaning? That we find in politics and religion whatever we seek?. . . [Tlhat we are all just clever versions of Chance the gardener? That we are trained from an early age to respond automatically to given words and concepts? That we never really think out much of anything for ourselves, but are content to repeat what works for others in the same situation?

To which I would answer: yes, to all. The film’s enigmatic treatment of these possibilities is part of its message and method, which is to open up rather than close off questions. Walking on water is not the only supernatural element in the film. In a perhaps unconscious echo of GabrieI over the White House, Chance encounters a street gang whose leader, taking him for an emissary of a drug connection, sends him on his way: ”Now get this, honkie: you go tell Raphael that I ain’t taking no jive from no Western Union messenger. You tell that asshole if he got something to tell me, to get his ass down here himself.” As a representative of a skeptical humanity awaiting a sign of redemption, the speaker (as I take it) refuses the messenger and demands the real thing-the angel Raphael, or nothing. As the film’s credits roll (in the video version), we see several takes of an alternative ending. On his deathbed, surrounded by hushed mourners awaiting his last, prophetic wisdom, Chance repeats the “Raphael” speech. However, Sellers cannot get through it: he blows take after take, giggling hysterically. If this was the ”real” ending, Chance was again to baffle the public with an empty enigma that it would take for a profundity. Perhaps that ”profundity” would have given Humanity the Chance it deserves.

THE BEST MAN Millar-Turman, 1964,104 mins.

Producers, Stuart Millar and Lawrence Turman; director, Franklin J. Schafier; screenplay, Gore Vidal; art director, Lyle R. Wheeler; set decoration, Richard Mansfield; costume designer, Dorothy Jeakins; music, Mort Lindsey; cinematographer, Haskell Wexler; editor, Robert Swink. Hen y Fonda (William Russell); Cliff Robertson (Joe Cantwell); Lee Tracy (Art Hockstader); Edie Adams (Mabel Cantwell); Shelley Berman (Sheldon Bascomb); A n n Sothern (Mrs. Gamadge); Gene Raymond (Don Cantwell); Kevin McCarthy (Dick Jensen);Mahalia Jackson (Mahalia Jackson); John Hen y Faulk (7’.T. Claypoole); Richard Arlen (Oscar Anderson); Penny Singleton (Mrs. Claypoole). Based on Gore Vidal’s Pulitzer Prize winning play of 1960, The Best Man shares with Frank Capra’s State of the Union a protagonist who abandons politics when it clashes with principle. Forced to choose between personal integrity and power gained by evil means, presidential candidate Bill Russell (Henry Fonda) chooses integrity. Vidal differs from Capra in suggesting that Russell’s choice is not the only moral one, and that, in any case, the electorate might not care either way. At first, moral distinctions between characters seem obvious. Though a seasoned politician and an unfaithful husband, Russell is also an honest intellectual and an iconoclast. His opponent, Joe Cantwell (Cliff Robertson), is a headline-grabbing, hypocritical opportunist with a killer instinct who does not want to repeat the error of his older brother, Don (Gene Raymond), who had run for president honorably, and lost. Both candidates want the support of President Art Hockstader (Lee Tracy), a shrewd, Trumanesque figure from an older generation-the last of the “great hicks,” as he calls himself. Hockstader hkes and admires Russell, but intends to support Cantwell, whose decisivenesshe respects. To Hockstader, private morality does not necessarily coincide with the capacity to govern: despite his distaste for Cantwell, Hockstader believes he will make a better leader. Despite this advantage, Cantwell manages by his mean-spiritedness to alienate Hockstader: ”It’s not your being a bastard I object to; it’s 28

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your being a stupid bastard," the ex-president tells him.Though near death, Hockstader takes over Russell's campaign and tries to run it on his own rough-and-tumble terms-which, despite his basic decency, are as hardball as Cantwell's. Knowing that Cantwell intends to charge Russell with mental instability, Hockstader urges him to counter with charges of Cantwell's alleged youthful homosexuality. An appalled Russell declares, "This is just what I went into politics to stop. . . . If I fight like Cantwell, I lose all meaning." Hockstader scorns his reservations: "Power is not a toy we give to chddren. It's a weapon for men. If you don't fight, the job is not for you and it never will be." Hockstader rallies votes for Russell the old-fashioned way, by glad-handing, backroom deals, and tradeoffs. The concessions that corrupted Grant Matthews in Stufe offke Union are here just politics as usual. When Russell stops short of blackmail, however, the disappointed ex-president denounces him:"The hell with both of you." Russell stops Cantwell, but on his own terms: he withdraws from the race, and throws his support behind a third candidate, who then wins the nomination. A stunned Cantwell tells Russell, "I don't understand you," to which Russell replies, in a summary critique of his opponent's methods and worldview, "I know you don't. Because you have no sense of responsibility toward anybody or anything. That is a tragedy in a man and disaster in a president." Cantwell, however, may have the last word. With chilling clarity, he tells Russell, "You don't understand me; you don't understand politics; you don't understand this country. The way it is and the way we are. You're a fool." That "we" reflects Cantwell's entirely supportable contention that he represents the real America, while Russell's moral scruples are mere aberrations. Taking the ironic view that in politics the "best" man can never win-because the qualities that make him the best will defeat himVidal suggests that the office of presidency can itself redeem mediocrity. When Russell's astonished campaign manager objects that the winning candidate is a faceless unknown, Russell offers an optimistic reply: "So was Art [Hockstader] when he was nominated. Men without faces tend to get elected president. And power or personality or personal honor fill in the features, usually pretty well." This was a point made about Harry Truman, who seemed so unpromising a figure compared to his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, but who, it is generally agreed, rose to the requirements of the office and the times.

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The Best Man

At the start of the film, Russell’s wife Alice (Margaret Leighton), alienated because of his infidelities, rejoins him for the sake of political appearances. Though she initially supports Hockstader’s tactics, she comes to respect Russell’s effort to maintain his personal honor. In the end, they are reconciled: his integrity (and his promise of future fidelity) restores their marriage. Perhaps the movie’s morality boils down to a comment Hockstader makes to Cantwell: ”There are no ends, only means. What matters is how you do things and how you treat people and how you really feel about them.” Improbably, Frank Capra was originally asked by United Artists to direct The Best Man. By Capra’s account, he objected to Vidal that the main characters were atheists. Vidal answered, “No coincidence; I’d like to convert the whole damn world to atheism. It’s my vocation.”*At that point, Capra says, he backed out of the project. In his own account, Vidal acknowledges that Capra was entirely unsympathetic to his ”disagreeable reali~m.”~ Capra’s idea, Vidal says, was to have Bill RusseIl conform to his own pattern of political heroism, to be a good guy who spoke for all the little people. Capra envisioned a scene in which the hero, to circumvent the impersonality of modem politics, dresses as Abraham Lincoln and recites the Gettysburg Address to the delegates. Vidal claims it was he who had Capra fired. The split between these huge but incompatible talents was inevitable: in Capra’s America, the people are the ultimate source of wisdom and integrity; in Vidal’s, they are an easily duped mass from whom the virtuous politician must hide his intellect and protect his integrity.

BOB ROBERTS Live Entertainment; PolyGram; Rank Organisation; Working Title Films, 1992,105 mins.

Producer, Forrest Murray; director, Tim Robbins; screenplay, Tim Robbins; production designer, Richard Hoover; music, David Robbins and Tim Robbins (songs); costumes, Bridget Kelly; art director, G a y Kosko; set decorator, Brian Kasch; cinematographer,Jean w i n e ; editor, Lisa Zen0 Churgin. Tim Robbins (Bob Roberts); Giancarlo Esposito (Bugs Raplin); Alan Rickman (Lukas Hart 111); Ray Wise (Chef MacGregor); Brian Murray (Terry Manchester); Gore Vidal (Senator Brickley Paiste); Rebecca Jenkins (Delores Perrigrew); Harry J. Lennix (Franklin Dockett); John Ottavino (Clark Anderson); Robert Stanton (Bart Macklerooney). Presented as a documentary about an insurgent right-wing candidate for senator from Pennsylvania, Bob Roberts is a bitter satire about the corruption of the political process by money and ideology. As investigative reporter Bugs Raplin (Giancarlo Esposito) declares, ”There are no Mr. Smiths in Washington. Mr. Smith has been bought.” Bob Roberts sends up the idea of the redeeming political hero by presenting a candidate who consciously casts himself in that role. In one of his music/campaign videos, Bob Roberts (Tim Robbins), in colonial garb, resurrects fallen patriots on a battlefield. He campaigns on an ideology (more like a theology) of greed, in terms of which the worst sin is not to be affluent. He puts down welfare recipients and drug users, and promotes prayer in school. In retum, Roberts’s awestruck followers treat him like a divinity. If politics represents a Faustian bargain, the movie says, then what better pose could a modem political Satan take than that of a redeemer preaching guilt-free consumerism joined with a smug moralism? Roberts’s opponent, Senator Brickley Paiste (Gore Vidal), when asked who he thinks the ”real” Bob Roberts is, confesses he does not know: ”I don’t see anybody at home. But I will say that once or twice in the course of our debate I detected a slight whiff of sulfur.” (The satanic agent in Alias Nick Beal might have been in the screenwriter’s mind.) While documentary filmmaker Terry Manchester (Brian Murray) follows this mysterious upstart on the campaign trail, his fiercely 31

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Bob Roberts

protective campaign manager, Lukas Hart 111 (Alan Rickman), ”spins” him as a financial genius and charismatic entertainer rebelling against ”hippie” parents who raised him on a commune. Roberts’s true nature is revealed through dramatic irony, “unintended” footage of temper tantrums and media mess-ups, and interviews with skeptics. The film’s liberal agenda is embodied in Roberts’s opponent, incumbent Senator Brickley Paiste (given world-weary sincerity by Vidal), who epitomizes mature, honorable public service. He is for health care and job creation; he wants to use the ”peace dividend for the homeless; he asks Americans to be ”real” in their approach to social problems, and calls for sacrifice. The Roberts campaign savages him with false accusations and doctored photographs. Roberts wins election on a wave of public sympathy by fabricating an assassination attempt that supposedly leaves him crippled. This occurs just as reporter Raplin is uncovering his financial links to the very drug rackets he denounces, and Congress is investigating Lukas Hart‘s crooked bank deals, whereby he diverted housing funds to transport drugs and arm right-wing rebels in South America. Raplin is subsequently killed under mysterious circumstances. We never get to the heart of Roberts hunself the documentary cannot penetrate it. But Manchester’s camera finds clues to the imposture: a supposedly paralyzed Roberts taps his foot while singing, and walks (in silhouette) across a hospital room. A troubled Manchester, leaving Washington with his footage, stops to visit the statue of Thomas Jefferson, and gloomily contemplates the patriot’s declaration of ”eternal hostility” against “every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” But Jefferson is just a statue and his words are only words. Combining the observations of Paiste and Raplin, we can put together Robbins’s interpretation of recent American history. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” indeed filled people with hope, he says, but its real face was the Vietnam War; the National Security Council, in combination with the arms industry, pursues covert wars and profits from the very drug trade it pretends to oppose. Roberts is, effectively, a CIA plant (a “Bethesda Candidate?”) out to advance the NSC’s agenda. Exaggerated as it might be, Robbins’s script reflects elements of reality and can stand as a fair warning to the public to consider the mechanisms by which politicians deploy rhetoric and manipulate symbols.

BULWORTH Twentieth Century Fox, 1998,107 mins.

Producers, Warren Beatty and Pieter Jan Brugge; director, Warren Beatty; screenplay, Warren Beatty and Jeremy Pikser; production designer, Dean Tavoularis; art director, William E O‘Brien; costumes, Milena Canonero; original music, Ennio Morricone; cinematographer, Viftorio Storaro; editors, Robert C. Jones and Billy Weber. Warren Beatty (Jay Billington Bulworth); Halle Berry (Nina); Oliver Platt (Dennis Murphy); Paul Sorvino (Graham Crockett); Jack Warden (Eddie Davers); Amiri Baraka (Rastaman); Richard C. Sarafian (Vinnie); Christine Baranski (Constance Bulworth); Don Cheadle (L. D.); Laurie Metcalf (Mimi);Isaiah Washington (Darnell);Josh Malina (Bill Feldman); Sean Astin (Gary). Movies about redeeming politicians often connect the hero to some supernatural or sacred force. In Gabriel over the WhifeHouse, an angel inhabits a hack politician and inspires him to do great things. In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,Jeff Smith’s deep reading of American documents instill him with the spiritual force of the Founding Fathers. Senator Jay Billington Bulworth (Warren Beatty) gets his power from hip-hop music and rap. The premise of the film is that ”black culture is the only source of honesty and integrity in an America entirely controlled by wealthy special interests. The burned out, sold out Bulworth has photos of such left-wing icons as Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Huey Newton on his walls, but his campaign commercials consist of Clintonian, NewDemocrat hedging. “We stand at the doorstep of a new millennium” in which government must be energized, but trimmed; welfare and affirmative action must be contained. Suffering enormous feelings of self-contempt, Bulworth takes out a contract on himself, though he first (having sold his influence to the insurance industry) arranges a ten million dollar policy to cover his family. Expecting to be assassinated at any moment, he drinks himself silly and, at a campaign stop in South Central Los Angeles, abandons his prepared remarks to speak directly about politics. When asked why he has not helped press a bill to ensure black consumers 33

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Bulworth

parity in insurance charges, he responds, “Well, you haven’t really contributed any money to my campaign, have you?“ Insurance companies ”pretty much depend on me to get a bill like that [bottled up] in my committee.” Vowing to ”call a spade a spade,” he challenges his audience to ”put down that malt liquor and chicken wings and find someone other than a running back who stabs his wife to get behind.” Shortly after, he similarly offends Jewish supporters in the movie industry: “It’s funny how lousy most of your stuff is. Money turns everything to crap.” Once he has found his ”voice” and lost his despair, an exhilarated Bulworth is urged on by a mysterious street character, Rastaman (Amiri Baraka): ”Can you sing, Bulworth? You’ve got to be a spirit, and the spirit will not descend without song. You got to sing, fool.” Now a holy fool, Bulworth breaks into rap during his next campaign appearance before wealthy contributors. On campaign financing: “One man, one vote, now is that really real? The name of our game is let’s make a deal.” On health care: ”You can call it single payer or Canadian way; only socialized medicine will ever save the day.” The audience of potential contributors is put off, but the general public (as is conventional in political films) loves his candor. Rastaman pursues and encourages Bulworth: “You got the life: ain’t it grand? You got to be a spirit. . . .You can’t be no ghost.” Full of purpose and personal energy, Bulworth tries to cancel the contract he took out on himself, but the plot contrives that he cannot, so he and we are kept guessing about the identity of the assassin. In the movie’s didactic moments, Beatty’s characters set out his critique of economic policy and racial politics in America. Private insurance companies take an excessive percentage of health care costs, far more than government does. The black middle class was cheated of hope by the decimation of the manufacturing base in the United States when industrial jobs went overseas. Drug dealing has become the only occupation open to young blacks because available service jobs don’t provide a living wage and public education is inadequate to the task of preparing them for other careers. The film represents its black characters as raffishly righteous in all respects, and analytically acute as well. Nina (Halle Berry), who attaches herself to Bulworth when he embarks on his adventure in honesty, responds to his question, “Why do you think there are no more black leaders?” with a seductively throaty materialist analysis citing the decimation of the manufacturing base in urban centers. A

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drug dealer who has recruited armed children to be his lookouts boasts that, given the state of education and the low wages paid in service positions, he is providing them “entry level employment in the only growth sector occupation that’s open to them right now.” In one mean-spirited scene, the drug-peddling and armed children humiliate two white policemen, who are caricatured as bigoted bullies. Bulworth’s achievement of full integrity is signaled when Nina tells him, “You’re my nigger.” Henry Louis Gates credits the film for not relying on vague and generic ”good guy” positions of the sort Frank Capra employed, but having, rather, a genuine political perspective. ”By Hollywood standards, that makes Bulworth downright pornographic.”1° Regarding the film’s endorsement of the redemptive function of black culture, Gates cites a sentiment expressed by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1897, to the effect that a “black tomorrow” would be destined to ”soften the whiteness of the Teutonic today.” Spike Lee was less charitable: ”I hated that movie. ‘You my niggah.‘ Pleeeeeez! . . . An old story. Black people leading a white man to his own spirituality.”l*Ultimately, the movie undoes itself by adopting such a condescending paradigm.

THE CANDIDATE Warner Bros., 1972,109 mins.

Producer, Walter Coblenz; director, Michael Ritchie; screenplay, Jeremy Larner; production designer, Gene Callahan; music, John Rubenstein; costumes, Patricia Norris; cinematographers, Victor J. Kemper and John Korty; editors, Robert Estrin and Richard A. Harris. Robert Redford (Bill McKay); Peter Boyle (Marvin Lucas); Melvyn Douglas (John f. McKay); Don Porter (Senafor Crocker farmon); Allen Garfield (Howard Klein); Karen Carlson (Nancy McKay); Quinn K . Redeker (Jenkin); Morgan Upton (Henderson); Michael Lerner (Corliss); Kenneth Tobey (Starkey). Jeremy Larner, author of the astute screenplay for The Candidate, had been a speechwriter for Eugene McCarthy in the late 1960s and knew modern-day campaigning at first hand. This fact may explain why The Candidate is still accounted by many as the smartest political film ever made. For all its accuracy of detail, however, the film still grounds itself in the conventions of the political genre. When Bill McKay (Robert Redford) sells out for success, he does so amidst symbolic trappings conventional for the genre. When encouraged to run for governor by political operative Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle), liberal attorney Bill McKay demands to run on principle alone, always advancing his true beliefs. Lucas offers a guarantee that he can do so in two words: "You lose." On that basis, Bill agrees; but he intends as well to make his campaign a rebuke to his father, former governor John J. McKay (Melvyn Douglas), who represents the "old" school of comprise and corrupt coalition building. Campaigning for his party's nomination, Bill McKay starts off openly favoring welfare, abortion rights, and busing to achieve integration, and he urges voters to contemplate the "real" issues of race and poverty facing the country. He does not articulate his ideas very effectively, and they are in any case "far out," but oddly, this does not seem to matter: he wins because of his youth, looks, and personal vitality. The electorate is less concerned with issues than with personal appearance and manner. 36

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In the campaign against incumbent Senator Crocker Jarmon (Don Porter), however, the stakes rise and the professionals take over. To widen his following, Bill fudges his positions (abortion now “needs study”). When media specialist Howard Klein (Allen Garfield) cannot get good film footage to promote the health reform issue, Bill drops it. His campaign slogan turns bland: ”Bill McKay for a Better Way.” The film had opened, shrewdly, with a losing candidate’s concession speech, and thereby offered the audience a glimpse of what defeat looks like. It affirms that defeat does not resemble Robert Redford. One of the first questions Klein asked about the candidate was, ”Does he have kishkas?” Lucas senses he does. Responding to Bill’s initial reluctance to run, his wife Nancy (Karen Carlson) cryptically but prophetically remarks, “You have power.” She knows him better than he knows himself, in that regard. Ultimately, under the threat that his father might endorse his opponent, and facing humiliating poll numbers, Bill is convinced by Lucas to seek the elder McKay’s endorsement, or at least beg for his neutrality. This decision represents a radical concession by Bill: he had run in part to repudiate his father’s politics. At the same time, principle nags at Bill. Even after being well drilled in pre-programmed campaigning, he occasionally breaks free in midsentence and digresses to take up some issue of real importance to him. The digressions tend to confuse Bill’s audience, and they certainly infuriate his staff, which had carefully crafted his evasions, but they satisfy his personal need to keep in touch with his authentic self. Two excruciating moments define Bill’s rise (to success) and fall (from integrity). The first occurs after a televised debate with opponent Crocker Jarmon, during which Bill gets ”off message” and fumblingly asserts some of his real concerns. His staff is sure his moment of candor is a blunder, but his father, having seen enough to know he will win, endorses Bill on the spot. To Bill’s question, ”I wonder if anyone understood what I was trying to say?” the elder McKay replies, ”It doesn’t make any difference.” His son’s victory, he understands, will be a triumph of personality: ”He’s cute.” Later, after Bill wins election in a last-minute upset, his father offers him the kind of congratulations he had hoped never to hear: “Son, you’re a politician.” McKay Sr. knows that Bill has sold his soul, and is relishing every minute of it.

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The Candidate

The other defining moment occurs during Bill’s speech to a teamster’s convention. Though he detests the organization because of its refusal to support nonunion farm workers, he allows his father to broker a deal for their support. While addressing the issue of working conditions, Bill pauses for a second-as if for one of his usual digressions into honesty-but then launches instead into campaign drivel about “pulling together.” The director pushes the underlying irony: as the music swells, Bill’s audience, moved by his “eloquence,” dissolves into tears and cheers. We are far from Capra’s ”little people” who can by instinct distinguish cant from honesty. (And student audiences, to whom I have often shown the film, rarely catch the irony, conditioned as we all are to read affirmatively the reaction cues that the movie tries to undercut.) Though realistic in dialogue and technique (hand-held cameras convey the hectic pace of campaigning), the film is full of symbolic touches. We can take Lucas (Lucifer?)for a Satan figure, seducing Bill McKay in the pattern of Alias Nick Bed. Bill’s corruption is also symbolized by the recurring appearance of an attractive woman with distinctive glasses who gives the candidate warm handclasps and whispers words in his ears, and with whom Bill later has sexual liaisons. Attracted to power, and tempting it, she symbolizes both the spoils and moral dangers of political success. The film ends memorably. On his way to his victory address, Bill pulls Lucas into an empty room to ask plaintively, ”What do we do now?” Having lost sight of the goals that originally spurred him, McKay has no idea what to do when in office. Reviewers generally like this final ”turn,” as a depiction of the poignant bewilderment of a good man gone wrong without quite noticing how. A notable dissenter is Andrew Sarris, writing in 1972: ”I despise Robert Redford’s reluctant virgin of a politician.”12Bill McKay had lots to do, Sarris said: try to raise the minimum wage, stop the Vietnam War, and stop the appointment of the reactionary judges to the Supreme Court then being proposed by Richard Nixon. True enough; but perhaps a sequel to The Candidate might have shown how being in office subjects politicians to the same pressures they faced on the way there.

THE CAT’S PAW Harold Lloyd Corporation, 1934,102 mins.

Producer, Harold Lloyd; director and screenplay, Sam Taylor; sto y , Clarence Budington Kelland; music, Alfied Newman; art director, H a r y Oliver; choreographer, Lar y Ceballos; cinematographer, WaIter Lundin; editor, Bernard Burton. Harold Lloyd (Ezekiel Cobb); Una Merkel (Petunia “Miss Pet“ Pratt); George Barbier (Jake Mayo); Alan Dinehart (Mayor Ed Morgan); Grace Bradley (Dolores Dace); Nut Pendleton (Strozzi); Grant Mitchell (McGee); Warren Hymer (Spike Slattey); James Donlan (Red, the Reporter); J. Farre11 Macdonald (Police Chief Pat Shigley); Frank Sheridan (Police Commissioner Dan Moriarity); Edwin Maxwell (District Attorney Neal); Fred Warren (Tien Wang); David jack Holt (Ezekiel as a child); Frank LaRue (Jim the Politician); Vince Barnett (Wilks, a gangster). The Cat’s Paw is yet another film of the early 1930s in which a benign dictator suspends democracy in order to solve society’s problems. Here, a na’ive hero cleans up a corrupt town. He is a missionary’s son, but the unusual skills he brings to bear are not religious ones. Rather, he relies on the wisdom of a sage who might have studied at Machiavelli’s knee. Harold Lloyd embarked on this project, based on a novel by Clarence Budington Kelland, as a deliberate departure from his normal mode: The Cat’s Paw was to be plot-driven rather than gag-oriented, and to stress fast-paced dialogue; its protagonist was the first one that Lloyd played who was not named ”Harold.” Having grown up in China in the home of his missionary father, Ezekiel Cobb (Harold Lloyd) is sent to find an American wife who will return with him and further the work of his church. Taken in by kindly politician Jake Mayo (George Barbier), Cobb is convinced to run for Mayor when a reform candidate dies before the election. To everyone’s surprise, all the efforts of the opposition party to discredit Cobb have the reverse effect, and he wins. Once in office, he is turned into an effective mayor by the shrewd, fast-talking Petunia Pratt (Una Merkel), who enlightens him about the realities of political life, mobilizes his zeal, and transfers h s idealism from religion to politics. 39

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The Cat’s Paw

The crooked machine retaliates by framing Cobb and removing him from office, but, following the precepts of a Chinese general whose works he had studied, he takes matters into his own hands. He rounds up all the criminals in town and terrifies them into confessing their crimes. He and Miss Pet marry, but rather than return to China, they stay in the United States to continue their political work. Modern viewers are likely to be shocked at the film’s ”blatantly fascist deno~ement,”’~ and some may agree with Richard Schickel’s view that the film is “a dog, the worst feature Lloyd ever made, a virtually gagless tale.”14Author Kelland went on to more appealing political projects: he later wrote Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, which Frank Capra adapted with great success.

CITIZEN KANE RKO Radio Pictures Inc.; Mercury Productions, 1941,119 mins.

Producer and director, Orson Welles; screenplay, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles; art directors, Van Nest Polglase and Perry Ferguson; set decorator, Darreff Silvern; costumes, Edward Stevenson; music, Bernard Herrmann; cinematographer, Gregg Toland; editor, Robert Wise. Orson Welles (Charles Foster Kane); Joseph Cotten (led Leland); Dorothy Comingore (Susan Alexander); Agnes Moorehead ( M a y Kane); Ruth Warrick (Emily Norton Kane); Ray Collins (Jim Gettys); Everett Sloane (Mr. Bernsfein);George Coulouris (Mr. Thatcher);Erskine Sanford (Herbert Carter); William Alland (Jerry Thompson); Paul Stewart (Raymond); Harry Shannon Mane’s father). In most films of the corrupted hero, the protagonist starts out intending reform, but is drawn from it by the lure of power. In Citizen Kane, the issue is not power but love: Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) speaks like a reformer, but events reveal that his true motivation is not to redeem the state, but to gratify his narcissism. To every enterprise he undertakes-a newspaper empire, a marriage, a love affair, a political campaign-Kane brings an idealist’s zeal, but a basically damaged character. His passion to control, to be loved uncritically and hailed as the savior of the underdog, is a product of the trauma of having been separated from his mother as a boy and put into the hands of a wealthy guardian, Mr. Thatcher (George Coulouris), against whose politics, values, and lifestyle Kane rebels throughout his life. Kane’s commitment to “the people” and to reform is no more than an effort to repair early psychological wounds and avenge himself upon the resented disruptor of his northern “Eden” where his beloved sled Rosebud lies buried in the snow along with his childhood happiness. When Kane takes over his first newspaper, he composes a ”declaration of principles” that expresses his philosophy of journalism: that the Inquirer will ”tell all the news honestly” to its readers and function as “a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and as human being^."'^ Kane’s friend and admirer Jed Leland asks to keep the handwritten original for himself, convinced that it 41

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Citizen Kane

might someday be “something pretty important, a document. . .like the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution.” Later, however-after Kane’s campaign for governor has been crushed by the scandal of his relationship with Susan Alexander-a disillusioned (and drunk) Leland comes to see his friend differently. It is not only that Kane has, in his own sarcastic words, “set back the sacred cause of reform,” but because it is now clear to Jed that Charles’s commitment to that cause was based on his own need for love and admiration: ”You talk about the people as though you owned them. As though they belong to you. As long as I can remember, you’ve talked about giving the people their rights as if you could make them a present of liberty, as a reward for services rendered.” But the workingman, Leland points out, is ”turning into something called organized labor”; Charlie will not like it, Ted says, when he finds that the ”workingman expects something as his right and not your gift.” Finally, Leland zeroes in on the ultimate truth about his friend: “You don’t care about anything except you. You just want to persuade people that you love them so much that they ought to love you back.” To this diatribe, Kane offers the toast, ”To love, on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows, his own.” Later, after a drunken Leland has passed out over his typewriter while writing a hostile notice of Susan’s operatic debut, Kane himself sits down to complete the review in the same vein that it had been started, thus demonstrating that he does realize his wife’s lack of talent. He then fires Leland. Recalling the incident in old age, Leland remarks, “He thought that by finishing that notice he could show me he was an honest man. He was always trying to prove something.” In his letter firing Leland, Kane included a check for $25,000; Leland, in response, returned the check, torn to pieces, along with Kane’s now tarnished declaration of principles. As Leland sees it, the desire to be loved was behind all Kane’s actions: “That’s why he went into politics. It seems we weren’t enough. He wanted all the voters to love him, too. All he really wanted out of life was love. That’s Charlie’s story. How he lost it. You see, he just didn’t have any to give.“ Leland’s view is corroborated by Kane’s hysterical condemnation of his opponent ”Boss” Gettys’s threat to expose Kane’s relationship with Susan; as he sees it, Gettys is attempting to ”take the love of the people of this state away from [him]”-the love he thought was due

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him and that he needed for psychological survival. Charles Foster Kane was not out to redeem the state, but to use it as an instrument to validate his status as a great man deserving the devotion of the populace at large. He could not cure the commonwealth of its ills because he brought to the political process a flawed personality in which an authentic devotion to the public good could not take root.

CITY HALL Castle Rock Entertainment; Columbia Pictures, 1996, 111mins.

Producers, Harold Becker, Ken Lipper, Charles Mulvehill, and Edward R. Pressman; director, Harold Becker; screenplay, Ken Lipper, Paul Schrader, Nicholas Pileggi, and Bo Goldman; art director, Robert Guerra; production designer, Jane Musky; set decorators, Robert J. Franco and Bruce Swanson; costume design, Richard Hornung; music, Jerry Goldsmith; cinematographers, Michael Seresin and Jamie Silverstein; editors, David Bretherton and Robert C. Jones. A1 Pacino (John Pappas); John Cusack (Kevin Calhoun); Danny Aiello (Frank Anselmo); Martin Landau (Judge Walter Stern); Bridget Fonda (Marybeth Cogan); David Paymer (Abe Godman); Anthony Franciosa (Paul Zapatti); Richard Schiff (Larry Schwartz); Nestor Serrano (Detective Eddie Santos); Angel David (Vinnie Zapatti); Roberta Peters (Nettie Anselmo); Larry Romano (Tino Zapatti). Should a politician’s career be judged in toto, taking into account his best achievements as well as his worst? Should occasional and uncharacteristic offenses be forgiven in men of otherwise principled character? In movies like Primary Colors (and such predecessors as Advise and Consent and The Last Hurrah), the answer is yes: judge the life as a whole, and take good intentions into account. City Hall says no: as in a Greek tragedy, retribution pursues and destroys the sinner, no matter what his or her achievements and intentions. To all appearances, John Pappas (A1 Pacino) is an ideal New York mayor, in the mode of Fiorello La Guardia. Dedicated to the city and its inhabitants and shrewd enough to manage its politics, Pappas serves the city while conciliating various constituencies and maintaining fiscal discipline. He projects warmth, compassion, and idealism. He has gained the fervent loyalty of an idealistic young southerner, Kevin Calhoun (John Cusack), who serves as deputy mayor. But Pappas is guilty of a crime: years earlier, at the behest of a district leader with criminal connections, he had quietly arranged parole for a criminal who deserved a long prison term. The original parole report, which recommended severe punishment, was altered 44

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to justify releasing the criminal. When the released criminal later kills a policeman and an innocent bystander, the trail of guilt (pursued by Calhoun) leads from a parole officer to a parole supervisor (Richard Schiff), a district leader, a judge, and, finally, to the mayor himself. Though the machinations of a crooked contractor are behind it all, none of the participants are actively evil, just accommodating. Pappas puts his case to Calhoun: must this one error destroy a career that seems destined for the governorship and perhaps the presidency? Calhoun’s answer is an unequivocal yes. The frustrated parole supervisor complains about the conditions under which he works: “We are awash here in criminals, in halfbaked social workers, in a city that doesn‘t function, in a world that doesn’t know right from wrong.” By contrast, Pappas, speaking at the funeral of the child killed in the exchange of fire between detective and criminal, envisions a perfected city, ”free from fear, our families mingling, our children laughing, our hearts joined.” He invokes the child’s spirit as a force for good: ”Could not something pass from this sweet youth to me? Could he empower me to find in myself the strength, to have the knowledge, to summon up the courage to accomplish the seemingly insurmountable task of making a city livable?” He declares himself ready to fight for his ideal city, and calls on the community to assist. It is a sacramental moment, during which a city’s population unifies in the service of a great social vision. Then the vision evaporates as events close in on Pappas. Explaining his personal philosophy to Calhoun, Pappas stresses the value of menschkeit, a Yiddish term he translates as ”something between men; it’s about honor, character.” Pappas’s problem is that he has permitted menschkeit to take the place of morality. In order to divert attention from district representative Frank Anselmo (Danny Aiello), Pappas countenances the planting of false evidence in the slain detective’s home, an act that would deprive his widow of his pension. This after promising her, in private, “The city takes care of its own.” In the end, the truth emerges because of an honorable action taken by Anselmo, whose involvement has led him to commit suicide. Calhoun never threatens to expose Pappas, and Pappas serves no time, but the mayor understands that he must leave politics. Because the film operates on the principle of hidden sin and nemesis, we do not see either protagonist suffering internal conflict. Calhoun singlemindedly pursues the truth, neither diverted by Pappas’s arguments

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City Hull

nor particularly sympathetic to his plight; Pappas acknowledges his sin and pays the price. A none-too-convincing “upbeat” ending has Calhoun running for city council, remarking, irrelevantly, “I’m willing to be lucky; and if you’re willing to be lucky, New York will give you a chance.” We are to imagine that he will, ultimately, become the perfect politician, infused with Pappas’s ideals and political aptitude, but unburdened by bloodguilt. The film generally disappointed reviewers, who complained that the plot seemed confusing and that, considering the writing and acting talent involved, the whole seemed less than its parts. Roger Ebert complained that the optimistic ending seemed tacked on: “Good films deserve to end with scenes involving what they are about, not what they are not about.”

THE CONTENDER Battleground Productions; Cinecontender; Cinerenta, 2000,126 mins.

Producers, Willi Bar, Mark Fydman, James Spies, and Douglas Urbanski; director and screenplay, Rod Lurie; production designer, Alexander Hammond; set decorator, Eloise Stammerjohn; art director, Halina Gebarowicz; costumes, Matthew Jacobsen; music, L a r y Groupt?; cinematographer, Denis Maloney; editor, Michael Jablow. Joan Allen (Senator Laine Hanson); Gary Oldman (Shelly Runyon); JeffBridges (President Jackson Evans); Sam Elliott (Chief of Staff Kermit Newman); Christian Slater (Congressman Reginald Webster); William L. Petersen (Governor Jack Hathaway); Kathryn Morris (Special Agent Paige Willomina);Saul Rubinek (JerryTolliver); Philip Baker Hall (Oscar Billings); Mike Binder (Lewis Hollis); Muriel Hemingway (Cynthia Charlton Lee); Robin Thomas (William Hanson); Kristen Shaw (Fiona Hat haway ). Director Rod Lurie, who promoted The Contender as a “political thriller” in the line of The Manchurian Candidate (1962), The Parallax View (1974), and All the President’s Men (1972), skillfully employs the requisite tools of that genre-action, conspiracy, suspense, and surprise story twists. But the film also strives to deal with political issues, and there it founders on improbabilities and incoherence. When his vice president dies, Democratic President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges) decides to ensure his political legacy and to affirm gender quality “in the highest level of the executive“ by appointing a woman to replace him. Evans’s choice is Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen), daughter of a former Republican governor who had switched parties because of the Republican drift rightward. Her nomination is opposed by conservative Senator Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman), who is offended by her liberal political views and sure that she lacks “the promise of greatness.” He prefers the Democratic governor of Virginia, Jack Hathaway (William L. Petersen), who seems a more logical candidate to many others as well. On a more personal level, Runyon is smarting from his defeat in a presidential run against Evans. 47

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The Contender

Runyon finds and leaks accusations about Laine’s participation in a college sorority initiation ceremony that involved videotaped group sex with fraternity boys. Charges of prostitution also surface, as does the story of her affair with her present husband while he was married to a close friend of hers. While Laine apologizes for the pain she caused her friend, she otherwise maintains that it is beneath her dignity to discuss personal and sexual matters that do not relate to her competence to hold office. In the end (with stunning improbability) the president sticks with her and she is appointed vice president, at his demand, by a cheering, bipartisan Congress. The film (bizarrely)presents these outcomes as triumphs of personal and political integrity. The film’s politics are forthrightly liberal. Testifying before the congressional committee that will confirm her nomination as vice president, protagonist Laine Hanson declares her support for “a woman’s right to choose,” for the elimination of the death penalty, and for gun control; she favors term limits and campaign reform. She wants to see ”every gun taken out of every home, period”; she favors “making the selling of cigarettes to our youth a federal offence.” She declares that the ”the separation [of church and state] exists because we cannot have a fairy tale govern a nation.” She also sets forth some ”conservative” positions, but with a liberal rationale: she favors “a strong and growing armed forces” because of the need to “stomp out genocide on this planet.” Earlier, she was noted to have voted for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, not because of his sexual activities, but because of his hypocrisy: as commander in chief, he permitted the careers of military officers to be destroyed for indiscretions comparable to his own. Then, almost uniquely as a movie politician, she declares her belief that civic values are superior to religious convictions as guides to morality: Mr. Chairman, I stand for the separation of church and state and the reason that I stand for that is the same reason that I believe our forefathers did. It is not there to protect religion from the grasp of govemment, but to protect our government from the grasp of religious fanaticism. I may be an atheist, but that does not mean I do not go to church. I do go to church. The church I go to is the one that emancipated the slaves and gave women the right to vote and gave us every freedom that we hold dear. My church is this very chapel of democracy that we sit in together and I do not need God to tell me what are my moral absolutes. I need my heart, my brain, and this church.

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This astonishingly forthright declaration of faith in a civic religion is greeted with silence by the committee, but the president takes it as confirmation of her potential for “greatness,” and, at a joint session of Congress, demands her immediate appointment: “You have now come face to face with my will. Confirm my nominee, heal the nation, and let the American people explode into the new millennium with the exhilaration of being true to the glory of this democracy.” To swelling music, the entire Congress of the United States-liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans (only Shelly Runyon excepted)-rise to do the president’s bidding. In a film that reflected even a tiny sense of political reality, this conclusion would be absurd. Here, swelling music replaces logic and probability. Lurie’s script relies on the notion that political foes would be won over to a cause they oppose by the simple fact that its proponent has integrity. Laine declares that ”principles only mean something when you stick by them when they’re inconvenient.” It is certainly inconvenient politically to be silent in the face of charges of public sex. In the end, however, the movie has it both ways. While the country and the Congress assume the charges to be true and accept Laine anyway, she privately informs the president that she is not, in fact, the woman in the incriminating videotape, a fact supported by depositions of the frat boys involved. The country is thus made to pass some sort of test of enlightenment with regard to gender relations. Affirming his nominee’s claim to “greatness,” President Evans quotes Napoleon to the effect that ”to get power, you need to display absolute pettiness. To exercise power, you need to show true greatness. Such pettiness and such greatness are rarely found in one person.” Congress is to confirm Laine Hanson, he declares, despite the fact that she lacked the pettiness needed for success. Subplots illuminate some of the film’s themes. Shelly Runyon in public plays the fair-minded, even sympathetic legislator, but privately schemes to destroy Laine’s reputation. He and his aides liken what they are doing to an assassination: “We have to gut the bitch in the belly.” A movie tagline has it that ”Sometimes you can assassinate a leader without firing a shot.” Another subplot concerns Governor Hathaway’s effort to enhance his reputation. His failed attempt to rescue a woman from drowning when her car veers off a bridge and into a river initially brings Hathaway great credit, so that his fortunes rise as Laine Hanson’s decline.

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The Contender

However, President Evans in the end discovers that the event was actually staged to enhance Hathaway’s reputation and went fatally wrong when the governor could not extract the woman from the vehicle. Evans uses this information both to eliminate Hathaway as a factor and to embarrass his supporter, Runyon. Another subplot has ambitious Democratic Congressman Reginald Webster (Christian Slater), initially opposed on principle to the Hanson nomination, resisting pressure by the president to soften his position: “I am nothing if I do not follow my heart, sir,” Webster declares. Though inconvenienced by his integrity, President Evans identifies with and privately admires Webster. As his investigation proceeds, Webster indeed uncovers information clearing Laine and comes over to her side. Missing from the film is a critique of the college pledging system that required the young and vulnerable Laine (and other college students) to engage in anonymous sex in order to gain acceptance. This practice, both as described by the characters and as portrayed (grainily, but exploitatively) in film clips of group sex, is certainly portrayed as sordid, but it is buried as an issue. Laine makes no move to campaign against sororities and fraternities that promote it, and discussing the practice only makes President Evans wish he were back in college again. Though Gary Oldman was an executive producer on the project (and plays Shelly Runyon with great subtlety), he was surprised to discover himself to be the villain of the piece. The political good that Runyon has done in his career is at odds with his basic conservative philosophy: his wife Maggie (Irene Ziegler), lamenting that they gave up having children for the sake of his career, praises him for supporting legislation that made hate crimes capital crimes. She fears that his crusade against Laine Hanson will make of him “a second rate Joe McCarthy.” Indeed, Laine learns that Maggie Runyon had had an abortion twenty years earlier, but high-mindedly refuses to use the information against Runyon, despite his violent denunciations of her pro-choice views (“If you support choice, you support a holocaust”).16 Director/screenwriter Lurie, a former film critic turned moviemaker, is drawn to political themes: his earlier film, Deterrence (1999), also used politics as background to a suspense story built on shaky ethical premises.

THE DARK HORSE First National Pictures; Warner Bros., 1932, 73 mins.

Producer, Daryl E Zanuck; director, Alfred E . Green; screenplay, Joseph Jackson, Wilson Mizner, Courtney Terrett (stoy),and Darryl F. Zanuck (stoy ) ; art designer, Jack 0%; Cinematographer, Sol Polito; editor, George Marks. Warren William (Hal Blake); Bette Davis (Kay Russell); Guy Kibbee (Zachay Hicks), Vivienne Osborne (Maybelle Blake); Frank McHugh (foe). The Progressive Party nominates delegate Zachary Hicks (Guy Kibbee) as its gubernatorial candidate after their convention is hopelessly deadlocked. Though they know nothing about him, they are impressed by the slogan value of his name (”Hicks from the Sticks”). When it turns out that Hicks is ”so dumb that every time he opens his mouth, he subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge,” party officials need to find someone to manage his otherwise hopeless campaign. Kay Russell (Bette Davis) suggests that they hire her boss, the resourceful Hal S. Blake (Warren William), despite the fact that he is serving a prison term for nonpayment of alimony. When party officials overhear him delivering a dynamic speech in prison, they realize they have their man and turn him loose. Blake plans to have Hicks impress the voters by delivering one of Lincoln’s speeches at a debate with his opponent. When the equally hopeless opposition candidate delivers the very same speech, Hicks denounces him as a dastardly plagiarist, guilty of ”filching thoughts from a dead man’s grave.” Blake, seeing that Hicks has been spared the necessity of exposing himself, instructs him to avoid the public and thereafter to answer all press questions the same way: “Well, yes. But then again, no.” Blake’s ingenuity rescues Hicks from one blunder after another. However, when Hicks falls for Blake’s scheming ex-wife, Maybelle (Vivienne Osbome), the opposition enlists her help. She inveigles Hicks into a game of strip poker in a mountain cabin, from which he must flee in his long underwear. Blake rescues Hicks yet again, but, in order to avoid arrest himself, he must remarry Maybelle. Kay, who procured Blake his job in the first place and has been lending him money to fend off Maybelle all the while, is naturally furious at 51

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this turn of events. To win her back, Blake has Kay arrested for abandoning a child (himself, in his mentality) and, after arranging a second divorce from Maybelle, heads off with Kay to Nevada to mn another campaign. Hicks, of course, wins the election. Andrew Bergman describes The Dark Horse as an “extremely funny and bitter film,” in the tradition that treats the voting public as “gullible to every political prank-an easy tool for shysters.”17 Blake, calling his candidate ”the dumbest human being I ever saw,” centers his campaign precisely on that gullibility: “We‘re going to convince the voters that they’re getting one of them. That’s what voters want in these days of corruption and depression.” Linking those two social ills obscured the problem of underlying economic conditions by suggesting that the nation’s troubles could either be cured by more honest politics, or should be endured with a sense of humor. The work is derivative: the Lincoln speech stunt had earlier been used by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly in their stage comedy To the Ladies. Reviewers also noted plot similarities to the satiric stage show of 1932 Of Thee I Sing, written by Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind with music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin. Of Thee I Sing, which became the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize as best drama, was credited by reviewers with inspiring, that same year, a series of movie satires (including The Phantom President, with George M. Cohan) that exploited the similarities between politics and entertainment.

DAVE Donner /Schuler-Dormer Productions; Northern Lights Entertainment; Warner Bros., 1993,110 mins.

Producers, Lauren Shuler-Donner and Ivan Reitman; director, Ivan Reitman; screenplay, Gary Ross; production designer, J. Michael Riva; art director, David Klassen; set decorafor, Michael Taylor; costume designer, Richard Hornung, Ann Roth; music, James Newton Howard; cinematographer, Adam Greenberg; editor, Sheldon Kahn. Kevin Kline (Dave KovicPresident Bill Mitchell); Sigourney Weaver (Ellen Mitchell); Frank Langella (Bob Alexander); Kevin Dunn (Alan Reed); Charles Grodin (Murray Blum); Ben Kingsley (Vice President Nance); Ving Rhames (Duane Stevenson); Faith Prince (Alice). When the redeeming president returned in the films of the 1990s, he often did so in the form of an action hero fighting a foreign or alien foe (as in Air Force One and Independence Day). We might call that Reagan-style redemption, but there was room for liberal redeemers as well. The American President offered one; Dave offers another. Both films focus on domestic rather than foreign issues, and their protagonists take on crooked lobbyists, special interests, unscrupulous schemers, and reactionaries. Dave Kovic (Kevin Kline) runs a temporary employment agency. He is a gentle, resourceful man who takes enormous pleasure in getting people jobs that make them feel good about themselves. Bill Mitchell (also Kevin Kline) is president of the United States. He is a nasty, selfish, philandering lout who cares nothing about the country or his office. The two are identical in appearance, so Dave picks up occasional work impersonating Mitchell at local events. Noting the similarity, the Secret Service hires Dave to stand at public events while the president is off having sex with his mistress. When Mitchell is incapacitated by a stroke in the process, however, Dave’s job becomes permanent. Ambitious Chief of Staff Bob Alexander (Frank Langella) installs him as substitute president so as to prevent honest Vice President Nance (Ben Kingsley) from taking office in the normal succession. Alexander hopes to keep Dave in place for the rest of Mitchell’s term so he can position himself for a presidential run. 53

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To convince Dave to carry on the imposture, and break laws in the process, communications director Alan Reed (Kevin Durn) suggests he think of it as running a red light in emergency: “The country is sick. And you’re going to get it to the hospital.” The incidental metaphor works to describe what redeeming political heroes do in general: they cure the country of its ills. Dave has, initially, no such ambitions. Rather, he simply enjoys being the focus of all that audience attention. He is a crowd pleaser, connecting well with workers and kids in ways that the ”zombie” Mitchell never could. Mitchell’s wife Ellen (Sigourney Weaver), who hates her husband for his philandering and his political callousness, glimpses the difference in Dave’s behavior when he genuinely concerns himself with a homeless shelter for children that she supports. On his own initiative and with the help of accountant friend Murray Blum (Charles Grodin), Dave reverses a veto contrived by Bob Alexander to kill the shelter program. Soon enough, Ellen realizes that Dave is not Mitchell and they team up to fire Bob Alexander and set the country on a different course. The infuriated Alexander strikes back by implicating both the vice president and the president in a savings-and-loans scandal that he actually engineered himself. But the tables are turned when communications director Alan Reed (Kevin Durn), converted by Dave’s good example, provides him with papers that incriminate Alexander. By a fake death and the substitution of Mitchell’s body for Dave’s, they contrive to put government into the hands of the honorable vice president. Frank Langella nearly steals the movie as the maniacal Alexander, who had formerly been a senator and a member of the Trilateral Commission and now considers himself entitled to the presidency: ”No boy scout is going to take it away from me just because he’s vice president.” Dismissing Dave’s efforts to chart his own course, he declares, ”He’s not a president. He’s an ordinary person. I can kill an ordinary person. I can kill a hundred ordinary people.” If held to a standard of realism, the film does not bear close scrutiny, but it entertainingly celebrates common decency and goodness of heart. The cause Dave adopts as his own is, fittingly, legislation that would guarantee work to any American who seeks it: “Have you ever seen the look on somebody‘s face the day they finally get a job? . . . They look like they could fly. And its not about

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the paycheck, it's about respect, about looking in the mirror and knowing that you've done something valuable with your day." The good feelings generated by full employment, Dave argues, will radiate out to serve the nation as a whole, making the problems that afflict society seem soluble: "You don't really know how much you can do until you stand up and decide to try." The film is meticulously moral in its treatment of the growing love between Dave and Mrs. Mitchell: they have no sexual contact while Mitchell, hidden deep in a White House vault, still lives on his respirator. After his fake death, Dave wanders off into the night anonymously and returns to his "day" job at his temp agency. The political bug has hit, however, and he turns his office into campaign headquarters for a run at public office. Ellen Mitchell rejoins him, finding in Dave the man her husband might have been. Bill Mitchell has the office, but not the heart or spirit for the presidency, and in this film (as in the 1930s tradition of redeeming political heroes) it's the heart that counts. Kevin Nine well embodies Dave's sweetness of nature. Secret Service Agent Duane Stevenson (Ving Rhames), initially involved in arranging the masquerade, is ultimately moved to see that the "fake" president incarnates the decent heart of America. Stevenson confirms the imposter's authenticity when he tells him, "I would have taken a bullet for you, Dave."

DETERRENCE Battleplan Productions; Moonstone Entertainment; TF1 International, 1999,101 mins.

Producers, Paula M . Bass (Paula Hammerel),Marc Frydman, and lames Spies; director and screenwriter, Rod Lurie; art designer, Steve Merrick; music, Larry Groupk; cinematographer, Frank Perl; editor, Alan Roberts. Kevin Pollak (President Walter Emerson); Timothy Hutton (Marshall Thompson); Sheryl Lee Ralph (Gayle Redford); Badja Djola (Harvey); Clotilde Courau (Kgfie); Sean Asfin (Ralph); Mark Thompson (Gerald Irvin); Michael Mantel1 (Taylor Woods);Kathryn Morris (Lizzie Woods). Deterrence has the look and feel of an expanded Twilight Zone episode. The first directorial effort of former movie critic Rod Lurie, it was, in fact, made on a television-style, three-week shooting schedule, using a single set and costing under one million dollars. But the film also resembles the television series in its speculative bent and the artificial confinement of its plot to a particular moral issue. The script sets up a very tricky ”what if“ situation to which the president must respond. In the year 2008, Iraq invades Kuwait and Saudi Arabia by surprise. If not prevented, Iraq will thereby gain control of the world’s oil. The president’s situation is complicated by the fact that he was not elected, but rather the appointee of a vice president who had been disabled; that he is America’s first Jewish president, and therefore might be accused of bias in his negotiations with the Iraqis; and that he is a man, as a television commentator observes, who ”doesn’t have the physical bearing of a president” and is ”very second banana.” Finally, this un-elected, unrepresentative, and unimpressive man must deal with this crisis in isolation from the normal resources of the presidency because he is confined, by a blizzard, to an Oklahoma diner, in the course of a primary campaign. Emerson demands that the Iraqis withdraw instantly. When they refuse, he is urged to use conventional weapons against them, but is hampered by the fact that American forces are deployed elsewhere on the planet. He decides-despite all advice to the contrary by 56

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Chief of Staff Marshall Thompson (Timothy Bottoms), National Security Advisor Gayle Redford (Sheryl Lee Ralph), and the entire military establishment back in Washington (not to mention the majority of the patrons in the diner)-that the only solution is to send a plane bearing nuclear bombs toward Baghdad. Despite this, the Iraqis refuse to back off. Instead, they retaliate by firing twenty-five armed nuclear missiles against major world targets. Apocalypse nowright now! The owner of the diner, Harvey (Badja Qola), watching the situation as it evolves, observes, "That man is plain insane. That man, our leader, is going to rain down the end of the world on us. . . . There's not one legitimate reason for him to even consider what he's doing." Asking for everyone's trust, and giving assurances that he has matters under control, Emerson nevertheless obliterates Baghdad even as the Iraqi retaliatory missiles head toward their many targets in the West. Lurie has denied, in interviews, that he endorses Emerson's act, and the movie begins and ends with antiwar statements by real-life twentieth-century presidents (Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, etc.). However, everything in the film tells us that Emerson is its hero. We know both because he prevails, but also because he is an atheist-the ultimate mark of political integrity for Lurie, who ascribes the same belief to the heroine of h s next film, The Confender. As Emerson explains to waitress Katie (Clotilde Courau), "Every president must become an atheist. You take the oath and then you must leave behind all thoughts of an afterlife, a better place beyond. My responsibility, my purpose, is to preserve our existence here on earth." The script clearly endorses both the position and the president who takes it by making him the moral center of the work. A surprise twist undermines the film's premise and blurs the moral question it raises. It turns out that none of the twenty-five Iraqi missiles sent against Western targets actually detonates because they had been sabotaged in advance by a decade-long conspiracy between the United States, where the weapons had been manufactured, and France, which had sold them to Iraq, supposedly covertly. The Iraqis have been snookered, Baghdad's twenty-five million inhabitants are dead, and the president has made his tactical point: "Today the United States sent a message to the world. If our national security is threatened, we have nuclear weapons, and we will us them."

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In a self-contradictorymanner, the film’s ending suggests that the president’s triumph as a leader has diminished him as a man. Emerson acknowledges this by apologizing for the deaths he has caused: ”I would like to express my eternal sorrow for all the lives lost today.” He also decides to pull out of the presidential race. “I’m a horse with a broken leg,” he offers, by way of explanation. When he reaches down to help the devastated Katie up from the floor, she refuses to take his hand. We infer, though the film does not suggest it visually, that he has sacrificed his humanity to the cause of world peace. Though bogus plot turns rob his role of coherence, the unprepossessing Kevin Pollak enacts Lurie‘s concept of an ordinary man rising to extraordinary circumstances. Timothy Hutton makes an intense but, given the weather, unbelievably dapper chief of staff.

THE DISTINGUISHED GENTLEMAN Hollywood Pictures, 1992,111 mins.

Producers, Leonard Goldberg and Michael Peyser; director, Jonathan Lynn; screenplay, Marty Kaplan; sto y, Marty Kaplan and Jonathan Reynolds; production designer, Leslie Dilley; art director, Ed Verreaux; set decorator, Doree Cooper; sound, Russell Williams 11; costume designer, Francine Jamison-Tanchuck; music, Randy Edelman; cinematographer, Gabriel Beristain; editors, Tony Lombardo and Barry B. Leirer. Eddie Murphy (Thomas Jefferson Johnson); Lane Smith (Dick Dodge); Victoria Rowel1 (Celia Kirby); Sheyl Le Ralph (Miss Loretta); Joe Don Baker (Olaf Andersen); Charles S. Dutton (Elijah Hawkins); Frances Foster (Grandma); James Garner (Jeff Johnson); Doris Grau (Hattie Rivkin); Cynthia Harris (Vera Johnson); Kevin McCarthy (Terry Corrigan); Noble Willingham (Zeke Bridges); Victor Rivers (Armando); Tommy Boggs (as Tommy Boggs); Grant Shaud (Arthur Reinhardt). In The Distinguished Gentleman, a trickster hero gets a dose of conscience and turns his hand to reform. Reversing the premise of Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jonathan Lynn’s Thomas JeffersonJohnson heads for the capital with the aim of plunder. When events conspire to bring out the idealist in him, and it becomes more fun to reform Congress than exploit it, Johnson and his little band of swindlers, using their criminal skills, clean up the place. Jeff Smith started with ideals but had to acquire the cunning to defend them against a corrupt establishment; Thomas Johnson starts with cunning and develops ideals worth defending. Since Johnson is played by Eddie Murphy, an actor with iconic rogue status, he and his friends enjoy exercising their wit against establishment figures and institutions as much as they like collecting graft. Defending his crooked way of life to his disapproving grandmother, Johnson proclaims that he is no thief, but an artist-a con artist. In the end, the artist wins out over the con man. Johnson gets to Washington by exploiting the similarity between his name and that of a recently deceased congressman. He is helped 59

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by his multicultural ring of thieves and by the Silver Foxes, a group of Florida elders who become his campaign staff. Once in Congress, he finds his election stunt universally admired by his peers: he will fit right in with the ex-TV weathermen and retired jocks who have found their way to the Capitol. In Congress, Johnson learns the ropes from ambitious aide Arthur Reinhardt (Grant Shaud), lobbyist Terry Corrigan (Kevin McCarthy), and influential committee chair Dick Dodge (Lane Smith). To collect the big money, he needs to please wealthy local interests, including utilities owner Olaf Andersen (Joe Don Baker). However, Johnson also encounters the stunning public interest advocate Celia Kirby (Victoria Rowell), who seeks his support for her causes; and he finds a mentor in Kirby’s uncle, Congressman/minister Elijah Hawkins, who is an unheeded moral voice in Congress. In addition, Johnson is challenged to action by a woman from his district whose daughter may have developed cancer from power lines near their home. To take up her cause, he needs to take on Olaf Andersen (and forego the graft that could flow from him).One stormy evening (against a background of thunder and lightning), Johnson appears to make a Faustian pact with the forces of corruption. Instead, with the assistance of his ”team” and the Silver Foxes, he sets up an elaborate sting to expose them. In its ethnic politics, the film sets a clever black-Hispanic-Jewish coalition against a bunch of greedy white politicians and businessmen. Johnson’s knowledge of Yiddish is crucial to his getting the support of the Silver Foxes, and he uses a variety of accents to further both his con and h s sting operation. As the struggle develops, the new generation of congressmen takes sides. Those whose path to office was as tainted as Johnson’s-the television personality and the ex-jock-line up with the establishment; the lone idealist, a Vietnam veteran, jumps in to help Johnson. Murphy’s streetwise, iconoclastic persona is often on the wrong side of the law, as in 48 Hours (1982)and Trading PIaces (1983).When he is a policeman, as in Beverly Hills Cup (1984), he is a very unorthodox one. Here he plays a con man, but his victims are invariably rich, crooked, and foolish: we never see him harm anyone sympathetic, like a senior citizen or worker. We hear, as well, that his father bitterly disapproved of his lifestyle. Celia Kirby inspires him by her idealism: ”My life has to mean something,” she tells the smitten Johnson.

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Johnson admits that though his parents gave him his middle name to honor a man they admired, the only doctrine of Jefferson’s that he has followed is the pursuit of happiness. Falling in love with Celia alters his sense of himself “The better I do, the worse I feel.” In the end, having been exposed in the process of exposing others, he must leave Congress. He vows, however, that his next move will be to run for president. Despite this promise, a sequel is very unlikely. Though ingratiating,the movie is forgettable, except as an example of how political idealists could be constructed in the movies of the 1990s from the fabric of the opportunistic 1980s.

A FACE IN THE CROWD Newton Productions, 1957,125 mins.

Producer and director, Elia Kazan; screenplay, Budd Schulberg, based on his short story “The Arkansas Traveler”; art directors, Paul Sylbert and Richard Sylbert; costumes, Anna Hill Johnstone; music, Tom Glazer; cinematographers, Gayne Rescher and Harry Stradling Sr.; editor, Gene Mivord. Andy Grzfith (Lonesome Rhodes); Patricia Neal (Marcia Jeffries);Anthony Franciosa (Joe Kiely); Walter Matthau (Me1 Miller); Lee Remick (Betty Lou Fleckum). While the protagonist of A Face in the Crowd is not a politician, his career has everything to do with politics, according to director Elia Kazan. He and screenwriter Budd Schulberg were, he says, trying to warn of ”the power TV would have in the political life of the nation. ’Listen to what the candidate says,‘ we urged, ‘don’t be taken in by his charm or his trust-inspiring personality. Don’t buy the advertisement; buy what’s in the package.”’I8 The film, made in an era naive enough to be shocked at the idea of a politician being promoted like a commercial item, develops the idea that in America, packaging is everything, both in products and politics. Larry “Lonesome”Rhodes (Andy Griffith) is a drifter possessed of refreshing candor, seemingly uninterested in power or position and contemptuous of authority and cant. Plucked from an Arkansas county jail when he is ”discovered by reporter Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), he becomes a radio personality and embarks on a career that makes him first a local, then a statewide, and finally a national celebrity; his popularity brings him to the world of advertising and, finally, to the arena of politics, where he offers his marketing genius to promote the drab and reactionary Senator Fuller (John Dudley) as a presidential candidate. As a reward, Rhodes is promised the cabinet position, created specifically for him, of Secretary of National Morale. Lonesome’s candor seems a product of personal integrity, but actually masks a vast contempt for humankind. Like Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, Lonesome can connect viscerally with people he secretly despises. In the hands of lesser talents than Griffith, Kazan, and Schulberg, he could very easily have become a cartoon villain: 62

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his coarse laugh and raw appetite lend themselves to caricature. But the character always stays more complex than that. Early in the film, he is ready to chuck his chances and walk away from opportunities that would tie him down. His early forays into power-mongering are simply reflexive revenges: he humiliates the bullying sheriff who had put him in jail; he genuinely rebels against mouthing the exaggerated advertising claims of the mattress manufacturer who sponsors his first program; when fired, he is content to leave town as a hobo again. It is when he has decided to walk away from the opportunities she has opened for him that a smitten Marcia, fearful of losing him, becomes Rhodes’s mistress. We recognize that she is courting disaster, but we also understand her physical and personal attraction to the charismatic Rhodes. When Rhodes’s unorthodox appeal actually wins more customers for the mattress company, other opportunities come his way. He moves on to the Memphis market, succeeds there, and attracts the notice of Joey Kiely (Anthony Franciosa), an opportunistic publicist who, unasked, gets him a lucrative contract with New York sponsors and displaces Marcia as his manager. Far from being a moral anchor, as Marcia had been, l e l y encourages Lonesome in his selfindulgences. SensingMarcia‘s importance to him as he rises to success, Lonesome asks her to marry him.Despite the surprise appearance of a first Mrs. Rhodes, who must be bought off, Marcia agrees. But Lonesome, on his way to Mexico for a divorce, falls for a flirtatious cheerleader, Betty Lou Fleckum (Lee Remick), whom he consequently marries. Horribly hurt, Marcia immediately understands what has happened: Lonesome married Betty Lou to avoid marrying her. In effect, he married his adoring public, and thus disengaged from a critical conscience to whose promptings he felt himself inferior. In a scene of unusual frankness that gives the f ilm a tragic dimension, they exchange acute and accurate insights into each other’s personalities. Director Kazan was initially drawn to this material by the character of Marcia, the ”bright and idealistic young woman” from Sarah Lawrence College who picks from a county jail “a country boy with country horse sense and a gift for storytelling” and, ”believing she’s found a personality with a great potential for good,” makes a celebrity of him through her radio program. When she notices that Lonesome’s ”going bad,” she “tries to restore him to the self she loves,” but that effort fails and ”she sees that success has corrupted his honesty. Since he is her creation, what he has become, a corrupt-

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ing influence, is her responsibility. And, figuratively, she kills him.” Marcia, therefore, has much in common with the “good women” of political films; she is a Mary Matthews (from State ofthe Union) who loses the fight for her man’s integrity. The ”killing” of Lonesome Rhodes is accomplished when Marcia holds open the microphones at the end of one of his homespun performances, as he privately expresses to other cast members his contempt for his public: ”Those morons out there? They do what I tell ’em! They’re just a lot of trained seals. I toss ’em a dead fish, and they flap their flippers.” (The incident might recall the real-life fate of ”Uncle Don.” He was the popular star of a children’s radio program in the 1940s whose career ended suddenly when he murmured, at the end of a program, thinking the microphones off, “That ought to hold the little bastards!”) Condemned by his disillusioned public and deserted by his new political allies in the Fuller campaign, Lonesome Rhodes ends up raving in his penthouse, screaming Marcia’s name in desperation as she flees the scene. Idealistic writer Me1 Miller (Walter Matthau) provides a cynical postscript to Lonesome’s career by assuring him that it is probably not over. “You’ll still make a living. It just won’t be the same as it was before.” The American public, here portrayed as enthusiastic simpletons, will always need, and be taken in by, characters like Lonesome Rhodes. One of the film’s most amusing sequences concerns Lonesome’s invention of a campaign on behalf of the food supplement Vitachex. When company scientists propose improving the product in order to increase sales, Lonesome suggests that they instead simply dye the pills yellow (the color of sunshine!) and proclaim that the product will increase sexual energy. Sales, of course, soar. Anyone with that much contempt for the intelligence of the public, the film implies, will not stay out of work for long. And since the public equals the electorate, the film offers the paradox of appealing to the intelligence and self-awareness of an audience it has characterized as imbecilic. Who, then, is watching? A Face in the Crowd reunited the team of director Kazan and writer Schulberg, which had scored a brilliant success with On the Waterfront in 1954. Reviewers were generally well impressed, but some complained that the work undercut its main theme (a plea for electoral intelligence) by portraying the public and politicians as fools and opportunists, respectively. The film offers the screen debuts of Andy Griffith, Anthony Franciosa, and Lee Remick.

FAIL SAFE Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1964,111 mins.

Producer, Max E. Youngstein; director, Sidney Lumet; screenplay, Walter Bernstein, based on the novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler; production designer, Albert Brenner; set designer, J. C. Delaney; costume designer, Anna Hill Johnstone; cinematographer, Gerald Hirschfeld; editor, Ralph Rosenbaum. Hen y Fonda (the president); Walter Matthau (Professor Groeteschele); Frank Overton (General Bogan); Dan O’Herlihy (General Warren Black); Fritz Weaver (Colonel Cascio); Larry Hagman (Buck). In Sidney Lumet’s Cold War melodrama, based on a novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, an American president preserves world peace by ordering an American bomber to drop a nuclear bomb on an American city. The president does not consult the electorate; he acts, instead, as its high priest, appeasing the destructive gods of technology with an extreme act of national sacrifice. The moral logic of the plot is ironclad, once you accept its premises, and the action of the (unnamed) president (Henry Fonda), in that context, expresses the nation’s moral decency and emotional maturity. The Cold War has divided the world into two hostile camps, represented by the United States and the Soviet Union, each with the power to destroy the other. The balance of destructive power has produced a fragile stability, based on the knowledge by each party that it would itself be destroyed if it launched an attack on the other. This balance is about the best the world can manage. Both sides have placed their faith in the infallibility of technology and in the training of personnel who will, in cases of emergency, function like technology by unquestioningly completing missions of mass destruction at their commanders’ instructions. When a Soviet airliner is spotted off course and assumed to be hostile, the military automatically, and according to plan, send American planes toward the Soviet Union. When they determine that the flight is not, in fact, hostile, they recall the mission: the “fail-safe” system works. But scientific and strategic safeguards are undone by mutual distrust when American technological failures, compounded by Soviet 65

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jamming mechanisms, cause one squadron of American bombers to continue its assignment. Once past the “fail-safe”barrier, the planes, led by loyal and resourceful commanders, move inexorably toward Moscow. In a show of good faith, the American military sends fighter planes on virtual suicide missions to shoot the bombers down. Failing in that effort, they give the Soviets the military intelligence needed to shoot the bombers down themselves. All but two are destroyed: one armed with nuclear weapons, and the other a decoy. With one last clear chance to avoid catastrophe, the Americans correctly specify which is which, but the Soviets, fearing a trick, destroy the decoy and thereby let the armed bomber through. Moscow is destroyed. In the end, technology-compounded by personal failures and suspicions-has caused a catastrophe. During the crisis, individuals of good will on both sides reach out to each other in sympathy and understanding, but they cannot control the great political and military forces that embody their ideologies. In order to pacify the Soviet military and stave off all-out nuclear war, the president elects to sacrifice New York City as a definitive show of American good will. ”He can’t do it,” one character says of the president’s decision. ”What else can he do?” another answers. Invoking the Biblical sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, the president sends a trusted friend, General Warren Black (Dan O’Herlhy), to drop the bomb on New York. But no angel intervenes, as in the Biblical tale: the General, knowing that his family lies below, drops his bomb and kills himself after performing his duty to his nation and to the world. Black‘s horrific sacrifice is foreshadowed by a dream sequence that opens the film, in which the general dreams repeatedly of watching a bull tormented and killed by an unidentified matador. Black is convinced that when he discovers the identity of the killer, his own death wiIl ensue. In the end, he understands that he is both the matador and the bull.19 The film is structured as a tragedy: a flaw or error must be expiated, and a protagonist sacrificed to the universal order. The “order” here is not a reflection of an inflexible divine will punishing human fallibility, as in classical and Renaissance tragedy; nor fate represented by nature and social conditions, as in naturalistic tragedy; but, in large measure, a reflection of technology itself, which has developed a will of its own. ”It’s in the nature of technology. Machines are developed to meet situations,” one character remarks. ”Then they take over,” warns another; “They start creating situations.”

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Maintaining the belief that technology can be controlled and nuclear wars can be won is a hawkish social scientist, Professor Groeteschele (Walter Matthau). His argument proceeds both from his confidence in technology and from a Darwinian resolve: ”Those who can survive are the only ones worth surviving.” Once the ”failsafe” mechanism has failed, he advocates an all-out strike against the nation’s “mortal enemy,” the Soviet Union. Opposing his views are some military men and, significantly, a congressman-i.e., an elected representative of the people. And yet, humans are involved and responsible. Human minds have created technology to pursue human hostilities. Humans have agreed to submit themselves to technology and to behave accordingly. The decision to jam American communications, and thereby make it impossible to recall the bombers, is made by individuals in the Soviet camp. Having made a god of technology, humans must also sacrifice. Frank Cunningham contrasts Lumet’s Fail Safe with Stanley Kubrick’s more renowned DY. Sfrangelove (also 1964) to the detriment of the latter, which he chastises for being ”distressingly cynical” and for substituting ”the drug of unconsidered laughter” for any ”considered study” of the threat of nuclear war. His criticism may be unfair, comparing apples and oranges of equal quality, but in fact DY. Strangelove excludes itself from the category of ”political” film (as conceived here) because it does not imagine a connection between a society of real people with a stake in existence and its cartoon versions of national leaders and military. Fail Safe, on the other hand, is deeply engaged with the human community contemplating the possibility of its own destruction.

THE FARMER’S DAUGHTER Vanguard Films Production, 1947,97 mins.

Producer, Dore Schay;director, H. C. Potter; screenplay, Allen Rivkin and Laura Kerr, based on a play by Hella Wuolijoki; art directors, Albert S. D’Agostino and Feild Gray; set decorator, Harley Miller, Darrell Silvera; costume design, Edith Head; music, Leigh Harline; Cinematographer,Milton Krasner; editor, Harry Marker. Loretta Young (Kafrin Holsfrom);Joseph Cotten (Glenn Morley); Ethel Barrymore (Agatha Morley); Charles Bickford (Clancy);Rose Hobart (Virginia Thatcher); Rhys Williams (Adolph Petree); Hurry Davenport (Dr. Matthew Sutven); Tom Powers ( H y Nordick); William Harrigan (Ward Hughes); Keith Andes fSven Holstrom); Harry Shannon (MY.Holstrom); Lex Barker (Oluf Holstrom); Thurston Hall (Wilbur Johnson);Art Baker (Anders Finley); Don Beddoe (Einar); James Arness (Peter Holstrom); Anna Q. Nilsson (Mrs. Holstrom). The Farmer’s Daughter reflects producer Dore Schary‘s devotion to the progressive ideals of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. (Schary was later to write the play and film Sunrise at CampobelEo, which chronicled Roosevelt’s struggle with polio.) By making the protagonist a woman, The Farmer’s Daughter revives in the postwar years the depression-era figure of the redeeming hero. In the 1930s, the “good” woman guided the male politician through periods of temptation or despair and inspired his idealism; in this film, she is herself the agent of political reform. Even more remarkably, the film rejects a conventional ”romantic” ending (in which a clever woman saves a good man and then leaves the fray) in favor of one in which the heroine stands equal with her mate in the world of politics. Schary’s heroine, Katrin Holstrom, the only daughter in an immigrant farm family, is fiercely self-reliant. Having gone to the city to study nursing, and finding herself stranded and broke when an acquaintance cheats her, she refuses to ask for help from her family. Instead, she takes work as a maid in the home of the politically prominent Morley family to earn tuition money. She maintains her integrity by holding fast to her well-grounded political opinions, which she dispenses (most charmingly) along with hors d’oeuvres. 68

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Image Not Available

Swedish housemaid Katrin Holstrom (Loretta Young)is convinced to run for Congress in order to reform a corrupt political district. (The Farmer’s Daughter, Vanguard Films, 1947.) Source: Larry Edmunds Bookstore, Los Angeles, Calif

The Morley family represents a tradition of high-minded national service, internationalist and liberal in approach. The late Senator Morley had been an ardent supporter of Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations; his son Glenn (Joseph Cotten) is an upright Congressman; his widow Agatha (Ethel Barrymore) is the state’s political matriarch, enforcing party discipline and determining candidates for office. Their house is democratically run-the gruff but loyal butler, Clancy (Charles Bickford), calk Mrs. Morley by her first name-so the spirited Katrin fits right in and soon makes herself indispensable. She has all the skills of a farm girl, including some miraculous ones: she can cure colds with Swedish massage and homemade glogg. (Glenn Morley is of course immediately attracted to her.) The conflict in the film centers on the decline of political morality among the Morleys, who have succumbed to sectarianism. When a representative from the adjoining district dies, the Morleys assent to the nomination of an unworthy hack, Anders Finley (Art Baker), as

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his successor. Eloquent and well prepared with facts and statistics, as a result of night courses she has been taking in public speaking and economics, Katrin demolishes Finley at a rally with pointed questions. She thereby attracts the attention of the opposition party, which lacks a viable candidate. When the party representatives ask her to run on their ticket, appealing to her sense of political responsibility, Katrin agrees, though it means alienating the Morley family. Katrin represents what the Morleys had been about in politics: integrity and excellence. But Agatha, though personally fond of Katrin, means to do all she can to defeat her in the general election. Clancy the butler, on the other hand, promises to support her, voting against the family’s candidate for the first time. As he explains to Katrin, ”You’re Morley people”: in her devotion to a politics of decency, she represents the family’s true political legacy, which they have temporarily dishonored. Possible wrong turnings distract Katrin. Her political advisors urge her to adopt a formal, rhetorical speaking style at odds with her simple native eloquence. She is put on the right track by Glenn, who is in love with her despite their political division: he urges her to retain her natural style. When false smears circulated by the Morley’s party bring discredit upon her, Katrin temporarily abandons the race and returns home. Glenn follows her there to propose to her, and she accepts: a romantic ending implicit in the previous action is set in place. Remarkably (and in defiance of patriarchal stereotypes), her immigrant father (Harry Shannon) dissuades her from this temptation to settle for domestic bliss, stressing that men and women have an equal duty to defend the truth. She reenters the race and, with the help of Glenn and her brothers, proves her innocence. Agatha, who has belatedly discovered that the candidate she has endorsed belongs to a secret racist organization and has engineered the smear campaign, throws her support to Katrin, who wins election and joins Glenn both as a wife and as a Congressional colleague. As befits a redeeming heroine, Katrin experiences a moment of consecration midway through the film. To provide material for her public speaking class, Clancy has her read Senator Morley’s eloquent defense of the League of Nations, the failed effort at world government that followed World War I. As an emotionally moved Agatha watches unseen, Katrin reads Morley’s speech in the family library. Filmed impressively in a series of low-angle and high-angle

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shots, the scene shows Katrin becoming imbued with the best of the Morley legacy, even as the family is drifting from it. The Farmer’s Daughter, scripted by Allen Rivkin, is full of satirical political jabs. Asked what constitutes a living wage, Katrin declares that it depends on whether you are giving it or getting it. At the campaign meeting where Katrin challenges Finley, most of the speeches are delivered as double-talk. To ridicule sectarian politics, Clancy gets a rousing cheer by proclaiming ”Fish for sale!” Loretta Young won the 1947 Oscar for playing Katrin, a role originally intended for Ingrid Bergman, and Charles Bickford was nominated for best supporting actor. Joseph Cotten displays his characteristic decency in the role of Glenn, and Ethel Barrymore brings charm and authority to the role of Agatha Morley. In 1963, the film was briefly revived as a television series (without its original stars).

GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE Cosmopolitan Pictures; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, 1933,87 mins.

Producer, Walter Wanger; director, Gregory LaCava; based on the novel Gabriel over the White House: A Novel of the Presidency by Thomas Frederic Tweed; screenplay, Carey Wilson, with additional dialogue by Bertram Block; music, William Axt; art director, Cedric Gibbons; cinematographer, Bert Glennon; editor, Basil Wrangell. Walter Huston (Judd Hammond); Karen Morley (Pendola Malloy); Franckot Tone (Hartley Beekman); Arthur Byron (JasperBrooks, Secretay of State); Dickie Moore (Jimmy Vetter);C. Henry Gordon (Nick Diamond); David Landau (John Bronson); Samuel Hinds (Dr. Eastman); William Pawley (Borell);Jean Parker (Alice Bronson); Claire Du Brey (nurse);Mischa Auer (Thieson). Gregory La Cava’s Gabriel over the White House initiates the tradition of the redeeming hero in political movies, and makes his supematural origins entirely evident. Inspired by the angel Gabriel, President Judd Hammond (Walter Huston) redeems the American nation as a direct agent of divinity. The film appeared at an especially dark moment of the Great Depression, just weeks before Franklin Roosevelt took office. Economic conditions were desperate, President Herbert Hoover’s leadership was inadequate, and the new president’s prospects as a leader were far from apparent. In February 1933, even so mainstream a publication as Barron’s expressed a yearning for “a mild species of dictatorship” to help the country out of its troubles: ”Sometimes openly and at other times secretly, we have been longing to see the superman emerge.”*OGabriel’s redeeming hero provided such a “superman.“ Based on a novel by Thomas F. Tweed, the film was backed by publisher William Randolph Hearst. As Robert L. McConnell points out, ”the dominant ideology of the story coincided closely with some of his most cherished beliefs,” including the need for a strong 72

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Image Not Available

Inspired by the angel Gabriel, President Judd Hammond (Walter Huston) saves America from Depression and despair by declaring a “)effersonian dictatorship.” (Gabriel over the White House, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1933.) Source: Larry Edmunds Bookstore, Los Angeles, Calif.

executive. The version of the film that Hearst shaped is not the one that exists today, however. Executives at M-G-M, which distributed the movie, insisted on late changes designed to soften criticisms of Hoover. Consequently, the released film contains narrative gaps and plot contradictions. What remains is propaganda imbedded in a fantasy of personal and political redemption. Newly elected President Hammond, a genial political hack, doles out graft with no regard for the nation’s terrible problems: an economy in ruins, mass unemployment, rampant crime. While a spokesman for the unemployed passionately pleads in a radio broadcast for “the right to put food into the mouths of our wives and children,” and declares that ”the right man in the White House can bring us out of despair and into prosperity again,” Hammond shares a box of candy with his nephew.

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Two characters close to the president hope for better things from him. Chief of Staff Harley Beekman (Franchot Tone) is an idealist and a dedicated public servant, grateful for the chance to be of service to his nation. “Special secretary” and presidential mistress Pendie Molloy (Karen Morley) has high hopes for Hammond: she points out that his quill pen was used by Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, and could again be used for good. Hammond insists, however, that real reform is beyond him and that his only responsibility is to serve the party that put him in office. He is amused when his valet remarks of the White House, “Sho’ is a big place,” but the observation pretty much mirrors his own relationship to the presidency. While not evil, he is morally underdeveloped. Divine intervention transforms Hammond after a serious car accident leaves him near death. As he lies asleep, a mysterious force enters his body, and he awakens a different man. He reorients his administration’s priorities: ”Every citizen of the United States should be insured the elementary necessities for keeping life within his body. This cabinet, every member of Congress, is answerable directly to the American conscience.” When the secretary of war offers to disperse ”unemployed vagrants” marching on Washington, President Hammond-in the movie’s rebuke of Herbert Hoover’s dispersal of the Bonus Marchers-instead insists they be supplied with food, shelter, and medical supplies. He institutes a number of relief polices later to be adopted by Roosevelt’s New Deal. Beekman remarks, ”The way he thinks is so simple and honest, that it sounds a little crazy”; Pendie Molloy replies, ”If he’s mad, it’s a divine madness.“ Having tackled the economy, the transformed Hammond turns his attention to crime. Declaring a ”Jeffersonian dictatorship,” he abolishes the Eighteenth Amendment (establishing prohibition) and insists that liquor be sold in government stores so taxpayers rather than criminals can reap profits from its sale. Crime boss Nick Diamond (C. Henry Gordon) retaliates by machine-gunning the White House. Hammond assigns the task of revenge to Beekman, who, under martial law, summarily tries, condemns, and executes Diamond and his gang. On the international front, Hammond repudiates all treaties, forces other nations to pay outstanding war debts, and, using Lincoln’s pen, imposes international peace. His great work done, Hammond then collapses and the spirit of Gabriel, having transformed

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the world, leaves his body. The mortal president, proud of his divinely inspired achievements, dies content. Political columnist Walter Lippmann, properly apprehensive about Gabriel’s fascist implications, remarked that its protagonist president “is irresistible in the picture because nobody he has to deal with is real. In his imagination he can conquer anything because he never meets anything which his imagination has not created.” The world of the movie, he remarks, “is the world of irresistible wishes. More specifically, it is a dramatization of Mr. Hearst’s editorials.”21 Reviewer Richard Watts Jr. characterized Gabriel as “a cheap, chauvinistic, jingoistic editorial that panders to some of the worst political emotions” and “a shabby and dubious sneer at democracy.”22For all that, the movie did good business. John J. Pitney Jr. remarks that while ”it is tempting to regard Gabriel as a satire or a subtle warning about the corruption of power,” it is the case that “in the America of 1933, responsible people were talking about dictatorship” as the solution to the nation’s w0es.2~It is sobering to conjure up the America in which the film had plausibility. Later films about redeeming heroes will be more discreet about their divine origins, but symbolism (linguistic or visual) will give them away. When, for example, Senator Joseph Paine asks political boss Jim Taylor not to “crucify” the idealistic Jeff Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, we glimpse the connection.

THE GREAT MCGINTY Paramount Pictures, 1940,82 mins.

Producer, Paul Jones; director and screenplay, Preston Sturges; art directors, Hans Dreier and Earl Hedrick; set decorator, A. E. Freudeman; costume designer, Edith Head; music, Frederick Hollander; cinematographer, William C. Mellor; editor, Hugh Bennett. Brian Donlevy (Dan McGinty); Muriel Angelus (Catherine McGinty); Akim Tamiroff (the Boss); WiZliam Demurest (the politician); Allyn Joslyn (George); Louis Jean Heydt (Tommy Thompson);Harry Rosenthal (Louis); Arthur Hoyt (Mayor Tillinghast); Libby Taylor (Bessy); Thurston Hall (MY. Maxwell); Stefi Duna (dancing girl); Esther Howard (Madame La Jolla);Frank Moran (Boss‘s chauffeur). In Preston Sturges’s The Great McGinty, a cocky drifter who enters politics for the sake of profit and graft finds his conscience wakened by a good woman who convinces him to turn honest. The results are disastrous. He fails to achieve his wife’s goals because people and politics are fundamentally corrupt-a situation the film revels in rather than mourns. The sheer boldness of newcomer Dan McGinty (Brian Donlevy) opens doors for him in a corrupt city. The Boss (Akim Tamiroff), impressed by his feat of voting for his ticket thirty five times in a single night, hires McGinty to collect graft. McGinty is adept at the job, using charm when suitable and force when necessary. The Boss promotes his career, making him mayor, and then governor. McGinty’s big mistake is going honest, at the request of the wife whom he had married only for convenience and then fell in love with. His quixotic decision leads to jail and finally exile to a banana republic, where he and the Boss end up tending a rundown bar. The Boss hires McGinty for pragmatic reasons. When his other thugs use their guns on a debtor, the Boss explains, that man cannot pay up; McGinty’s flexible tactics maintain the cash flow. The Boss also enjoys his belligerent independence: when McGinty returns his punches, the Boss cries out in amusement, “He thinks he’s me!” The Boss and his assistant, the Politician (William Demarest), are unnamed because they stand for universal types. As he does not intend 76

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to lose control or go broke merely because of changes in administration, the Boss runs all the parties in the city. He sees himself as one of the barons of old, who expropriated money from the peasantry by force, and defends his rule as the least of many possible evils: “If it wasn’t for me, they’d be at the mercy of everybody.“ Catherine McGinty does not begin as a reformer. Wise in the ways of politics and, like Saunders in MY. Smith Goes to Washington, cynical, she initially defends government graft. She points out that you can’t steal from the people, because what you steal you spend, and what you spend goes back to the people-”so where’s the harm?” The Politician agrees heartily: ”If it weren’t for graft, you’d let a very low class of people in politics-people with no ambition.” She herself suggests the marriage of convenience to McGinty after the Boss insists he get a wife in order to attract women voters. Once married, however, Catherine immediately becomes a civilizing force in the household. With two children by a former marriage, she provides McGinty with an instant family, respectability, and responsibility. When he returns home drunk after his victory party, he is chagrined that the children should see him in that condition. Initially given to gaudy extravagance in clothes, furniture, and women, McGinty lets Catherine rescue him from his own bad taste. (At a telling moment, she guides him around some animal droppings that litter a parade route.) McGinty becomes a devoted father to Catherine’s children, and the children, in turn, come to revere him. They think he is George Washington and Abraham Lincoln all in one, Catherine tells him. As wife of the mayor, Catherine tours the city and becomes concerned about child labor, sweatshops, and tenements. McGinty initially protests that he lacks the power to reform such conditions; and furthermore-a definitive argument, from his point of view-he and Catherine have no relatives living in tenements. Besides, he plaintively insists, people in tenements like being poor, and children enjoy sweatshops. (He cites his own experience working in a candy factory, which contrasted favorably to his home environment.) Catherine, the traditional good woman of political movies, assures him,first, that he has more character than he realizes: that he is, as she puts it, a tough guy, not a wrong guy. She also convinces him,as he becomes governor (and takes the oath of office with solemnity), that he is at last strong enough to do the good of whch he is capable. When McGinty declares his wish to be an honest governor-to abolish chdd

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labor, improve tenements, root out corruption, and serve the peoplethe indignant Boss tries to shoot him.Jailed, the Boss exposes their past corruption, and McGinty, too, is arrested. In the comic denouement the Politician steals the keys to the jail and springs the Boss and McGinty. Making one last call to Catherine on his way out of the country, McGinty apologizes for his failure to fulfillher hopes: “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” he says. The story, told in flashback, opens in the saloon where the fallen politicians have settled. McGinty tells the story of his life to a remorseful embezzler from the United States who, out of guilt, has attempted suicide. Thus, the main plot, about a dishonest man who, in an uncharacteristic moment, behaved honestly, is contained within a frame story about an honest man who, in one ”crazy” moment, did a dishonest thing. McGinty’s tale-which of course might be an extravagant l i d o e s lead to the embezzler’s redemption: he goes home to return the money he has stolen, serve his time in prison, and return, eventually, to his wife and children. McGinty may represent what Robert Ray has called the ”outlaw hero” in American movie mythology, which he sets in contrast to the ”official” hero featured in Capra’s films, who is devoted to the public good. The ”outlaw,” putting his private sense of right and wrong above anything, rejects society’s laws and politics. Not a man of civic virtue, his motto is ”Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.“24Ray argues that national ideology preferred the outlaw, who represented youth and stressed freedom. Sturges thus rings a change on previous patterns in the political film by showing the comic vicissitudes and ironic fate of an outlaw hero who, under the influence of a woman who represents social responsibility and settled ways, tries to act like an official hero. America, it appeared to Sturges, prefers its outlaws. The Great McGinty was Sturges’s first directorial effort. A highly successful playwright and screenwriter, he offered Paramount his script (which went on to win an Oscar) for one dollar if the studio would let him direct the film. Despite a small budget and tight shooting schedule, it was a hit with critics and audiences and kicked off a great career.

HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO Paramount Pictures, 1944,101 mins.

Producer, director, screenplay, Preston Sturges; set decoration, Stephen Seymour; art directors, Haldane Douglas and Hans Dreier; costumes, Edith Head; music, Werner R. Heymann; cinematographer, John F. Seitz; editor, Stuart Gilmore. Eddie Bracken (Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmifh); Ella Raines (Libby);Raymond Walburn (Mayor Everett D. Noble); William Demurest (Sergeant Heppelfinger); Franklin Pangborn (Committee Chairman); Elizabeth Patterson (Libby’s aunt); Georgia Caine (Mrs. Truesmith);A1 Bridge (Political Boss); Freddie Steele (Bugsy); Bill Edwards (Forrest Noble); Harry Hayden (Doc Bissell); Jimmy Conlin (JudgeDennis). As a political film, Hail the Conquering Hero is very much a special case. First, it is a wartime movie, so issues of government, community, and personal character are taken up in a context of national mobilization and sacrifice. Second, it is a Preston Sturges film. Therefore, like his earlier political project The Great McGinty and, indeed, like every film he ever made, it ”confounds audience expectations by belonging to no single genre and by outmaneuvering, with remarkably sustained invention, modes of response inherited from other films.”= Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken) entered the Marines as the son of “Hinky Dinky” Truesmith, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner who was killed in battle during the First World War on the day of Woodrow‘s birth. Woodrow was not destined for such heroics. Discharged after a month because of hay fever, he was ashamed to go home. Instead, he took a job in a defense plant and arranged to have fake letters sent to his mother from military addresses so as not to disappoint her. Six marines on leave-including Sergeant Heppelfinger (William Demarest), who served with Woodrow’s father-hear out his story and decide to help him out of his dilemma. A mother-obsessed marine named Bugsy (Freddie Steele) calls Woodrow’s home in Oakridge, California, and announces that he is coming home a hero; Sergeant Heppelfinger and the others instantly fall in with the plot and, dressing 79

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a protesting, dumbfounded Woodrow in one of their uniforms, escort him home, where he is greeted as a hero. Woodrow does not seek political office; rather, the community seeks him out because it needs worthy leadership in a time of national trial. Judge Dennis (Jimmy Conlin), a good-government advocate who has long worked for reform, explains to Woodrow why he must run for mayor: There is something rotten in this town. . . . It’s like the town was selfish. . . . Everybody thinking about little profits and how not to pay the taxes and reasons for not buying bonds and not working too hard. . . . The motto of this town is ”business as usual” but a lot of us feel war time ain‘t a usual time and that business as usual is dishonest. That’s why we need an honest man for mayor, an honest man who will wake us up and tell us the truth about something he knows all about.

The town already has a perpetual candidate who represents good government, the veterinarian Doc Bissell (Harry Hayden), but he lacks charisma and has never attracted many votes. Judge Dennis, Doc Bissell, and other reformers implore Woodrow to use the celebrity he has acquired through his (supposed) military heroism to defeat the complacent incumbent, Mayor Everett Noble (Raymond Walburn). The townsfolk in Hail the Conquering Hero are drawn with broad comic strokes. At Woodrow’s homecoming, competing bands drown each other out, speakers bluster, and crowds cheer like enthusiastic children. Further, the citizens of Oakridge have long forgotten their political ideals. The General Zablitski whose statue stands in their town park and is the locale of every municipal ceremony is not a hometown hero, but a borrowed signifier. “The town bought him from an ironworks that was going out of business. He just happened to be a bargain,” Woodrow points out. One need only compare Sturges’s cynicism with the reverential treatment of the capital monuments visited by Jeff Smith in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. For Capra‘s hero, the monuments represented the blood shed in battle on behalf of the nation and the sacred principles for which the sacrifices were made. Their meaning was clear, if forgotten by the Washington establishment. Perhaps the most devastating comment on the public is made by a self-loathing Woodrow when he points out how Iong the town has rejected the good government policies represented by Doc Bissell

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and, instead, perpetually elected blowhard Everett Noble: “You didn’t know a good man when you saw one, so you always elected a phony instead, until a still bigger phony came along. Then you naturally wanted him.” But though Andrew Sarris has labeled Had the Conquering Hero a ”sophisticated parody”26of MY. Smith Goes to Washington, it may in fact have elements of homage. Woodrow’s reverence for the Marine Corps and its traditions is profound: he impresses his marine friends by rattling off the names of every battle the U. S. marines ever fought, from 1775to the present-”New Providence, Fort Nassau, the second Battle of Trenton, the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis. . . . ” As well, we see that lurking somewhere in the minds of the citizens of Oakridge are higher moral aspirations, a yearning to be worthy. Woodrow himself understands with considerable pain the gap between his little life as a failed marine, discharged for hay fever, and the spectacular heroism of his father, “Hinky Dinky” Truesmith. Partly in his father‘s memory, and partly out of sheer exuberance, the six marines with authentic war records lend Woodrow the prestige of their achievements so that he can return home the hero the town expects him to be. Sergeant Heppelfinger takes Woodrow’s confession that he is a phony as authenticating his heroism: “I seen a lot of brave men in my life-that’s my business-but what that kid just done took real courage.” Genuine ideals do exist and can be realized. The film sets forth the idea that the home front and the battlefield are separate but complementary arenas for worthy activity. Of the military, it displays little concrete knowledge: war heroes are men who do something vaguely laudable, out there somewhere, and who are modestly dismissive of their deeds. (Speakingof a medal on his chest, Sergeant Heppelfinger declares, ’’I don’t even remember what I got it for.” Another marine, Heppelfinger says, got his for stealing a roasted pig from Japanese soldiers: ”Just a hog.”) The authentic marines temporarily inhabit the home front and, somewhat inadvertently, change it for the better. But they see it as an arena in which deeds of heroism equal to their own may be practiced. This point is first made in a comic vein by Mayor Noble, distressed that a returned war hero could gain so much political support so quickly: “In a war like this, every man must do what he does best, and what he does best, he does in Guadalcanal.” (Mayor Noble spent World War I in the quartermaster corps, safe from harm.) At the end of the film, Sergeant Heppelfinger, having validated Woodrow’s

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virtue and ensured his election, tells the citizens of Oakridge, as he returns to service, “We still got a little work to do, in our own line.” The battlefield heroism of “Hmky Dinky” Truesmith and Heppelfinger is translated into the heroism of good government at home, and the citizens of Oakridge are enjoined to uphold a high standard. Unlike other political heroes, Woodrow is never tempted by the allure of power. He is driven by shame, not ambition, and only wants not to take credit for a heroism he did not practice. The moral choice he faces at the end of the film is whether to slink out of town and back to the defense job he had held, or to admit the falsity of the stories told about him by his marine friends. When he does the latter-and in fact claims the imposture was his idea all along-he regains the respect of ”Bugsy” and at the same time actually increases the regard of the people of Oakridge. Doc Bissell labels Woodrow ”honest, courageous, and veracious”; but he admits that in the end, ”Politics is a very peculiar thing. . . . If they want you, they want you. They don’t need reasons any more. They find their own reasons.” The woman in Woodrow’s life, Libby (Ella Raines), admits to a similar irrationality in love. Feeling unworthy of her, Woodrow had broken off their engagement right after his discharge from the Marines, claiming that he had fallen in love with another woman. Libby, on the rebound, became engaged to Forrest Noble, the Mayor’s son, who was exempted from service for chronic hay fever. She is a competent, intelligent person (serving as Mayor Noble’s secretary, and discreetly cleaning up his bombastic prose), but has pined for Woodrow throughout. Though she takes no part in the political action, other than rooting for Woodrow, her steadfastness validates his essential virtue. The film is beautifully paced in general, and owes much of its success to the desperate energy Eddie Bracken invests in Woodrow’s efforts to escape the situation into which the Marines have thrust him. Woodrow has a deep sense of personal decency, and strives passionately to manifest it. He will, we assume, bring this authenticity to bear in public life. Sturges’s directorial tact is never more in evidence than in a long tracking shot during which Woodrow tries to tell Libby the truth about himself on a walk from Town Hall to her home. Bracken and Raines provide level, unaffected performances as decent people trying to behave well while in circumstances that make them miserable.

JUDGE PRIEST Fox Film Corporation, 1934,80 mins.

Producer, Sol Wurtzel; director, John Ford; screenplay, Lamar Trotti, Dudley Nichols, based on stories by Irwin S. Cobb; art director, William S. Darling; costume design, Royer (gowns); music, Samuel Kaylin and Cyril Mockridge; cinematographer, George Schneiderman; editor, unrecorded. Will Rogers (Judge William Priest); Tom Brown (JeromePriest); Hen y Walthall (Reverend Ashby Brand); Anita Louise (Ellie May Gillespie); David Landau (Bob Gillis); Brenda Fowler (Mrs. Caroline Priest); Berton Churchill (Senator Horace Maydew); Rochelle Hudson (Virginia Maydew); Stepin Fetchit ( J e f Poindexter); Hattie McDaniel (Aunt Dilsey); Roger Imhof (Billy Gaynor); Frank Melton (Flem Talley); Charley Grapewin (Sergeant Jimmy Bagby); Francis Ford (juror number twelve); Hyman Meyer (Herman Feldsburg); Paul McAllister (Doc Lake). Kentucky Circuit Court Judge Billy Priest (Will Rogers) has held the elective position for twenty-five years, since the end of the Civil War. In that time, Priest has, by deed and example, created a stable, decent community in which blacks and whites live in harmony (if not on equal terms) and classes mingle without much fuss or differentiation. His civic wisdom and the virtues of tolerance, courage, and decency he upholds emerge from the values of the Southern Confederacy, in whose army he served. An epigraph from Irwin Cobb, upon whose fictional character the protagonist is based, extols ”the tolerance of the day and the wisdom of that almost vanished generation.” Although this interpretation of history might seem to us patently fictional, it allows for the depiction of a benign social ideal acceptable to Depression-era audiences in all regions of the country. Having lost his wife and children years before, Priest is personally lonely but beloved by most of the town. His name suggests that his enforced celibacy has released his benevolent energies for community use and maintenance. (Joseph McBride points out that Judge Priest is ”a figure who combines the conciliatory and ameliorative functions of both jurist and ~ l e r g y m a n . ”When ~ ~ ) emergent forces of intolerance and violence threaten his peaceable kingdom, 83

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Priest connives to preserve humane vaIues, advance the cause of true love, and spare the downtrodden from the rigor of the law. State Senator Horace Maydew (Berton Churchill), an intolerant windbag who stands for respectability and repression, challenges Priest at election time. Maydew’s hostility to Priest is both ideological and personal: Priest has contained Maydew’s influence for years, and earlier thwarted his run for Congress. Sympathetic to Maydew’s values is Priest’s socially conscious sister-in-law, Caroline (Brenda Fowler), who condemns his antics on and off the bench. She especially deplores Priest’s fondness for the disreputable elements of society, like his neighbor, the orphaned schoolteacher Ellie May Gillespie (Anita Louise), whose background is obscure, and the chicken thief Jeff Poindexter (Stepin Fetchit). “The name of Priest means something in Kentucky,” Caroline complains. ”I’ve never heard that it meant intolerance,” murmurs Billy in response. Priest, who admits to favoring the spirit of the law over its letter, tends to find excuses for defendants who come before him. When Maydew, in his role as prosecutor, denounces Jeff Poindexter as a thief, Priest recalls that the slave owner for whom Jeff is named also stole chickens, from the Union Army, during the war. Chicken thieving, therefore, is a ”family” trait rather than a crime particular to the black defendant. Priest is less interested in judging Poindexter than in getting his advice on fishing. The community at large remains in Priest’s camp, especially a group of fellow Civil War veterans whose daily recreation consists of sitting in his courtroom and commenting on the cases before him. His nephew Rome (Tom Brown), recently returned from a Northern law school with degree in hand, is also on his side, and in love, despite his mother’s disapproval, with Ellie May. Priest is never tempted to abandon his beliefs in order to retain political power, but he is rendered impotent to promote the good when Maydew challenges his judicial objectivity in an assault case that involves townsman Bob Gillis (David Landau). The taciturn Gillis had struck the obnoxious barber Flem Talley (Roger Imhof) for disparaging Ellie May. Priest, who had witnessed the incident, told Talley he deserved the blow. When Gillis is later put on trial for assault, after defending himself from an ambush by Talley and his friends, Priest’s words are used against him, as evidence of bias, and he must yield the bench for the trial.

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Image Not Available

Canny ludge Billy Priest (Will Rogers) exonerates an innocent man and preserves

a community from false ideas of progress in John Fords Judge Priest. (Twentieth

Century Fox, 1934.)Source: Larry Edmunds Bookstore, Los Angeles, Calif.

Rome, who defends Gillis in court, is losing badly because Talley and his friends lie on the stand. Moved by the injustice of the situation, Reverend Ashby Brand (Henry Walthall, the ”Little Colonel” of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation), confides a long-held secret to Priest. Hoping to use it to vindicate Gillis, Priest, serving as associate defense attorney, tricks Maydew into reopening the trial by secretly providing him with evidence of Gillis’s earlier conviction for murder. Once the trial is reopened, however, Priest calls Reverend Brand to the stand to elicit his testimony about Gillis’s heroic actions in the Civil War. In a remarkable montage narrated by Brand, we see a younger Gillis, having been released from a chain gang for military service, fighting bravely for the Confederacy, and also (as an equal opportunity hero) gallantly rescuing a wounded Union officer from the battlefield. Gillis is exonerated, revealed to be Ellie May‘s father, and embraced by the community (to such a degree that Caroline is on his arm in the closing sequence of the film).

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Film history is the poorer for the deletion, made at the insistence of the producers, of a scene in which Priest holds off a mob seeking to lynch Poindexter. Some tantalizing traces remain that give an idea of what it was like. Tag Gallagher reproduces a production still in which Priest, Rome, and Priest supporters Herman Feldsburg (Hy Meyer), Doc Lake (Paul McAllister), and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby (Charley Grapewin, holding a rifle) await the approach of a hostile crowd.28We have Ford’s testimony that Priest’s antilynching plea, cut from the film, was “one of the most scorching things you ever heard.” Within the film as it exists, there is one allusion to the scene: when Poindexter offers to play “Marching through Georgia,” a song despised by Southern whites, Priest reminds him, “I got you out of one lynching,” but threatens that if he plays the tune, ”I’ll join the lynching.” Ford later included a near-lynching in Young MY. Lincoln, of course, and later restored the plot element in his remake of Judge Priest, The Sun Shines Bright. Race distinctions in the movie are never mentioned directly, but are palpable. Prosecutor Maydew characterizes Poindexter as an alien to the community ”who cometh from no man knows whence.” Aunt Dilsey (Hattie McDaniel) fusses over Judge Priest with an adoration that projects the stereotype of the happy black menial. Priest demonstrates his kinship with black characters by joining in song with McDaniel (“My Old Kentucky Home,” including the line about ”darkies” being “gay” in the summer) and incorporating Poindexter into his household. His close association with them, as with the marginalized Ellie May, validates Priest’s saintly stature: he is of the community but above it in spiritual vision and personal virtue. Priest’s virtues are not incompatible with political shrewdness. Accounting for his colloquial charm, Priest confides to Reverend Brand, “First thing I learned in politics was when to say ‘ain’t.’’’ To unite a momentarily estranged Rome and Ellie May, Priest knocks a croquet ball into the neighboring yard and asks Rome to fetch it for him. Later, after having tricked Maydew into reopening Gillis’s trial, he ”enhances” Reverend Ashby’s stirring testimony by having Poindexter play a spirited version of ”Dixie” outside the courtroom as musical accompaniment.By placing the trial in the middle of a reunion celebration for veterans of the Confederacy, director John Ford and screenwriter Lamar Trotti can end the film with a grand parade in which all elements of the community engage with renewed unity and pride.

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Rogers, a beloved stage performer, radio personality, newspaper columnist, sage, and defender of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, teamed up with John Ford for this and two other movies, Dr. BUZZ (1933) and Steurnbouf Round the Bend (1935),all of which extol the notion of an American Adam whose innocence would spare the land from the corrupting forces of civilizati~n.~~ The character of Billy Priest, who appears in numerous stories by journalist and humorist Irvin Cobb (1876-1944), was altered by director Ford and screenwriter Lamar Trotti to serve Will Rogers’s particular style, and Rogers was encouraged to rephrase his scripted dialogue in whatever manner suited him. He did so in collaboration with Stepin Fetchit, with whom he shared a number of scenes, and who had similarly developed and honed a particular character type. The Ford-Rogers combination was commercially brilliant: Judge Priest was one of the top grossing movies of 1934. Rogers’s death in a plane crash in 1935 brought a sad end to their collaboration.

KINGFISH Turner Network Television, 1995,100 mins.

Producers, Robert Ckristiansen, johnny Goodman, and Rick Rosenberg; director, Thomas Scklamme; screenplay, Paul Monask; production designer, Thomas A. Walsk; set decorator, David Scklesinger; costumes, Merilyn Murray- Walsh; music, Patrick Williams; cinematographer, Alexander Gruszynski; editor, Paul Dixon. John Goodman (Huey I? Long Jr.); Anne Heche (Aileen Dumont); Matt Craven (Seymour Weiss);Ann Dowd (Rose Long); Bob Gunton (Franklin D. Roosevelt); Bill Cobbs (Pullman Porter); Hoyt Axton (Huey I? Long 5.); Kirk Baltz (Frank Costello); Jeff Perry (Earl Long). Like All the King’s Men and A Lion Is in the Streets before it, KingFsk considers the life and career of Louisiana politician Huey P. Long. Kingfzsk differs from it predecessors, however, because it does not give its protagonist a fictitious name (”Willie Stark,” ”Hank Martin”) and thereby assumes some of the responsibilities of a docudrama. This commitment may have been the script’s undoing, because in the process of including many incidents from the historical figure’s life, it deprived itself of a clear narrative line that could carry thematic weight. All versions of the Long story, however, need to confront a paradoxical figure of a corrupt demagogue who crusaded earnestly for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised. This film’s Huey Long (John Goodman) is, like the historical figure, an unscrupulous bully who builds a successful political career-ommissioner, governor, Senator, credible presidential candidat-n guile, force, and intimidation. Goodman’s Long admits that he is two men at once. One is all too human: a drunk and adulterer who abuses power and enriches himself illegally. The other is ”something bigger,” a champion of the people who speaks with Biblical authority. The film credits Long with genuine achievements-like supporting education and building roads necessary to farmers (though only in parishes that support him)-and with a sincere sense of mission: “I was put on earth to do something.” He starts a grassroots, ”Share Our Wealth” movement to build a political base for economic reform 88

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(”I’m no Karl Marx, but I do love the working man”). He denounces the power of the wealthy, like J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and the “scalawags” of Standard Oil, who treat his state ”like some South American country.” He is a great orator, quoting from Longfellow and the Bible to great effect. He calls on President Franklin D. Roosevelt to ”break up the concentration of wealth in this country and redistribute it according to the Lord’s plan.” Shortly before he is killed, he denounces his fellow Senators for their indifference to the plight of the poor. He has a great memory for names, even of his humblest supporters. He seems to be free of personal prejudice: he hires as his close aide Seymour Weiss (Matt Craven) with the comment, ”I love a Jew who doesn’t change his name.” He supplies free textbooks to all students in Louisiana, black and white. At the same time, Long identifies the “divine” plan with his own political fortunes: ”Politics is a game of kings, and in that game, I am God.” When accused of violating the constitution of Louisiana, he declares, “I urn the constitution”; ’’I make my rules”; ”What the Kingfish wants, the Kingfish takes.” His mistress Aileen (Anne Heche) ironically asserts (and undercuts) his exalted view of himself, after leaving his bed, by laconically informing his staff, ”He is risen.” Long’s methods are, nevertheless, unquestionably corrupt. He forces his will upon the Louisiana legislature even after leaving the governorship, ousting honest judges who defy his wishes. Faced with legal challenges, he fakes an assassination attempt (and frames an innocent man) in order to justify martial law. He lies for political advantage. While in New York, he makes a deal with gangster Frank Costello to allow gambling operations in New Orleans, for a portion of the profits. Another sort of film might have made this moment a turning point in his life, but because Long’s career is always marked by opportunism, this “devil’s bargain” is entered into without hesitation, and therefore lacks moral weight. The film touches on many episodes in Long’s life, but fails to organize them to much effect or to clarify the issues facing the main characters. Potential conflicts are set up in the script and then dropped without resolution. All Long’s crooked money, and the documentation that would prove his connection to it, are in a safe deposit box under the control of Aileen, but though jealous of Long’s wife, Rose (Ann Dowd), Aileen never considers betraying

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him. Meanwhile, President Franklin Roosevelt, recognizing Long as ”a menace with national ambitions” and threatened by his growing popularity, seeks ways both to exploit and to contain him. Various factions and interests consider assassinating Long. Ultimately, however, these plot developments do not serve the narrative: Long is shot by a supporter of a judge whom he has illegally removed from office. Long tries to justify his career of lies to his disapproving father: “The truth is just too tough for most folks.” People are grateful for his lies, he says, because ”Life is so damn hard.” To his boast that he uses his power to change the world, his father replies, ”Nothing changes the world but the truth.” That moral is not integrated into the plot, however, because no one in the film effectively represents a ” t r u t h beyond Long’s own. Crucial questions are answered ambiguously. For example, when Long asks his black valet, ”Do you think I’d be a good president?” the valet answers, evasively, ”Senator, it’s all in your heart.” Since we don’t know Long’s heart, we are left to wonder which side of his nature would have won out in the end. The final exchange between the dying Long and his wife is also ambiguous. He asks her, “Did I do good?” She replies, “Yes, you did, darlin’. You did the best you could.” We are asked to give Long the benefit of the doubt, on the basis of insufficient information. While the performances are uniformly able (Goodman performs well, and Heche is quite memorable), they gather little force.

THE LAST HURRAH Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1958,121mins.

Producer and director, John Ford; screenplay, Frank S. Nugent, based on the novel by Edwin O‘Connor; production designer and art director, Robert Peterson; set designer, William Kiernan; costumes, Jean Louis; cinematographer, Charles Lawston Jr.; editor, Jack Murray. Spencer Tracy (Frank Skefington); Jefley Hunter (Adam Caulfield); Dianne Foster (Mave Cau$eld); Pat O‘Brien (John Gorman); Basil Rathbone (Norman Cass 9.); Donald Crisp (The Cardinal); James Gleason (Cuke Gillen); Edward Brophy (Ditto Boland); John Carradine (Amos Force); Ricardo Cortez (Sam Weinberg); Anna Lee (Gert Minahan); Jane Darwell (Delia Boylan); Wallace Ford (Hennessey); Frank McHugh (Festus Garvey); Carleton Young (Mr. Winslow); Frank Albertson (Jack Mangan); Bob Sweeney (Degnan); William Leslie (Dan Herlihy); Ken Curtis (Msgr. Killian); 0.Z . Whitehead (Norman Cass Jr.); Arthur Walsh (Frank Skefjington Jr.); Ruth Warren (Ellen David; Charles Fitzsimmons (Kevin McCluskey); Helen Westcott (Mrs. McCluskey). The idea of “compromise,” so despised in films about redeeming heroes, is the very heart of goodness in The Last Hurrah. Seasoned politician Frank Skeffington has made a career of compromise, and used it to do more good than any amount of cold virtue could. O’Connor’s take on the history of ethnic relations in early twentieth-century Boston goes like this: For many years, greedy, mean-spirited Protestant Yankees exploited and humiliated the Catholic Irish. Eventually, the Irish took over the reins of government, and redressed the balance. The Yankees did not care for this, but they couldn’t do anything about it except retire to their private clubs and use their economic power to impede social progress. Wily politicians like Frank Skeffington outmaneuvered those icy Brahmins and to serve the people’s needs by whatever means came to hand. Many saw Edwin O’Connor’s 1956 novel as a sentimentalized and sanitized portrait of Boston mayor James Michael Curley, who flourished in the 1920s and 1930s (Curley himself was of that opinion). The urban equivalent of Louisiana’s Huey Long, the real Curley was as famous for corruption (for which he spent time in 91

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prison) as for championing the poor. OConnor’s fictional Skeffington is a man of deep feeling and shrewd instincts who cuts comers to outwit an oppressive establishment. Ford turns Skeffington into a raffish saint whose enemies are transparently callous and prejudiced. The film concerns Frank Skeffington’s last campaign for mayor of ”a New England city.” He faces a variety of detractors. Descendants of the Puritan founders, like publisher Amos Force (‘JohnCarradine), see him as representing the unruly, usurping Irish. Bankers fear that his concern for public housing and slum renovation will threaten their bond ratings. The Catholic establishment is scandalized by his shady politics. Papal knight Roger Sugrue hates him for associating with Jews and other minorities. However, Skeffington is beloved by blue-collar voters, municipal workers, and ethnics. His loyal inner circle includes Catholics John Gorman (Pat OBrien), a ward boss, and Ditto Boland (Edward Brophy), a dimwitted, adoring gofer, but it also contains a Jew and a Yankee blue blood who have cast their lot with Skeffington. We see the action through the eyes of Skeffington’s nephew, Adam Caulfield (‘JeffreyHunter). Because his own son is a dunce, Skeffington invites Adam to follow his last campaign and learn both about the practice of old-fashioned politics and the history of the Irish in New England. It takes Adam a while to get it: when he expresses outrage at his uncle’s apparent opportunism for turning a funeral service into a political rally, John Gorman explains that Skeffington’s presence was the only way to ensure a decent crowd for the deceased, a shabby character who left his widow without savings or insurance. The audience also gets an education in values. When Skeffington gives the needy widow money that he claims was bequeathed to her by his late wife, she demands that he swear he is speaking the truth, that the gift is not mere charity. Radiating sincerity, Skeffington does just that, demonstrating that a lie, even a sworn lie, is justified if it serves a good purpose. Skeffington also prevents the funeral director from taking advantage of the widow. Incidents like these represent a host of interventions on behalf of “little” people whose only recourse is the watchful benevolence of men like Skeffington. It is to Adam’s wife Mave (Dianne Foster) that Skeffington describes the value of compromise. When a conflict arises among Italian-Americans about a municipal statue, the Knights of Columbus demanding Columbus and the Sons of Italy stipulating

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Image Not Available

Seasoned politician Frank Skeffington (Spencer Tracy) campaigns the old-fashioned way in the course of his final run for mayor. (The Last Hurrah, Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1958.) Source: Cinema Collectors, Hollywood, Calif.

Garibaldi, he puts the matter beyond argument by selecting Mother Cabrini, the first American saint. Skeffington’s story charms the skeptical Mave, and establishes a pragmatic ethic that stands against the na‘ive moral absolutism that characterized many films of the 1930s. Later, Skeffington crashes the Protestants-only Plymouth Club to berate the banking establishment for not supporting a bond issue required for slum clearance. In the end, he gets his way by an act of blackmail. Infuriated, his enemies determine to defeat him in the next mayoral campaign. Their candidate, navy veteran and nincompoop Frank McCluskey (Charles Fitzsimmons), has been plausibly identified as a mid-1950s depiction of John F. Kennedy, then a rising figure in Massachusetts politics. The cardinal, though no fan of Skeffington’s, hates having to choose between “an engaging rogue” and “a complete fool.” (Adam and Mave excepted, the film presents the ”younger generation” as despicable wimps.) Implausibly, because the film so strongly ridicules lum,McCluskey wins the election by using television to overwhelm Skeffington’s old-fashioned ward politics.

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At Skeffington’s deathbed, his foe, Roger Sugrue, moralizes on his fall: “If he had it to do over again, he would do it very differently.” To which the dying politician replies, finnly, ”Like hell I would.” The unrepentant Skeffington’s casual morality remains far superior to that of his heartless, hypocritical detractors, and he is beloved by ordinary people. Ford’s direction here can be energetic and forceful, as in the scene where Skeffington confronts the establishment at the Plymouth Club, but it can also grow slack. Time described Skeffington’s death scene as eighteen minutes of ”sentimental excruciation,” and claimed it was a shot-by-shot duplication of the death of Snow White.3oPerhaps Ford intended to reproduce cinematically what is the most moving part of OConnor ’s novel, Skeffington’s lyrical deathbed recollections of his youth and his courtship of his beloved wife. Despite its doubts about the virtues of idealism, the movie belongs in the tradition of the redeeming hero. Skeffington’s ”moment of sanctification”consists of his morning ritual of placing a rose in a vase before a large portrait of his wife. She and the rose represent all in existence that is sound, holy, and worthy of devotion-the transcendent values that really matter, and that Skeffington’s pharisaical foes cannot comprehend. After his uncle’s death, Adam performs the ritual of the rose and thereby proves himself his uncle’s true heir in a n imperfect world.

A LION IS IN THE STREETS William Cagney Productions; Warner Bros., 1953,90 mins.

Producer, William Cagney; director, Raoul Walsk; screenplay, Luther Davis, adapted from the book by Andria Lock Langley; production designer, Wiard Iknen; art director, William Kissell; music, Franz Waxman; costumes, Kay Nelson; cinematographer, Har y Stradling Sr.; editor, George Amy. James Cagney (Hank Martin); Barbara Hale (Verity Wade Martin); Anne Francis (Flamingo);Jules Bolduc (Warner Anderson); John McIntire (Jeb Brown); Jeanne Cugney (Jennie Brown); Lon Ckaney Jr. (Spurge); Frank McHugh (Rector); L a r y Keating (Robert L. Castlebery); Onslow Stevens (Guy Polk); James Millican (Mr. Beach); Mickey Simpson (Tim Beck); Sara Haden (Lula May); William Pkillips (Deputy Lewis); Ellen Corby (singing woman). A garish, overacted melodrama peopled with stereotypes and juvenile plot elements, A Lion Is in the Streets is worth little in artistic terms, but it reveals a good deal about the conventions of the political film. Dramatizing the classic struggle between principle and power, it sets its protagonist between two women who compete for his soul. To heighten the significance of his choices, it resorts to the easy symbolism of storms and atmospherics at crucial turning points. Protagonist Hank Martin (James Cagney), a popular itinerant peddler, seems on the surface to be ”of the people.” He charms his customers with his folksy talk (he even calls them “folkses,” a usage as implausible as it is awkward) and appears genuinely concerned for their welfare. His irrepressible charm sweeps schoolteacher Verity Wade (Barbara Hale) off her feet, and she marries him despite his poverty. His efforts to teach himself law look, in this context, like valid exercises in self-realization. Early on, however, Hank‘s moral flaws and ulterior motives become evident. He uses his charm to manipulate people, a process he compares to learning a musical instrument: “All you’ve got to know is what place to push to get what note. Then, pretty soon, everybody’s dancing to your tune.” At first, Hank uses his popularity for 95

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such benign purposes as getting the neighbors to repair his shack. Later, he uses those neighbors to advance his political ambitions, to the point, finally, of inciting them to mob violence to force his election to office. Hank‘s change from crusader to exploiter turns on his initially well-intentioned effort to expose the cheating of cotton farmers by employees of merchant Robert L. Castleberry (Larry Keating). In a fracas that follows Hank’s bold exposure of the grain swindle, farmer Jeb Brown (John McIntire) kills a corrupt sheriff and Hank exploits his trial to advance his own political agenda. Hank’s effort is helped along when corrupt grain officials wound Jeb while he is in prison. Cruelly, Hank convinces Jeb to forego painkilling medicines so that he can testify, and then exploits the trial to propel himself into the race for the governorship. Even worse is Hanks collusion with shadowy political boss Guy Polli (Onslow Stevens),whose aim is to oust the honest incumbent governor. Polli offers Hank a stark moral choice: if he provides an alibi for Jeb’s killers, Polli will manipulate the election on his behalf. Hank (to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning) sells out his followers. When this is discovered-mainly because Verity exposes him-Hank is executed at point-blank range by Brown’s outraged widow, Jennie (Jeanne Cagney). Hank dies lamenting how close he had come to political success until ”they found me out.” Crude symbolism organizes the story. A subplot involves Flamingo (Anne Francis), a girl from the swamps who seduces Hank and then helps Polli convince him to lie about Jeb‘s killer. Flamingo (who early on, in a jealous rage, had tried to dump Verity in alligator-infested waters) represents an incorrigibly primitive and corrupt element in Hank that ultimately destroys him. The terrible rainstorms that occur on the day Polli tempts Hank have a plot function in that they prevent country voters (Hank‘s strength) from getting to the polls, but they also stand for Hank’s disordered priorities and the temptations laid before him. The film expresses distrust of the popular will. Hank’s rural supporters are, in general, an easily manipulated mob completely under his spell, ready to riot and kill on his behalf. Integrity seems the property of the wealthy classes. Cotton magnate Robert Castleberry (Larry Keating) turns out to be ignorant of the cheating done by his employees. Wealthy attorney Jules Bolduc (Warner Anderson), Hank’s supporter in his early days, opposes him when he becomes

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corrupt. These honest aristocrats are set against the swarthy Polli (suggesting the Greek polis?), just as the college-educated Verity is set against the primitive Flamingo. A Cagney family project, the film was taken from a novel by Andria Locke Langley that, like the much superior AZZ the King’s Men of Robert Penn Warren, suggested the career of Huey Long. Reviewers have praised Cagney’s performance for its energy, but the film’s clumsy, contrived plot makes it seem mannered.

THE MAN ABC Circle Films/Lorimar Television, 1972,93 mins.

Producer, Lee Rich; director, Joseph Sergent; screenplay, Rod Serling, based on a novel by Irving Wallace;art director, James Hulsey; set designer, James I. Berkey; music, Jerry Goldsmith; Cinematographer, Edward C. Rosson; editor, George Jay Nicholson. James Earl Jones (President Douglas Dilrnan); Martin Balsam (Jim Talley); Burgess Meredith (Senator Watson); William Windom (Secretary of State Arthur Eaton); Lew Ayres (Vice President Noah Calvin); Barbara Rush (Kay Eaton); Elizabeth Ross (Mrs. Smelker); Janet MacLachlan (Wanda Dilman); Georg Stanford Brown (Robert Wheeler);Jack Benny (as himself). The Man deals with a standard theme of political movies, the choice between what is expedient and what is moral. It adds a wrinkle, however: the politician making the choice is the first black president of the United States. His struggle is played out, then, in terms of late1960s racial politics and rhetoric. The test imposed on him by Rod Serling's script (based on a novel by Irving Wallace) is whether he can transcend racial politics. The title itself suggests its times. Defining "manhood" is a recurring cultural project (as witness Shakespeare in Macbeth). In the black rhetoric of the time this film was made, the phrase "the man" alluded to oppressive white men; but here, it also glances at the detested practice of referring to adult black males as "boys." In what sense can a black president be "the man"? Senator Douglas Dilman ('James Earl Jones)has achieved office not by election but by constitutional succession after the sudden death of his predecessor and the refusal of the ailing vice president (Lew Ayres) to succeed him. ("You need a man, and I am not he.") Because of a (fictional)change in the law of succession, Senator Dilman is next in line, as president pro tempore of the Senate. But Dilman, a former professor whose temperament is more suited to thought than action, is overwhelmed and intimidated by his responsibilities. He describes himself, at various moments, as the "house nigger," the "invisible man," and an "interim caretaker" rather than a true president. He 98

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must decide whether to simply serve out his term and let his cabinet make all decisions for him, or to assert himself, take the reins of power, and fight for the nomination at the next election. If he takes the latter course, he must take on the ambitious and powerful secretary of state, Arthur Eaton (William Windom), who feels cheated of office by the change in succession law and considers the presidency appropriately his by right and by temperament. He must also deal with attitudes represented by racist Senator Watson (Burgess Meredith), who declares, at Dilman’s succession, “The White House doesn’t seem nearly white enough for me tonight.” Eaton very quickly establishes himself as the decision maker at cabinet and staff meetings. He bitterly resents Dilman, whose appointment, in his view, had been a sop to black protesters. He never envisaged that Dilman might actually take office as president. For his part, Dilman is torn between the conflicting expectations of black and white America. Speaking of black well-wishers who greeted him at the White House, he confesses to his radical daughter Wanda (Janet MacLachlan), ”I’m the wrong one. . . . They were expecting the black messiah. . . . And the rest of the country is going to want an Uncle Tom. Well, I can’t be what everyone wants me to be.” Wanda urges him to cast off his academic reserve and represent black America vigorously: “I don’t give a damn about the rest of the country. . . . If you go under, they [black Americans] drown with you. They don’t want you humble. They don’t want you apologetic. They just want you president.” Though initially marginalized by a staff and cabinet that run his office and script his press conferences, Dilman becomes restive about the restraints placed on him. Goaded both by a black congressional delegation and by an aggressive black reporter, he eventually starts asserting himself. When he does, Eaton and his allies change strategies: rather than manipulate the president, they unleash him, with the thought that he will quickly embarrass and discredit himself. Instead, Dilman grows in office and becomes ”presidential.” Dilman faces a moral and political crisis when an American black militant assassinates the racist Defense Minister of South Africa (a nation then ruled by the apartheid system). At first, the accused, Robert Wheeler (Georg Stanford Brown), convinces Dilman of his innocence, and the president promises to block his extradition to South Africa. When evidence emerges that Wheeler was, in fact, the assassin, Dilman faces a dilemma. Should he consider Wheeler a

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freedom fighter and continue to protect him, as Wanda urges, or should he let him be returned to South Africa to be tried and hanged? Dilman is urged by a black congressional delegation to avoid the choice and pass along responsibility for the decision to the Justice Department. They are anxious for him to avoid controversy so he can gain the nomination of his party. He is also so advised by sympathetic aide Jim Talley (Martin Balsam), who would have him “sidestep a couple of times to give [himself]a chance.” Instead, Dilman decides on his own that Wheeler will be extradited. In a passionate speech defending his decision, he denounces the cycle of “violence, burial, and retribution” represented by the student‘s actions. On the strength of that resolve, he decides to put himself forward as an active candidate. Wanda, won over by his conviction and rhetoric, ends up supporting him. The film does not Iet us know whether he succeeds in his quest, only that-having met the test of personal integrity and upheld a moral position in defiance of racial politicshe will ”fight like hell for the nomination.” Originally intended for television and released in theaters only when sponsors avoided it, the film is quite underproduced. To stress Dilman’s isolation, it shows him alone in a cramped Oval Office, but does not compensate for that with cinematic expansiveness when portraying his self-redemption. The film is very much a product of its time and its ideas do not bear close scrutiny. The militant Wanda, who is supposed to represent a valid, if extreme, point of view, sounds extremely parochial when she spouts racial cliches at her father rather than taking in the scope of his responsibilities. Her conversion to his point of view seems weakly motivated. The movie also opts for trendy psychological motivations by suggesting that the politically ambitious Eaton is compensating for his sexual impotence, complained of by his wife Kay (Barbara Rush). Burgess Meredith contributes to the film an interesting portrait of a southern senator hostile to Dilman’s succession. Though he produces the evidence that proves the assassin’s guilt, thus momentarily embarrassing Dilman, he admits to being reluctant to do so. Such a ”mellowing” of attitude is perhaps meant to suggest that the country as a whole is moving toward racial reconciliation.

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE John Ford Productions; Paramount Pictures, 1962,122 mins.

Producers, John Ford and Willis Goldbeck; director, John Ford; screenplay, James Warner Bellah, from the stoy by Dorothy M . Johnson;arf directors, Hal Pereira and Eddy Imam; set designers, Sam V. Comer and Darrell Silvera; costumes, Edith Head; music, Cyril Mockridge and Alfred Newman; cinematographer, William H. Clofhier;editor, Ofho Lovering. James Stewart (Ransom Stoddard); John Wayne (Tom Doniphon); Vera Miles (Hallie Stoddard); Lee Marvin (Liberty Valance); Edmond O‘Brien (DutfonPeabody); A n d y Devine (Link Appleyard); John Carradine (Major Sfarbuckle);Ken Murray (Doc Willoughby); Woody Strode (Pompey); Lee Van Cleef (Reese);Paul Birch (Mayor Winder);Jeanette Nolan (Nora Ericson); John Qualen (Peter Ericson). Attorney Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) balks at being sent to Congress as a reward for having shot the outlaw Liberty Valance in a gunfight. “Isn’t it bad enough to kill a man without trying to build a life on it?” he asks. He had come to the frontier town of Shinbone hoping to practice law, but found it a community without effective legal institutions, still ruled by the “law of the gun.” Paradoxically, he must, to establish law, violate his own principles and kill the chief representative of lawlessness. Having done so, he feels unworthy to serve: he is reluctant to reap the reward of his ”crime.” In the tradition of the western film, the movie focuses on the origins of civilization and the foundations of a just society. Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) serves as a double villain. Initially, he is only a sadisticbully who robs people at will and intimidates a weak sheriff. Later, he is hired to serve the interests of cattle ranchers opposed to statehood for economic reasons having to do with their need for open ranges. Both roles put Valance in opposition to the forces of decency and civilization, which favor statehood, farming, shop keeping, learning, the railroad, and, above all, the rule of law. Championing these issues are Stoddard and newspaper editor Dutton Peabody (Edmond O’Brien). Stoddard-the complete embodiment of 101

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A legend is born and a political career initiated when Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) shoofs down the outlaw liberty Valance (tee Marvin)-or, rather, believes he does. (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Paramount Pictures, 1962.) Source: Larry Edmunds Bookstore, Los Angeles, Calif.

civilization-sets up h s law office at Peabody’s newspaper, and turns the back room into a school for the illiterate children and adults of the town. Standing outside that conflict is Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). He is strong enough to defend himself against Valance, whom he despises, but he does not go out of his way to confront him. Tom is, obviously, the only one in town qualified to be sheriff, but he has no interest in the job. Having little personal concern for conventional law and order, Tom plans to marry the woman he loves, Hallie (Vera Miles), and to live out his days as a horse rancher. Tom does intervene in Stoddard’s behalf after Valance humiliates him (Stoddard is performing such ”womanly” tasks as waiting on tables in the town restaurant), but it seems more out of a loathing for Valance than as an attempt to establish the norms of law for all. We enter politics at its very origins, at the moment when a community decides its fate and takes its course. When Valance presents himself as candidate to the territorial convention on statehood, he is

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defeated soundly, publicly, and democratically, despite his threats against who vote against him. He is then shot in a gunfight, ostensibly by Stoddard, and the voters of Shinbone send Stoddard and Peabody to represent them at the convention. There, the majority who favor statehood are opposed by the economic force of the cattle interests. Their spokesman (lampooned as a pompous hypocrite) denounces Stoddard for taking the law into his own hands: “The mark of Cain is on this man and the mark of Cain will be on all of us” if he is sent to Congress. The convention nevertheless votes overwhelmingly to approve statehood and elects Stoddard. Stoddard overcomes his personal reservations about the morality of his actions when Tom Doniphon informs him that it was he, not Stoddard, who killed Valance. He had shot him from hiding, just as Valance was about to gun the inept Stoddard down. It was, he admits, ”cold-blooded murder,” but, he adds, “I can live with it.” He did it because Hallie (Vera Miles), the woman he loved, did not want Stoddard to die. Tom thereby sacrifices his happiness for hers, understanding that she will have a better future with Stoddard: ”You taught her to read and write. Now give her something to read and write about.” Though Stoddard had not in fact shot Liberty Valance, he had quixotically accepted the gunman’s challenge. Though devoted to the law, Stoddard shares Tom’s independence of spirit: he declares, “Nobody fights my battles for me.” Peter Stowell speaks insightfully of Hallie’s role when he observes that ”on both a psychological and a mythical level [she] cannot fully commit herself to [Stoddard] until he has stood up to Liberty Valance. He must prove himself to be the frontier hero of the next stage of American ci~ilization.”~’ That he is so in reputation only does not matter. Though Tom Doniphon has violated the moral order by killing in cold blood, he, or someone like him, is necessary to the establishment of the social order: he is civilization’s unacknowledged martyr. He commits the violence that enables the establishment of society and the sovereign law, which then claims for itself uniquely the right to commit violence in defense of its institutions and dependents. The movie ends with a couple of ironic twists. Stoddard, having served as congressman, senator, judge, and ambassador, has returned to Shinbone for the funeral of the now-forgotten Tom. He tells the current editor of the town paper the full story of the obscure man whose death had not even been reported. He even reveals to

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him the great secret of his career: that it was Tom, and not he, who shot Valance. The newspaper editor refuses to run the story, however, on the grounds that it would discredit a long-standing myth ”This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The second twist involves Hallie’s feelings about the two men in her lives. Early on, Tom had given her a “desert rose”-a cactus flower-all that would grow in the desert dryness. Stoddard promises to show her real roses when they move east. But at the end of the movie, Hallie puts a desert rose on Tom’s coffin, and Stoddard comes to understand that she had loved him all along. When he offers to give up politics and move back to Shinbone, she readily agrees: “My roots are here. I guess my heart is here.” In political films set in later times, women often represent the rule of law. This film concerns an earlier stage of social evolution. Though obviously intelligent and competent, Hallie cannot read and write until Stoddard teaches her. Hallie is not the bearer of culture, but the prize to be won: the rose that Tom, a hero of the bygone wilderness, passes to Stoddard, whose concern is with the future and with civilization. Tom Doniphon tags Ransom Stoddard with the nickname ”Pilgrim,” and the name ”Ransom” itself suggests a religious function. It is Tom, however, who is the Christ figure, sacrificingpersonal happiness and taking on himself the sin of murder in order to move the country toward a civilized condition he neither requires nor particularly admires. He releases his claim on Hallie because he sees that she will have a richer life with Stoddard, and that she cares for him. We are not told whether the Stoddards have children, but we can be sure that Hallie and Tom would have produced a family to run and defend the ranch. Hallie has gained immensely from her marriage to Stoddard, but, in recognition of Tom’s virtues and his necessary contribution to the march of civilization, she realizes that she has also lost something.

MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1939,129 mins.

Producer and director, Frank Capra; screenplay, Sidney Buchman, based on the story by Lewis R. Foster; art director, Lionel Banks; costume designer, Robert Kalloch; music, Dimitri Tiomkin; cinematographer, Joseph Walker; editors, A1 Clark and Gene Havlick; montage by Slavko Vorkapich. Jean Arthur (Clarissa Saunders); James Stewart (Jefferson Smith); Claude Rains (Senator Joseph Paine); Edward Arnold (JimTaylor); Guy Kibbee (Governor Hopper); Thomas Mitchell (Diz Moore); Eugene Pallette (Chick McGann); Beulah Bondi (Ma Smith); Harry Carey (President of the Senate); H. B. Warner (Senate Majority Leader); Astrid Allwyn (Susan Paine); Ruth Donnelty (Emma Hopper); Grant Mitchell (Senator MacPherson); Porter Hall (Senator Monroe); Pierre Watkin (Senate Minority Leader); Charles Lane (Nosey); William Demurest (Bill Grzfith); Billy Watson, Delmar Watson, Johnny Russell, Harry Watson, G a y Watson, Larry Simms (the Hopper boys). Mr. Smith Goes to Washington fully embodies the myth of the redeeming hero. In this film, a nation that has drifted from its founding ideals is restored to them by one of its faithful sons. Democracy is portrayed as a balanced system that is ultimately self-sustaining and self-correcting. Senator Joseph Paine (Claude Rains) and congressional assistant Clarissa Saunders (Jean Arthur) are two who have lost their way. Paine, who started his career as a crusading lawyer, has gained political power by selling out to political boss and tycoon Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold). Saunders, the daughter of an idealistic doctor, came to Washington full of honest hope but, after observing the city's ways, ended up a cynic out for the main chance. Their lost ideals are revived by an outsider to politics, Jefferson Smith (James Stewart). Smith is appointed to the Senate by corrupt power brokers who think him to be "the simpleton of all time." The power brokers do not comprehend the inspirational power of American ideals, however: Jeff, though na'ive in the ways of power, has 105

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studied deeply the writings of the Founding Fathers and absorbed their teachings. He understands America-the America, anyway, that some say Frank Capra “invented“ in this and his other populist films, like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Meet John Doe (1941), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Jeff’s father, a crusading reporter, had been murdered by corrupt mining interests he was trying to expose, leaving his son a legacy of sacrifice and integrity in the pursuit of truth. Jeff’s sincerity (coupled with his boyish charm) revives Saunders’ idealism. Each needs the other: Jeff has great intentions, but lacks the knowledge needed to fulfill them; Saunders has the knowledge to advance genuine reform, but needs a worthy cause. Jeff inspires Saunders so deeply that she goes against her own financial interests by enlisting in Jeff’s campaign to build a boy’s camp on land which Jim Taylor plans to sell for a huge profit. (Her motivation seems to be a desire to make mischief among the powerful-a trait Capra reserves for the characters he likes best.) Playing Ariadne to his Theseus, Saunders leads Jeff through the maze of Washington politics. When Taylor, in order to save his project, discredits Jeff with false evidence, Saunders instructs Jeff in the procedures required to mount a filibuster so that he can clear his name. More important, she is able to bring Jeff back from despair after Taylor’s machinations have crushed and disheartened him. Saunders rekindles in Jeff the faith he had awakened in her: in the end, he reaps the good he has sown. The film’s other corrupted idealist, Senator Paine, takes longer to bring around. Respected in the Senate, and a vice-presidential prospect, he has much to lose by alienating TayIor. Though he is genuinely fond of Jeff, with whose father he had campaigned in his youth, Paine buckles when Taylor puts his choice squarely before him: either help crush Smith, or lose the machine’s backing and, with it, all chance of political advancement. The scene in which Paine sells Jeff out to Taylor is particularly brilliant, showing the corruption of a man whose decent instincts are no defense against his ambitions. Jim Taylor is a typical Capra villain, not least for his charm. Though powerful enough to crush his opposition, he prefers-like a satanic seducer-to give people the rope they need to hang themselves. The technique works well with Joe Paine. With the incorruptible Jeff, however, Taylor is obliged to use rougher tactics. We

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see the darker side of Capra’s vision of America in the fact that but for Paine’s later confession, Taylor’s fascist tactics might have succeeded in hoodwinking the Senate and the electorate. Paine’s moral redemption comes on the floor of the Senate during Jeff’s filibuster. Taylor had suborned witnesses and created false documents that made it appear that Jeff owned the land on which the proposed boy’s camp was to be built. Worse, Taylor has used his newspapers to rally his state against Jeff thousands of letters and telegrams condemn Jeff’s supposed dishonesty. Tremendous pressure is brought against Jeff to resign, and his situation seems very bleak. With the help of Saunders, Jeff takes the Senate floor and initiates a filibuster in an effort to clear his name. In the course of his efforts, Jeff arouses Paine’s conscience by putting relentless moral pressure on him from the Senate floor. He reminds Paine of his father’s motto, that the only causes worth fighting for are the lost causes, and of the “great principles” for which Paine had fought in his youth. Even as a weary Jeff collapses in defeat, a stricken Paine confesses all and exposes the Taylor machine and its machinations. Jeff is given his chance to state his case by the ”President of the Senate” (Harry Carey), who would be, in reality, the vice president, but in the film seems conflated with the president himself. A supportive father figure, he penetrates to the heart of Jeff’s goodness and sustains him emotionally during his trials. (Ex-cowboy actor Carey’s iconic presence adds greatly to the film.) Also supportive of the truth is the press corps, or that portion of it not under Taylor’s control. Initially scornful of Jeff because of his obvious lack of senatorial qualifications, they rally behind him as they come to understand the nature of his struggle. Finally, there is Jeff’s faithful base, the children of America (ranging from the kids of his home state to the Senate pages), who mainly stick with him through lus trials. The “bad“ woman of the film is Joseph Paine’s daughter Susan (Astrid Allwynn), who keeps Jeff from the floor of the Senate when the Paine-Taylor bill is initially presented. Though he is initially dazzled by Susan’s glamour, Jeff’s growth to maturity can be tracked through his growing appreciation of Saunders’ spiritual beauty. Aided by Dimitri Tiomkin’s score (with many variations on a Capra favorite, ”The Red River Valley”), the director makes Jeff the representative American. James Stewart’s rangy charm is the foundation for the portrait, of course, but it is strengthened by early

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scenes of Jeff in his home state, where he is idolized for his values and his dedication to American ideals. When Jeff, having been appointed senator, arrives in Washington, he escapes his “handlers” and takes off on a tour of national monuments that embody his idea of America. Cinematographer Slavko Vorkapich created a justly famous montage for the sequence, invoking American values and stressing the sacrificial blood shed in founding and preserving the Union. Jeff’s own murdered father must be numbered among those honored dead. The film employs a good deal of Christ symbolism in its portrayal of Jeff Smith. Jeff identifies with and inspires the young; he believes that all the good in the world is done by “fools with faith”; like Christ in the desert, he is tempted (by Jim Taylor) with visions of power; Paine begs Taylor not to “crucify”him; he is silent at his Senate trial; he has a moment of despair when his gods-the Founding Fathers-seem to desert him; and, visually, the collapse that ends his filibuster looks very much like a crucifixion. Jeff functions as a living link between the sacred ideals of the Founding Fathers and the mystical body of the electorate. The story of the film’s reception has often been told: insulted senators at a Washington premiere considered legislation to punish the movie industry; Ambassador Joseph Kennedy wanted the film banned in Europe; and there was talk of suppressing it entirely. Columbia president Harry Cohn stood his ground, however, and the public embraced Mr. Smith warmly, so the fuss blew over. Though the film won only one Oscar (for ”original story”), it was nominated for seven, including both Rains and Carey for best supporting actor?2

NIXON Cinergi; Hollywood Pictures; Illusion Entertainment, 1995, 190 mins.

Producers, Oliver Stone, Dan Halsted, and Clayton Townsend; director, Oliver Stone; screenplay, Oliver Stone, Stephen J. Rivele, and Christopher Wilkinson; production designer, Victor Kempster; set designers, Merideth Boswell, Peter Kelly, H e n y Alberti, and Charlie Vassar; art directors, Richard Mays, Don Woodruf, and Margey Zweizig; costumes, Richard Hornung; music, John Williams; cinematographer, Robert Richardson; editors, Brian Berdan and Hank Corwin. Anthony Hopkins (Richard Nixon); Joan Allen (Pat Nixon); Powers Boothe (Alexander Haig); Ed Harris (E. Howard Hunt); Bob Hoskins (J. Edgar Hoover); E. G. Marshall (John Mitchell); Larry Hagman (Jack Jones);John Diehl (Gordon Liddy); Kevin Dunn (Charles Colson); Edward Herrmann (Nelson Rockefeller); David Hyde Pierce (John Dean); Tony Plana (Manolo Sanchez); Paul Sorvino (Heny Kissinger); James Woods (H. R. Haldeman); M a y Steenburgen (Hannah Nixon); Tony Lo Bianco (Johnny Roselli). Many political films in the redeeming hero tradition suggest that the politician is not autonomous, but serves some larger force or purpose. Lincoln in particular appears as an instrument of fate in the films D. W. Griffith and John Ford directed about him (Lincoln 119311 and Young Mr. Lincoln [1939]). In Gabriel over the White House, an angel inhabits the body of the president for a time, to do the divine will. A halo of grace figuratively adorns Jeff Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In Oliver Stone’s Nixon, the president’s mother, Hannah (Mary Steenburgen), casts her son in such a role. He will be great, she assures him, if he ”is on God’s side.” When two of her sons die of tuberculosis, she looks for some divine purpose behind the tragedies: “Something good must come of this.” She believes the family has a singular destiny: “We‘re not like other people. We don’t choose our way.“ In particular, she concludes, some special destiny has made young Richard stronger than his brothers were: “God has chosen thee to save.” When the mourning young Richard asks, ”What about 109

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happiness, Mother?” she replies as a martyr might: ”Strength in this life, happiness in the next.” Under attack from war protesters and criticism from the Northwestern “elite” who despise him, Nixon is inspired to carry on by invoking his mother’s spirit: ”I’ve got to see this thing through. Mother would have expected no less of me.” Though the movie views her legacy as distinctly mixed, Nixon recalls his mother as a “saint” in a rambling, maudlin speech he delivers as he leaves the M t e House. Nixon himself (Anthony Hopkins), in flashes, sees divinity at work in his life. The deaths of his brothers opened opportunities for him to have a career in law and politics. Later, the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy make it possible for him to become president. (He alludes, cryptically to his hearers, to the ”four bodies” that enabled his success.) Making comparison between the great trial of the Civil War and the war in Vietnam, Nixon asks a portrait of Lincoln, ”Where would we be without blood, Abe?” Later (in a melodramatic turn) he recoils at the sight of blood from an undercooked steak. Finally, speaking to Alexander Haig on his way to deliver his resignation speech, he casts his fall in religious terms: “They need to sacrifice something, you know, appease the gods of war, Mars, Jupiter. 1 am that blood, General. I am that sacrifice.” Standing before a portrait of Dwight Eisenhower, who, ironically, never suffered such a fate, Nixon declares, “All leaders must finally be sacrificed.” In his sacred drama, he casts himself as Christ. Nixon’s tendency to refer to himself in the third person further distances the representative of fate from the mortal man. Speaking of h s ”opening” to China in 1972 both as a crowning diplomatic achievement and as the logical culmination of his public life, he says, ”Nixon was born to do this.” Achieving rapprochement with Mao Tse-tung, he observes, ”Only Nixon could have done that.” But his sense of being “special” also deprives him of normal feelings and personal fulfillment. When his aides urge him to contact the parents of the students killed at Kent State University, he demurs: “I’d like to offer my condolences, but Nixon can’t.” He insists that the demonstrators are not protesting the war, but expressing their hatred of him as a man: ”It‘s not the war, it’s Nixon.” Forced to resign after tape recordings directly implicate him in the Watergate coverup, he continues to ask, ’Why do they hate me so?” On his way to give his resignation speech, he tells General Haig, ”Nixon’s never been good with these things, Al.”

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Although Nixon and his mother may see divinity at work in his life, Stone suggests that the real force behind him-and all politicsis a grand mechanism, variously described as the ”system” or as an uncontrollable “beast.” Screenwriter Christopher Wilkinson comments, ”The Beast became a metaphor for [the convergent interests of the] darkest organic forces in American Cold War politics: the anti-Communist crusade, secret intelligence the defense industry, organized crime, big business.”33 By contrast, Mao Tse-tung expresses a more sinister view of world conflict. He tells Nixon, ”You’re as evil as I am. We‘re both from poor families. But others pay to feed the hunger in us. . . . The real war is in us. History is a symptom of our disease.” When Nixon meets J. Edgar Hoover (Bob Hoskins) and Mafia leader Johnny Roselli (Tony Lo Bianco) at a racetrack-the latter two having become allied in Kennedy-inspired attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro-the “beast” is symbolized by a horse gone out of control. Simultaneously, Nixon in effect makes a devil’s bargain with Hoover to get rid of Robert Kennedy. Thereafter, the film stresses the darker forces that control Nixon’s actions. Stone does not shy from ringing in supernatural effects: storms accompany the Watergate break-in (and other key moments), and Air Force One suffers a sudden downdraft just as Nixon and his aides are discussing payoffs to the Watergate burglars. An alert student protester at the Lincoln Memorial perceives the limits on Nixon’s capacity to control the war: ”You can’t stop it, can you, even if you want to? Because it’s not you; it’s the system. . . . You’re powerless.” Nixon accepts her premise, but with reservations: ”No, I’m not powerless. I understand the system. I believe I can control it. I can make the system work. Maybe not totally, but tame it enough to make it do some good.” The student responds, “Sounds like you’re talking about some wild animal.” Nixon replies, ”Maybe I am.” Ultimately, Nixon concludes that at some point in history, the “thing” or beast ”doesn’t need people any more.” When Texas oil millionaires try to put blame on Nixon for losing the Vietnam War, he deflects their criticism. “It‘s nobody‘s fault. It‘s history.” Although the movie suggests that grand mechanisms control the course of events, it also explores Nixon’s belief that he can negotiate them. The film also tackles Nixon’s personal psychology. While he on the one hand imagines an “exalted” and anointed self that lives out

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a divine scheme, Nixon simultaneously identifies with a "despised" self who is unloved, unlovable, and ~elf-loathing.~~ Pleading for his mother's love, he asks her to think of him as her "faithful dog." (Like many of the more implausible lines in the film, this one is historical, culled from an early Nixon letter.) While courting his future wife, Pat ('Joan Allen), he puts himself in the humiliating position of driving her on dates with other boys. (This too is historical.) He feels distrusted and loathed by the public in all things, and wonders why, contrasting his achievements with the sins of the Kennedys. John Kennedy's assassination fills him with feelings of inferiority: "If I had been president they never would have killed me." His wife discerns an underlying, self-destructivemotive in his refusal to destroy the Watergate tapes: "You want the tapes to come out. You want them to see you at your worst. . . . They [the tapes] are you." Finally, however, Stone sees emptiness, not evil, in Nixon. Lamenting the fall of a man in whom he detected greatness, Kissinger asks, "Can you imagine what this man could have been had he ever been loved?"35In fact, however, Nixon receives many expressions of love from his wife and daughters and others in his inner circle. It is his nature and his tragedy that being loved is not sufficient to make him happy. (He is like Orson Welles's Charles Foster Kane in this.) Howard Hunt (Ed Harris) puts it to John Dean (David Hyde Pierce) that Nixon is "the darkness reaching out for the darkness." Crushed after his resignation, Nixon expresses his deep fears, and his emptiness, to Pat: "I'm so afraid. There's darkness out there. . . . I've always been afraid of the dark." Throughout the fiIm, Pat asks Nixon to give up politics because it fails to make him happy. She agrees not to seek a divorce only when, after his defeat as governor of California, he agrees never to run for office again. He breaks that promise, insisting that achieving the presidency will at last make him happy. In the end, of course, it breaks his heart and spirit. The film's most poignant moment occurs when Nixon, crushed by defeat, addresses a portrait of John Kennedy, beloved for all his faults and for all his lack of achievement. Nixon says, "When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are." Unfair as it might seem, the electorate, full of ordinary people, gives its heart to someone it deems extraordinary, even if its view is merely an illusion.

THE PHANTOM PRESIDENT Paramount Pictures, 1932,78 mins.

Director, Norman Taurog; screenplay, Walter de Leon, Harlan Thompson; music and lyrics, Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers; songs, Jimmy Durante and Eddie Leonard; cinematographer, David Abel. George M . Cohan (Theodore K. BIair/”Doc” Varney); Claudette Colbert (Feficia Hammond); Jimmy Durante (Curly Cooney); George Barbier (Jim Ronkton); Sidney Toler (Professor Aikenhead);Louise Mackintosh (Senator Sarah Scranton); Jameson Thomas (Jerrido); Julius McVicker (Senator Melrose); Paul Hurst (sailor); Hooper Atchfey (announcer); Charles Middleton (Lincoln); Alan Mowbray (Washington). If the country is in deep trouble, it needs a leader who has some magic within, who can bring to politics more than the rest of us can offer. It might be special intelligence, wisdom, knowledge, or character; it might be spiritual power that exceeds our own. (All those movies about Lincoln stress the last.) On the other hand, it could be plain old pizzazz. In The Phantom President, pizzazz is what wins the day and saves the country in the midst of the Great Depression. Though he is a solid enough figure, and his party’s designee for president, banker T. J. Blair (George M. Cohan) is a pretty dull fellow, and unlikely to get elected. Doc Varney (also George M. Cohan), on the other hand, is a medicine show man with a line of gab that could bring any crowd to its feet. Different as they are in character, they are exact doubles in appearance. When Varney turns up by accident at Blair’s home, the political wheels start turning. Blair’s backers believe they can use Varney to get him elected, so they let the medicine man campaign for the banker. With the help of partner Curly Cooney (Jimmy Durante), the appealing Varney captivates every constituency. In the end, the party bosses-who intended to banish Varney to some deep freeze after the election-foul up, and Blair is sent instead. Varney is the entertainment president of the United States, and things are bound to get better. There is no moral struggle here, and only one woman. Blair woos his neighbor Felicia Hammond (Claudette Colbert), daughter of an expresident, but she rejects him because he is boring. When look-alike 113

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Varney drops into her garden, on the run from the police, of course matters get complicated. The song-and-danceman has much more sex appeal than his unromantic look-alike. It takes Hammond a while to figure out the imposture, promote the impostor, and help Varney get elected; but, in the end, the entertainer becomes president and brings with him into the White House the legitimizing presence of a previous president’s daughter who will, presumably, keep him on course. The movie’s jingoism may be summed up in one of the songs Rodgers and Hart composed for it, “Maybe Someone Ought to Wave a Flag.” Its message seems to be that Americans can survive the Depression with some patriotic pep and a few good tunes. The film’s expressive metrical musical numbers (reminiscent of rap, but with different rhythms) represent a comic style once used effectively by such luminaries as the Marx Brothers and A1 Jolson, but now completely absent from movies. Stanley Kauffmann, reviewing a revival of The Phantom President thirty-five years after its original production, remarked that “the two men, played by the same actor, together make the ideal president. If the script could have done it believably, the perfect ending would have been for both men to live in the White House, one for political competence, the other for pubIic appearances.”% Kauffmann made his comments in the aftermath of Jimmy Carter’s election, in the hope that the modest new president’s ”underplaying” would “make him a political star.” It was not to be so.

POLITICS Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,1931,73 mins.

Director, Charles Reisner; screenplay, Malcolm Stuart Boylan, Robert E. Hopkins, Wells Root, and Zelda Sears; cinematographer, Clyde De Vinna; editor, William S. Gray. Marie Dressler (Hattie); Polly Moran (Ivy); Roscoe Ates (Peter); Karen Morley (Myrtle); William Bakewell (Benny);John Miljan (Curango); Joan Marsh (Daisy);Tom McGuire (Mayor). Politics begins on a serious note with the killing of a girl at a speakeasy. City officials, implicated in one way or another with the enterprise, refuse to do anything about the situation. At a town meeting, local housewife Hattie (Marie Dressler) questions the mayor, first timidly and then, when he temporizes about cleaning up crime, passionately. Frustrated by the unresponsiveness of the town fathers, the women decide to take control of matters by electing one of their own to office. Politically forward Ivy (Polly Moran) considers herself the logical reform candidate, but the women of the town instead nominate her friend Hattie. Ivy manages her campaign. The men of the town, resenting disruptions, try to break up the women’s political rally and threaten collectively to get drunk if they persist in their reform efforts. In response, the women, taking a page from Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, go on strike, forcing the men to do domestic chores and housework. Hattie’s campaign is almost derailed when it is discovered that her daughter Myrtle (Karen Morley) is sheltering a reformed gangster with whom she has fallen in love. But in the end, Hattie prevails and becomes mayor. We can be sure the city hall will be run more honestly than it has been. Dressler, a stage actress who made a brilliant entry into silent movies with Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914, with Charlie Chaplin) and handled comedy and drama equally well, made the transition to sound with great success, scoring notably in Anna Christie (1930, with Greta Garbo). She was among the nation’s top ten box office draws from 1931to 1934. Her appeal was unusual Molly Haskell labels her a ”gargoyle”who ”becameher own genre.”37Jeanine Basinger credits 115

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Local housewife Hattie (Marie Dressler) suffers a temporary defeat in her effort to become reform mayor of a corrupt town. (Politics, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 193 1 .) Source: Larry Edmunds Bookstore, Los Angeles, Calif.

the success of this ”old, overweight, and mug faced” actress to her being ”a reassuring mother figure to men and a nonthreatening nonbeauty for women.”38That combination of appeals, and the sheer range of her talent, made it possible for her to take on a male profession, in cinema, and show men how to live up to their responsibilities. An era searching for answers to overwhelming problems (in this case moral and civic rather than economic) was open to suggestions.

POLLY TIX IN WASHINGTON Educational Pictures, 1932,lO mins.

Director, Charles Lamont; music director, Alfonso Corelli; cinematographer, Dwight Warren; editor, Arthur Ellis. Shirley Temple (Polly Tix). The main genre conventions of the early political film-the temptation of the idealist, the struggle between the “good” and the “bad” woman, the final victory of conscience-can be found in Polly Tix in Washington, a ten-minute-long ”Baby Burlesk” starring Shirley Temple. Short films in the vein of the popular “Our Gang” movies of the 1920s and early 1930s, Baby Burlesks featured child actors (age four and thereabout) enacting grown-up situations in diapers and kiddy clothes. The productions tend to be smutty, and are positively weird to modern tastes sensitized to ”kiddy porn,” but they duplicate the concerns and themes of ”grown-up” movies. In Polly Tix in Washington, crusader A. Clodbuster is elected to the Senate on a platform favoring full milk bottles and the abolition of castor oil. In Washington, the castor oil lobby tries to bribe him to support their cause. When he resists, they send seductress Polly Tix (Shrley Temple) to win him over: “You give him the works. He’s too conscientious.” Polly arrives at Clodbuster’s office in a bathing suit and pearls to ”entertain” him. She jiggles across the screen, plants a kiss on his lips that sends him reeling, and tempts him with a big frosted cake and other luxuries. He initially resists-”I’m not for sale!”-but she presses on: ”0come now. You can be had.” Further pressed, Clodbuster soon breaks down: ”I think you are the most beautiful woman I ever seed. You’re gorgeous, you’re ravishing, I’m nuts about you.” Clodbuster’s daughter tries to deter Polly: ”He’s not your kind. You’re not a good woman.” Polly answers with a line Mae West might have used: ”You’re crazy. You‘ve got to be good to get stuff like this in these hard times.” In the end, however, Polly can’t go through with it: she has fallen in love with Clodbuster, and, in a food fight employing the very cake she had brought to tempt him with, helps overcome a gang of hooligans sent over by the castor oil lobby. 117

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Depression-era anxieties are further expressed by a puzzling character who wanders silently through various scenes in search of something. Finally, Polly asks him what he wants. "I'm looking for prosperity," he answers. "Why, prosperity is just around the corner," Polly assures him. The film ends with this character turning many comers in vain.

THE PRESIDENT VANISHES Paramount Pictures; Walter Wanger Productions, 1934,86 mins.

Producer, Walter Wanger; director, William A. Wellman; screenplay, Curdy Wilson, Cedric Worth, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Lynn Starling; based on the novel by Rex Stout; music, Edward B. Powell, Hugo Riesenfeld, Clifford Vaughan; cinematographer, Barney McGill; editor, Hanson T. Fritch. A. S. Byron (President Stanley Craig); Edward Arnold (Secretary of War Wardell); Edward Ellis (Gray Shirt leader Lincoln Lee); Robert M c Wade (Vice President Molleson);Paul Kelly (Secret Service agent Chick Moffat). In The President Vunishes, a powerful lobby of arms manufacturers, profiteers, and industrialists aims to reap huge profits for themselves by dragging the nation into a European conflict. Through a massive propaganda campaign, they drive the American public, initially opposed to all foreign involvements, into a militaristic frame of mind. In the streets of America, meanwhile, a fascist party known as the Gray Shirts, led by fanatical agitator Lincoln Lee (Edward Ellis), holds war rallies and assaults peace demonstrators, employing the slogan, ”Save America’s Honor.” A compliant Congress is just about to declare war when President Stanley Craig (Arthur Byron), well known as a man of peace, mysteriously vanishes. Leading the search for the president, Secretary of War Wardell (Edward Arnold) declares martial law and suspends individual rights. The public, sobered by the shock of the president’s disappearance, repudiates the war party’s policies, rallying to the slogan ”Find Our President.” To press their cause, the conspirators try to induce the vice president (Robert McWade) to take office and support their effort, but he refuses on principle. Freed for action by the collapse of the war cabal, the Secret Service (representing the president’s views) arrests them. The president, who had actually engineered his own disappearance in order to bring these events about, suddenly reappears to resume power and rally the country against the forces of greed and war. 119

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The f i l m was, in its time, considered a strong endorsement of Franklin Roosevelt’s policies, especially with regard to his struggles with a Congress and a Supreme Court reluctant to support his domestic agenda. Producer Walter Wanger, having earlier contributed GubrieZ over the White House to the roster of topical films about redeeming presidents, here takes a less overtly totalitarian approach to the problems presented by the Great Depression and international conflict, but nevertheless has produced a film in which the public is portrayed as so gulhble and easily influenced that only extra-constitutional means can solve the nation’s problems. Wanger was well suited by his background for issue-oriented films, having initially aimed at a serious diplomatic career after World War I. During the war, he had served as an attache to the American peace mission in Paris, led by President Woodrow Wilson, where he gained detailed knowledge of treaties and international issues and formed strong contacts in the diplomatic community. In the end, however-and perhaps discouraged by the failures of Wilson’s efforts-he resumed theatrical interests that had predated the war, becoming a producer and stage director before embarking on a distinguished film career in the early 1920s.Though he did produce the important antifascist film Blockade in 1938, he was not thereafter known as a maker of films with explicit social themes.

PRIMARY COLORS Universal Pictures, 1998, 140 mins.

Producers, Mike Nichols, Michele Imperato; director, Mike Nichols; production designer, Bo Welch; art director, Tom Duffield; costume design, Ann Roth; original music by Ry Cooder, Curly Simon; screenplay, Elaine May, based on the novel by Joe Klein; Cinematographer,Michael Ballhaus; editor, Arthur Schmidt. John Travolta (Governor Jack Stanton); Adrian Lester (Heny Burton); Emma Thompson {Susan Stanton); Kathy Bates (Libby Holman); Billy Bob Thornton (Richard Jemmons);Lar y Hagman (Governor Fred Picker); Caroline Aaron (Lucille Kaufman); Tommy Hollis (Fat Willie);Maura Tierney (Daisy Green); Paul GuiIfoyle (Howard Ferguson); Robert KZein (Norman Asher); Rob Reiner (lzzy Rosenblatt); Allison Janney (Miss Walsh). The lead characters in Prima y Colors are political romantics searching for a candidate worthy of their idealism. They do not ask that the candidate be perfect-they are more pragmatic than their predecessors in Frank Capra movies-but they do demand a solid core of decency and some bedrock moral principles. They believe they have found such a figure in Southern governor Jack Stanton (John Travolta). We make our judgments about him through their eyes, from the perspective of the 1990s. The "true believers" are campaign manager Henry Burton (Adrian Lester) and political investigator Libby Holman (Kathy Bates). Grandson of a prominent civil rights leader, Henry is a dedicated activist. However, he has grown tired of working for a worthy but uninspired black congressman whose only "victories" are moral ones: "It was all the same. He never surprised me." Henry seeks a candidate who cares passionately about his issues but can actually win. He commits to Stanton's presidential campaign after being startled into tears by the candidate's special capacity for empathy. After hearing a young black man's story of his struggle to overcome illiteracy, Stanton, with all apparent sincerity, poignantly recalls an uncle of his own who had failed in the same effort and, thereafter, wasted his life. It hardly matters that, as Henry soon discovers, Stanton's story was entirely a fabrication. In 121

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the instance, it created a sacramental moment for those present. Impressed-as much, perhaps by Stanton’s ability to surprise him as by his humanity-Henry signs on for the campaign. He explains to Stanton’s wife, Susan (Emma Thompson), why people of his generation feel at sea in the current political climate: ”You had Kennedy, I didn’t. I’ve never heard a president use words like ‘destiny’ and ‘sacrifice’ without thinking ‘bullshit.”’ He acknowledges that the Kennedy mystique was largely an illusion, “but people believed it and I guess that’s what I want-I want to believe it. I want to be part of something that’s history.” Reflecting her own idealism, Susan reassures Henry: ”It’s what we’re about too. What else is there?” Libby Holman is a friend of Jack’s from the 1972 campaign of George McGovem, which had galvanized the Democratic left. She recalls those days of idealism and comradeship as ”glorious.” Though she has been in and out of mental institutions in the time since, she remains a genius at tracking down political gossip and is assigned by the Stanton campaign to uncover damaging information about the candidate before the other side does so that it can be anticipated and countered. Libby’s ethic is that she will never gather dirt to discredit others, but only to protect her client. (“I bust dust. I don’t do in the opponent.”) Stanton claims to occupy the same high ground as Libby and Henry. He refuses to “go negative” in his campaign ads against a strong challenger. Typically, however, his reasons are strategic rather than moral. As he explains to Henry, “I don’t want to give that son of a bitch the chance to make me the son of a bitch.” When a negative approach later becomes tactically preferable, however, he adopts it energetically. In general, Stanton is a trial for his supporters. Though he promises to forward their political agenda-a concern for education, for workers and their rights, for the elderly and the disadvantaged-his faults are many and serious, including a series of reckless sexual adventures. At one point, he earnestly promises Henry, ”You will never have to be ashamed of this campaign.” Shortly after, he sends Henry to clean up one of his sexual messes with a bribe to the father of a pregnant girl. On the drive back to headquarters, Henry throws up. But even then, he stays with the campaign. At one point in the film, we find Henry watching the ending of the movie Sham. He calls out, along with the boy played by Brandon de Wilde, ”Come

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back Shane!”; he adds, ”Run for president!” Even while doing his candidate’s dirty work, Henry yearns for some mythic figure wearing a white hat to descend into the valley of politics and clean it up. The person whose heart breaks most is Libby Holman. She has worked ferociously hard for Stanton, at one point threatening to shoot off the testicles of a “dxty tricks” lawyer who has concocted and released to the press a counterfeit tape of Stanton in conversation with a mistress. (The woman was in fact his mistress, but the revelation that the tape was faked discredits the accusation.)But two discoveries finally disillusion Libby. One is that Jack is willing to use negative information she has discovered about an opponent who is mounting a significant challenge to his candidacy. Governor John Picker (Larry Hagman) had years before gone through a period of serious drug abuse and a homosexual episode. If released, the information will not only wreck his candidacy, but his life. Libby is repelled by the prospect. Picker is not evil, she pleads, but only ”human and awful and sad.” She quotes Jack‘s words from years before, when he had pledged to create a better politics: “Our job is to make it clean, because if it’s clean, we win because our ideas are better.” Susan Stanton, responding as the voice of present experience,replies, “We were young. We didn’t know how the world worked. Now we know.” The second discovery is that Jack had faked the blood test that had been administered to ascertain whether he had impregnated an underage girl. As it happens, Jack was not the father, Libby discovers, but that he feared he was demonstrates that he had in fact slept with her. Libby is disillusioned with Jack, and with Susan as well, who seems to have become such a political being that she no longer responds even to her husband’s personal betrayals. Libby tells Jack, ”She didn’t even hear that you fucked your seventeen-year-old baby sitter, and you know why? It’s never the cheater who goes to hell. It’s always the one who’s cheated on. That’s why you can stdl talk in that tenderhearted voice about being in it for the folks and Susan here can only talk in that voice from hell about your political career.” She continues, with a mixture of fury and grief that reflects both the depth of her pain and her recognition of the hopes that idealists place in charismatic figures like Stanton: ”It’s the shit no one ever calls you on, ever. You‘re so completely fucking special so that everyone’s always so proud of you . . . me too, me the worst.” She vows to release the evidence she has uncovered of the faked blood test: ”I will destroy this village in order to save it.“

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In the end, however, her devotion to the Stantons wins out, and she suppresses the material. As she explains to Henry, they have become so much the center of her existence that she cannot imagine life without them: “You see that moon? That’s me. Beautiful, huh? But Henry, it’s only reflected light. It needs the Sun, and the Stantons are my Sun. I live my life drawing light and warmth from them. Without them, I’m bleak and cold and aimless for eternity.” Later that evening, she shoots herself. At her funeral, Jack graciously reverses her image: “She lent us her courage and her warmth and her madness. She had the most amazing heart.” In the end, Jack withholds the information discreditable to Picker. Instead, he hands it over to his rival. Picker, realizing that the information that Jack has obtained is bound to come out eventually, withdraws from the race, thanking Jack (the film’s sense of irony is heavy here) for acting with honor and honesty. But of course Jack has simply found a way to accomplish his political goal with an appearance of high-mindedness: Machiavelli would applaud his tactic. Henry, who had grown very close to Libby, has finally had enough. He decides to leave the campaign because Jack has, in the end, failed his and Libby’s test. To keep Henry’s loyalty-which he seems to need both for political and for psychological reasons-Jack makes the case for himself and his practices. He admits that had Libby not died, he would indeed have released the information about Picker-and, since the Picker candidacy was doomed, would have been wrong not to do so. But, he insists, his final act-giving Picker the documents rather than leaking them to the press-was faithful to her ideals: ”What I did now, I did for Libby.” He faces Henry with the question: ”Which grade do I get, Henry, the high or the low?” If all men are flawed, and all morality is mixed, where should the balance lie? Stanton’s final argument is that of all the viable candidates, he represents-now and forever-the only option for idealists like Henry and Libby. “This is it, Henry, this is the price you pay to lead. You don’t think Abraham Lincoln was a whore before he was a president? He would tell his little stories and smile his little shit-eating back-country grin and he did it just so that he would one day have the opportunity to stand in front of the nation and appeal to the better angels of our nature.” Jack promises (like every compromising politician) that while he may use corrupt methods to get elected, he will, once in office, behave with integrity. ”That’s where the bullshit

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stops. That’s what it’s all about, so we have the opportunity to make the most of it, to do it the right way.” Others, Jack points out, will ”sell their souls . . . for nothing, just for the prize.” He asks, “Is there anyone out there with a chance to win this election who would do more for the people than I would?” The camera puts us in Henry’s place and forces us to ask ourselves the same question. In the end, Henry stays on. We see him smiling with pride at President Jack Stanton’s inaugural ball. Whether Stanton’s promises will be kept remains, of course, an unsettled question. At the time the film appeared, most were struck by its obvious resemblance to the lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton (down to the suicide of Clinton intimate Vincent Foster). In retrospect, this element seems less crucial. The movie bears comparison to All the King‘s Men, by making us judge the politician through the eyes of others and by facing us with the moral ambiguities of politics. It also resembles The Seduction of Joe T’nan, whose protagonist likewise enlists his wife in his search for political power, though Alan Alda’s screenplay for the latter film emphasizes the character’s wish to become a better human being, whereas Jack Stanton only promises to fulfill his political promises. Primary Colors suggests that, in the end, he, or someone like him, is the only real option facing that obsolete phenomenon, the political idealist.

RUNNING MATES Turner Films Inc., 2000,90 mins.

Producers, Andrew Gotflieb and Susan Black; director, Ron Lagomarsino; screenplay, Claudia Salter; producfion designer, Robb Wilson King; costumes, Hope Hanafn; music, John Debney; cinematographer, Alan Caso; editor, Pietro S. Cecchini. Tom Selleck (lames Reynolds P yce); Laura Linney (Lauren Hartman); Nancy Travis (Jenny Pryce); Faye Dunaway (Meg Gable); Bob Gunton (Senator Terrence Randall); Teri Hatcher (Shawna Morgan); Bruce McGill (Senator Mitchell Morris); Robert Culp (Senator Parker Gable). James Reynolds Pryce (Tom Selleck),popular governor of Michigan, is so decent, caring, and charismatic that he has no credible competition for his party’s nomination for president. Special interests can’t challenge him, so they don’t even try. They do, however, want to limit his power to effect real reform by selecting a vice president sympathetic to their interests, and are willing to put up $100 million in campaign funds to get their choice. Pryce must decide whether to accept their nominee and their money, or to choose his own. In the end he, of course, does the ”right” and Capraesque thing: he selects a crusading senator for vice president and denounces the money interests at the convention, to the lusty cheers of the delegates. In his early years in politics, Pryce denounced the corrupting power of special interests, but never made much headway against them. As he tells his wife, “Every step forward, you make another compromise, you owe another guy who wants to keep everything the same.” Now inured to the political game and imbued with the desire to win, he agrees to nominate for vice resident Senator Mitchell Morris (Bruce McGill), a man who ”never met a special interest he didn’t like,” rather than principled Senator Terrence Randall (Bob Gunton), who has denounced the ”obscene amounts of money” with which special interests purchase politicians. Pryce believes he can maintain his integrity while making compromises with the forces he opposes. When Randall urges him to “fight now” for a cause in which he once believed, Pryce responds, ”That’s what Custer thought. But Sitting Bull was smarter. He organized the 126

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tribes and waited.” Randall’s unanswered response is, ”Sitting Bull didn’t win either. Everybody lost, including this country.” When idealistic campaign manager Lauren Hartman (Laura Linney) accuses Pryce of dishonesty for agreeing to the nomination of Morris, he defends his strategy as both moral and pragmatic: “Getting what we came here for is honest. I‘ve committed my life to getting here, to this exact point. I’m not going to turn around and risk losing everything. Morris won’t hurt me, and Randall will.” When Hartman persists, pointing out how effectively she has run his campaign so far, Pryce responds coldly: “You see the name? You see the picture? I got us here. You’re a hired hand. You’re good, you’re smart, but you work for me.” When Hartman continues to promote Randall’s candidacy-to the point of leaking unauthorized news stories about Morris-Pryce fires her. Jenny Pryce (Nancy Travis) takes a different approach. She offers her husband supportive moral encouragement rather than lectures. He has succeeded in politics without taking the easy road because of his personal decency: “Your instincts are good and they’ve always gotten you where you need to go. That’s because they come from your thoughtfulness, your passion about life, about people, about this country. It’s the thing that makes you so rare.“ It is on this basis, apparently-the film does not reveal his mental process-that Pryce reverses himself and makes his surprising decision to select Randall. Hartman, who is packing in her hotel room while Pryce makes his speech, rushes back to the convention hall for a contrived emotional reconciliation. Part of Pryce’s ”rarity” seems to be that he is sexually memorable. Ln a scene justly mocked by several reviewers, four women with whom he has had physical relations-wife Jenny, campaign manager Hartman (before his marriage), senatorial spouse Meg Gable (Faye Dunaway), and media consultant Shawna Morgan (Teri Hatcher)-lock themselves in a bathroom to discuss his appeal and reminisce about his prowess. The scene serves Selleck‘s “hunk” appeal, but it trivializes the issues raised in the film. Like most movies of this genre, Running Mates is rather unspecific in its politics. We are not told precisely what policies Pryce will pursue if elected without the support of the “special interests.” In accepting the nomination, he speaks vaguely about the need ”to lead our party back to victory and our nation to greatness.” He declares a commitment “to be the shield for those who believe they have no

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protection and the sword to those who believe they have no power." He promises to oppose "government of the plutocrats, by the POtentates, for the privileged . . . smugly expecting your nomination to be privately passed into their hands and with the policy program of abandoning the public treasury to their continued plundering." Putting aside the excessive alliteration, it is difficult to find fault with the sentiment, but also difficult to understand exactly what it means. In one respect, the movie does take an unusually specific position, however. When an abortion clinic is bombed, and several people killed, Pryce insists on going to the location in person to denounce the act. Warned that appearing there will cost him votes, he answers, "If I don't, it will cost me. If I'm going to run the country, I'm going to have to express an opinion at some point. Screw the damn polls." That sentiment aside, the film represents a mild effort to resurrect and update Capra-style populism for modern audiences. The film ends with delegates chanting a safely generic slogan: "America's not for sale!"

SECRET HONOR Sandcastle 5 Productions, 1984,90 mins.

Producers, Robert Altman and Scott Bushnell; director, Robert Altman; screenplay, Donald Freed and Arnold M . Stone; production designer, Stephen Altman; music, George Burt; cinematographer, Pierre Mignof;editor, Juliet Weber. Philip Baker Hall (Richard Nixon). In a brilliant solo performance, Philip Baker Hall portrays Richard Nixon, drunkenly taping a political apologia shortly after his resignation from the presidency in 1974. Based on a stage play by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone that was originally produced in Los Angeles in 1983, the film presents a Nixon who reveals the secret truth about the Watergate scandal that brought an end to his career-the "reason behind the reasons." Nixon, the film has it, secretly arranged the debacle both to save himself from charges of treason and to save the country from a mysterious West Coast "Committee of 100" that was determined to enrich its membership by dominating the emerging the Pacific market. Indeed, Nixon's entire political career, from his earliest days as a California congressman, was engineered by the "Committee," operating through long-time Nixon advisor Murray Chotiner, famed political consultant and "dirty trickster." The Committee's ultimate aim was to arrange a third presidential term for Nixon so he could execute a "China Plan" that was the final step in their strategy. To scuttle their plans, the president-to his own detriment-concocted the Watergate scandal. The Committee of 100, Nixon says, was composed of "assorted white trash," not "your old money or the better sort." Nevertheless, they overawed the ambitious but ingenuous heir of Quaker values and middle-class mores. The Committee wanted California for a political laboratory, "a proving ground for later on," and in 1946 they adopted navy veteran Richard Nixon, who had answered a Republican newspaper ad seeking a candidate to run against Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas. (The historic Nixon did indeed answer such an ad and ran a notoriously dirty and successful red-baiting 129

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campaign against the former movie actress. The film’s Nixon recalls her nobility of bearing and admits to a fondness for her.) Much is made of the letter Nixon wrote to his mother as a child, complaining of mistreatment at the hands of his brothers and ending by calling himself her “obedient dog.” In the film, he altematively entreats his mother for guidance (”Tell me who I am. Tell me what to do”) and defies her, vowing to be “a man, not a nothing, not your dog but a real man.” Nixon recalls meeting with the Committee at luxurious Bohemian Grove, a notorious resort for the wealthy and powerful located north of San Francisco. In context, Bohemian Grove, limited to male members and numbering presidents among its membership, is an effective symbol of corruption. Accounted a ”let your hair down” sort of grown-up summer camp, it offers each year two weeks of uninhibited male bonding for the very rich and powerful. It has also gathered a reputation for pagan ritualism (and, according to conspiracy-minded websites, much, much worse). Overawed by the wealth and power the Committee commanded, Nixon became their tool, enacting policies designed to further enrich them as they monitored his career and engineered his eventual ascent to the presidency. A bitter Nixon admits, in the film, ”I sold my soul at Bohemian Grove-for shit. I kissed Rockefeller’s ass and he shit all over me. Oh, yes. That‘s what they do, those Eastem pricks. They fly from New York to Los Angeles shitting every step of the way on all of us.” Indeed, Nixon heartily detests an entire range of people, both on personal and class grounds. The founding fathers were “nothing more than a bunch of snotty English shits who never trusted any elected president to begin with.” Dwight Eisenhower, who, Nixon feels, thought of his vice president as no more than a ”thinking caddy” and wanted to drop him from his ticket, was a “bastard”and, worse, a “Democrat.” Also denounced are a variety of ”East Coast shits” and “pricks”; Jack Kennedy, a ”rich ivy league prince”; and Jacqueline Kennedy, “a clothes horse.” But Nixon’s worst abuse is reserved for Henry Kissinger, a ”whoremaster” and ”asshole,” a “fat fuck,” “Dr. Shitass,” ”Judas,” and a “slimy, two-faced, brownnosed, ass-licking kraut son-of-a-bitch” who, gallingly, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for peace. Nixon followed the Committee’s orders throughout his life, rebelling only when the plan grew too obscene even for him to execute. After his 1972 landslide election, Nixon received three orders

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by the committee: to continue the war in Viet Nam “whatever the cost” until 1976; to accept a draft in 1976 for a third term (to be arranged by constitutional amendment); and to ”seal the deal with China against the Soviets” in order to pave the way for carving up the markets of the Pacific fim, where America’s economic future lay. Nixon resigned rather than follow these orders because they outraged his morality. ”I did it for the little people, for Maggie and Jiggs, for my people”-for “forgotten America, the silent majority.” He offers, ”There was a sinister force in the White House, but it sure as hell wasn’t me.” But Nixon also acts in self-defense, because the Committee’s orders left him vulnerable to later exposure for worse deeds than the Watergate affair or the cover up. Speaking as his own attorney before an imagined judge, he declares, ”Do you think there would be a pardon for the man who kept the war going in Southeast Asia in exchange for vast sums of money, American tax money? I mean, a fortune in blood to be used to purchase a third term? . . . Because this blood bribery meant the deaths of thousands of American boys, and I didn’t want that. . . . Who wants to go down in history as a traitor who took bribes to keep a fucking war going? Do you understand then why I had to lead the press and the Congress to the tip of the wrong iceberg? I had to leave a little trail of crimes, misdemeanors for them to follow so that they would not find out about the treason and put me in a cage like a fucking animal.” So Nixon took “the hardest possible way“: he chose “to orchestrate the tapes like a great drama. He chose secret honor and public shame.” The film does not make entirely clear whether Nixon’s account is meant to be taken as true, or just a mad rationalization concocted after the fact. In any case, in its far-fetched way, it humanizes its muchreviled protagonist, turning him from a malevolent Machiavellian into a pathetic servant of rampant greed, and demonizes the forces with which politicians must negotiate in their search for power. “My life ended that night,” the film’s Nixon reports: the night he made “a pact with the devil” at Bohemian Grove. Secret Honor thus falls, if oddly, into the category of movies featuring ”redeeming” political heroes. The Nixon of the film is a selflacerating, hate-filled psychological mess, conflicted in the extreme between the ideals of his Quaker mother (“There is no road to peace; peace is the road”) and his own passion for power (”I just wanted power, that’s all. You can’t do anything without power”). The

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”redemption” this Nixon achieves is merely a defensive one, however: his achievement lies not in delivering the country from corruption, but in preventing it from going fascist. He himself remains a tortured mess (defiantly bellowing ”Fuck ’em!” at television monitors as the film ends).

THE SEDUCTION OF JOE TYNAN Universal Pictures, 1979,107 mins.

Producer, Martin Bregman; director, Jery Schatzberg; screenplay, Alan Alda; art director, David Chapman; set designers, Alan Hicks and John Alan Hicks; costume designer, Jo Ynocencio; music, Bill Conti; cinematographer, Adam Holender; editor, Evan A. Lottman. Alan Alda (Joe Tynan); Barbara Harris (Ellie Tynan); M e y l Streep (Karen Traynor);Rip Torn (Senator Hugh Kittner); Melvyn Douglas (Senator Samuel Birney); Charles Kim brough (Francis); Carrie Nye (Aldena Kittner); Michael Higgins (Senator Pardew); Blanche Baker (Janet Tynan); Chris Arnold (Jery); Maureen Anderman (Joe’s secretay ) ; Maurice Copeland (Edward Anderson); Adam Ross (Paul Tynan). The Seduction ofJoe Tynan assesses the personal costs and moral complexities of political life. Like Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, and unlike most political films, it confronts its protagonist with a dilemma that is not clear-cut, but fraught with moral ambiguity. It also presents a serious problem of interpretation, because screenwriter/star Alan Alda and director Jerry Schatzberg had different views of the movie’s central character. Alda wrote a screenplay about a decent politician who stumbles ethically and personally, but in the end redeems himself and inspires his wife to value public service. Director Schatzberg directed a more sinister film about a manipulative man who stumbles morally and betrays those close to him, and then seduces his wife politically by giving her a glimpse of what power means. The question of interpretation comes down to the final sequence of shots in the film. The dilemma faced by Senator Joe Tynan (Alan Alda) is whether to oppose a Supreme Court nominee who had been caught on film, years before, endorsing racial segregation. Tynan, a presidential prospect who has risen to fame as a crusading liberal (at a time in history when that was a feasible path to electoral success), is urged by representatives of the NAACP to mount a fight against the nominee. On the other hand, Tynan’s close friend in the Senate, Senator Samuel Birney, asks him to maintain a low profile on the issue. If the nominee is not appointed to the court, Birney must face him in the 133

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primaries, and the aged, ailing senator is desperate to retain his seat. Bimey asks Tynan to mute his opposition to the nominee for the sake of their political and personal friendship. The ethical issue is muddy. Nominee Edward Anderson (Maurice Copeland) has long since moderated his racial position and, Tynan acknowledges, is qualified to serve on the Supreme Court. While leading a crusade against him would strongly advance Tynan’s political fortunes, it is morally unjustified and would destroy Bimey. On the other hand, Tynan is strongly attracted to NAACP lawyer Karen Traynor (Meryl Streep), and embarks on an affair with her. Their campaign against Anderson’s nomination makes it easier to maintain the relationship, which is rich, fun, and rewarding: the two characters genuinely enjoy each other. Her ambitions match his, and she encourages his run for the presidency. A further complication is that Senator Bimey, a courtly conservative with the habit of quoting Stendahl (in French) on the virtues of rational dialogue, is also on the verge of senility. Under pressure, he cracks up during the hearings on Anderson’s nomination. It is sad to see his mental collapse, but hard to justify his continued presence in the Senate. Tynan’s relationship to his wife and family is troubled. His daughter Janet (Blanche Baker) suffers from severe mid-teen alienation. His wife Ellie (Barbara Harris), deeply committed to her psychoanalytic training in New York, is unwilling to resettle in Washington. She opposes Joe’s run for the presidency, when she leams of it, because it will take him even further from his family responsibilities. In the end, Joe chooses Ellie and his family over Karen, promising (just before he is about to make a politically crucial nominating speech) to ”take that same energy I put into my work and . . . put it into our life.” However, the nature of this choice is unclear. In the script, an earnest Joe convinces Ellie that he can maintain his commitment to his family while running for president. Catching her eye in the cheering crowd, he awaits a response before speaking. ”Finally, half in tears, half smiling at this dogged determination, she nods yes. . . . As he raises his hands to calm the crowd, there is a feeling that from now on this man intends to be in control of his life.” The script offers a redeemed hero, optimistically rewriting the endings of films like State of the Union and The Best Man, so that the central character need not leave politics in order to preserve principle.

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As shot, the film tells a different story. From her seat in the auditorium, Ellie is quietly overwhelmed by the sheer force and enthusiasm of the crowd. Watching their fervor grow, she begins tentatively to wave her little delegate flag. Her visual exchange with Joe signifies that she has absorbed what it means to have power and acclaim, and rather likes it. Significantly, their troubled daughter is not on the scene or, at that moment, on their minds. This darker outcome led critic Betsy Erkilla to conclude that the ”real tragedy of this film [is] not the seduction of Joe Tynan, but the seduction of Ellie T ~ n a n . ” ~ The film departs somewhat from type in its treatment of women. While the ”bad” woman, Karen, influences Joe to betray friends and family in order to further his political goals, and urges on him morally ambiguous issues, she has a plausible vision of public service and responsibility. On the other hand, the ”good” woman, Ellie, wants Joe as a domestic partner and, until the film’s ending, resents his political involvement, principled or not. Even in the script version, she insists that Joe put his domestic obligations ahead of the national interest. This is an extreme demystification of the political process and of the responsibilities of public service. Appetite becomes a metaphor for lust and ambition in this film. Eating in bed after sex with Karen, Joe calls himself an ”oral” person, alluding both to their snacks and their amorous doings. Joe indulges in (and wins) an eating contest with Senator Hugh Kittner (Rip Torn), a character of gross appetites who later is the recipient of oral sex in his office. (The courtly Birney finds their activities childish and repulsive.) In the end, the gross Kittner becomes Joe‘s political ally, promoting his candidacy for president. (In general, the movie is brilliantly mischievous about the low-down details of politicians’ lives.) Erkilla contends that the film’s most evil character is Joe‘s ambitious assistant, Francis (Charles Kimbrough),who promotes both his candidacy and his affair with Karen. ”He would have made a fine Mephistopheles, if the film had a Faust. Alan Alda, alas, is no Faust.” Her criticism is not quite fair, in that Joe Tynan is not meant to be Faust. Depending on whether we follow Alda or Schatzberg, he is either a redeeming hero or Mephistopheles himself, luring his wife into the political abyss.

THE SENATOR WAS INDISCREET Inter-John Productions; Universal-International,1947,88 mins.

Producers, Gene Fowler Jr. and Nunnally Johnson;director, George S. Kaufman; screenplay, Charles MacArthur,from a stoy by Edwin Lanham; art direction, Bernard Herzbrun, Boris Leven; set decorators, Russell A. Gausman and Ken Swartz; cosfume designer, Grace Houston; music, Daniele AmfitheatroJ cinematographer, William C. Mellor; editing, Sherman A. Rose. William Powell (Senator Melvin G. Ashton); Ella Raines (Poppy McNaughton); Peter Lind Hayes (Lew Gibson);Arleen Shelan (Valerie S h q herd); Ray Collins (Houlihan);Allen Jenkins (Farrell). Senator Me1 Ashton (William Powell) is an amiable simpleton who finds it unreasonable that his party’s leaders should not allow him to be president-to ”better himself,” as he puts it with a goofy sincerity. The party scoffs at his wishes, until he reveals that he has been maintaining a detailed diary of the indiscretions of his colleagues. Aided by an advertising copywriter, who sells him as he would any product, Ashton embarks on his campaign, but must resign when political enemies steal the diary. This thin plot becomes the occasion for broad political satire that covers both politicians and the electorate. Me1 Ashton is not unsympathetic: he is a nice man who knows he lacks ability, but wishes to be president anyway. He believes he is fully qualified-he has a dog, a family, and the other domestic requirements for the office-and he is willing, in his winsome way, to be ruthless about getting what he wants. The party bosses are on to hun early: they point out that by denying that he is runningfor the presidency, he is virtually declaring his candidacy. They forbid him to pose (Calvin Coolidge style) in Indian headdress, or to shake hands with labor leaders-both of which are considered ”big stuff” and sure signs of excessive ambition. The film’s satire of the tendency of politicians to make extravagant promises is rather broad. Ashton’s ”issues” include a bill to spare the letter carriers of America by requiring that all mail be written on tissue paper. To labor, he promises eight day’s pay for three days work; to business, eight-day weeks for two day’s pay; to citi136

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zens, a tax refund, with interest, at age forty-five, and social security payments of $200 a week (in 1947 dollars, a very good deal). He offers to double whatever veteran’s benefits any other candidate proposes, and proposes a bonus of $5,000 for all who did not serve in the military in World War 11. He also promises a government program to send every child in America to Harvard for free. Opposed to both inflation and deflation, Ashton declares himself for “flation.” A secondary plot revolves around the adman assigned to run Ashton’s campaign, played by Peter Lind Hayes (later a radio personality). Reporter Poppy McNaughton (Ella Raines), who terrifies Ashton and his colleagues by threatening to quote him accurately in her news stories, encourages his struggles with his conscience. Another topical character is a communist waiter who rails against capitalists. William Powell made his name in movies in a series of detective films. Playing Nick Charles in The Thin Man series as an affable drunk made his career in light comedy. Other good work includes My Man Godfiey (1936) and Life with Father (1947). (The Senator Was Indiscreet ends with a movie ”in”-joke when the “Mrs. Ashton” of whom we have been hearing throughout the film turns out to be Myrna Loy, long linked with Powell cinematically as Nora Charles.) The screenplay was by Charles MacArthur, also responsible for Gunga Din (1939) and, with Ben Hecht, for such brilliant work as The Front Page (1931), Twenfiefh Century (1934), and Wufhering Heights (1939).This film was the first and last directed by famed playwright and screenwriter George S. Kaufman. Reviews were not entirely kind to the film. Robert Hatch in The Nation found Ashton ”a presidential aspirant of such extravagant idiocy that the edge of the humor is pretty well dulled. Satire may hit the target from almost any angle it chooses, but it mustn’t miss it altogether.’” He did find Peter Lind Hayes ”wonderful,” however, and felt he ”stole” the movie.

STATE OF THE UNION Liberty Films; M-G-M, 1948,124 mins.

Producer and director, Frank Capra; screenplay, Myles Connolly and Anthony Veiller,from a play by Russell Crouse and Howard Lindsay; art directors, Cedric Gibbons and Urie McClea y ; set decorators, Emile Kuri and Edwin B. WilZis; costume designer, Irene; music, Victor Young; cinematographer, George .! Folsey; editor, William Hornbeck. Spencer Tracy (Grant Matthews); Katharine Hepburn (Mary Matthews); Van Johnson ("Spike" McManus); Angela Lansbury (Kdy Thorndyke); Adolphe Menjou (Jim Conover); Lewis Stone (Sam Thorndyke). When Frank Capra returned to the political theme in State of the Union, it was in a chastened mood. While his nalve, idealistic Jeff Smith had eventually triumphed over a politically comprised Senate establishment in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the pragmatic, savvy industrialist Grant Matthews could not pull off the same trick in 1948. Postwar pessimism had cast doubt upon the possibilities of political revival in America and the capacity of individuals to maintain their integrity in the world of politics. While Grant Matthews (Spencer Tracy) maintains independent and high-minded political positions-he is a political outsider reminiscent of Wendell Willkie, Republican opponent of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1941election-he is not an innocent. He has been so stirred by ambition that he has left his wife Mary (Katharine Hepburn) and begun a political (and personal) relationship with Kay Thorndyke (Angela Lansbury), a power-hungry newspaper publisher who aims to put kum in the White House to do her bidding. Based on a Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway play by Robert Lindsay and Russell Crouse, the film is notably a Frank Capra project, with links to the director's social trilogy, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Meet John Doe, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in which idealism clashes head-on with corruption. It is also a Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn collaboration,drawing on the companionate screen relationship the two performers had built up, in several preceding films,as individuals of integrity whose inherent decency eventually transcends temptation and trial. 138

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The state of their union is not as solid as it looks as Grant and Mary Matthews (Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn) smile gamely for a campaign shot during Grant’s run for the Republican nomination for president. (State of the Union, Liberty Films, 7948.) Source: Larry Edmunds Bookstore, Los Angeles, Caiif

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In morality play style, Grant Matthews is pulled in two directions. Exploiting his appetite for power, Kay Thorndyke (Angela Lansbury) involves him with corrupt political operative Jim Conover (Adolph Menjou), who is shunned by the Republican Party for his involvement in the scandals of the Harding administration but is now seeking to repair his fortunes by grooming a winning presidential candidate. Pulling in the opposite direction is Mary Matthews (Katharine Hepburn), who believes that Grant could be a great president, but only if he retains his personal integrity and his independence of thought. The film’s major characters are portrayed with generous complexity. The ambitious Kay Thorndyke is first introduced in the sympathetic role of a daughter who has come to visit her dying father. On his deathbed, Sam Thorndyke-a ruthless newspaper magnate whose presidential dreams were thwarted by a Republican Party that wisely shunned him as a candidate-charges Kay to fulfill his ambitions in whatever way she can. Men, he says, are weak, vain, and (worst of all) idealistic; women are the only realists. “Life is war; don’t count the casualties,” he says; he urges her to “Make those heads roll.” While this private interview is taking place, a houseful of waiting reporters mill about in the rooms below. In a beautifully filmed sequence, Kay shuts the door of her father’s room and, as a shot rings out from behind her, walks calmly down a curved staircase. Only reporter Spike McManus (Van Johnson) observes her icy demeanor after her father’s suicide; only the camera sees her pause briefly to cry. Capra early on reveals the sources of her ambition and lends her enough depth of character to account for Grant’s attraction to her. Even Jim Conover is more than a cardboard villain, displaying a charming lack of hypocrisy. He genuinely believes his corrupt practices to be wise and reasonable, given the nature of politics. Spike McManus, a political reporter employed by Kay Thorndyke‘s newspaper chain, functions as a touchstone character whose shifting allegiances chart the struggle for Grant‘s soul. Like the president of the Senate in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-also portrayed by an actor whose physical presence encoded American ideas about integrity, decency, and fairness-Van Johnson’s Spike directs audience response. Though employed by Kay and a cynic about politics, Spike is an honest observer. He eventually comes to appreciate Grant’s idealism and is moved by Mary’s effort to help him retain it.

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Grant’s blend of pragmatism and idealism is illustrated in a conversation with a fellow tourist outside the White House. Awed by the sight of the presidential residence, the man declares it a ”sacred place.” Grant insists, bluntly, that it needs a paint job. When his indignant companion asks whether Grant realizes just who lives in that building, the budding candidate replies with a diverse and inclusive list of philosophers, idealists, and martyrs from many cultures, including Moses, Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, Joan of Arc, Kosciusko, and Attucks. Nevertheless, he insists, the White House needs a paint job. The segment wittily and simultaneously establishes Grant’s broad humanism and his down-home realism. Grant, who initially writes his own speeches, criticizes both labor and capital for creating economic strife that harms the nation. When he argues for patriotic policies that transcend religion, ethnicity, class, and party, Grant endears himself to Capra’s little peoplewaiters, barbers, laborers-who represent the voting public of America. Jim Conover scorns such small fry, however, and urges Grant to appeal instead to representatives of special interests who can deliver blocks of votes at the presidential convention where the nomination will take place. Grant’s views initially contrast absolutely with the Thorndyke strategy of divide and conquer. Whereas Grant wants to bring out the best in people, Kay exploits the worst, ordering the editors of her newspapers to sow discord among the Republican presidential candidates-Taft, Dewey, Stassen, Eisenhower, MacArthur-so that she can promote Grant. She warns a wary Grant that the ”middle class morality” Mary represents is dragging him down, as it had other great men before him. Unaware of Grant’s presidential ambitions, Mary comes to Washington at his request thinking to accompany him on a tour of his plants and perhaps, in the process, become reconciled. When she learns the true reason she has been invited-to squelch press rumors about a romance between Grant and Kay-Mary is hurt and angry, but relents in part because she still believes in Grant’s potential for greatness. She decides that her influence is a necessary counterweight to Grant’s runaway ambition. In Grant’s company, Mary resumes her position as traditional wife-sewing on h s buttons, mending his socks, and hearing out his political hopes-but after a quarrel over Kay, she makes him sleep on the floor. He accepts this arrangement as entirely appropriate, given

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his respect for her political and personal integrity and his own concern about where his rampant political ambitions are leading hun. In a well-played, intimate scene, Grant admits to Mary that while the world admires his success, he feels himself to be a failure as a man, husband, and father. Having experienced moments when he could glimpse the ”eternal,” when he could conceive of causes truly worth dying for, as men had died in World War 11, Grant has come to fear that he has now lost his way. He finds the philosophy of merely beating the competition an unworthy one to live by, much less to die for. Thus Grant reveals his own need to nourish his ideals-wluch represent his wholeness and integrity-and his awareness that abandoning them would be a kind of death for him. Grant expresses the hope that the trip, and Mary‘s renewed presence in his life, will lead him to conceive better goals. Despite Mary’s influence, however, Kay wins Grant to her way of thinking while he is campaigning in Detroit. Having, as Spike reports, ”blown his top” on labor-he declares, ”when members stop running the unions, unions start running the members”4rant is about to ”let loose” on industry with a message of unity and mutual sacrifice, including a limit on corporate profits to avoid inflation. He also plans to promote his ideas for world peace, and to call for the creation of a world government that would control atomic powerindeed, a United States of the world with one law, currency, citizenship, and bill of rights. (Modern audiences will find it hard to comprehend that such utopian notions were not so far out of the mainstream at the time.) Grant’s idealism is popular with the public at large: Spike reports that individual voters are rapt by his speeches. But Jim Conover, alarmed at Grant’s frankness and anxious not to alienate the influence peddlers who deliver convention votes, urges him to substitute a speech full of platitudes about government bureaucracy. Despite Mary’s best efforts, Kay wins Grant to this point of view. He not only gives the “safe” speech that Conover had prepared for him, but also makes deals with corrupt power brokers who control blocks of voters. Ethnic minorities, for example, are to be set at each other’s throats to exploit their resentments. Grant explains to an unhappy Mary that he now thinks it acceptable to ”soft-soap a bunch of idiots’’ to get the nomination, become president, and do the good things she expects him to do. Mary, however, doubts that he can keep to his idealistic aims after using corrupt means to attain power.

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She also observes that the ”little people” who had been inspired by Grant’s honesty have noticed the change in him: in Capra-land, they infallibly spot a phony. Matters come to a head when Conover sets up a campaign broadcast from Grant’s home intended to display family unity. Though offended by such a crass exercise in image manipulation, Mary agrees to have Kay appear in their home in the role of a family friend and to endorse Grant’s candidacy. When Mary steps up to the microphone to endorse this fiction, however, Grant’s moral sense rebels. He can cope with his own corruption, though barely, but cannot stand to see Mary demean herself for his sake. He denounces and abandons his now-compromised campaign. Rather than running for office, he vows to instead make himself an influence for selfless patriotism a s an outsider to both major parties. Kay Thomdyke and Jim Conover, who between them define the world of politics, also remain true to themselves. Neither changes in the least and we last see them cooking up another candidacy through which to pursue their ambitions. Because politics as a whole is not redeemable, individuals of good will must abandon it utterly in order to achieve worthwhile goals. In his role as swing character, Spike McManus comes to see things Mary‘s way because his sense of decency-like that of Saunders in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-is finally engaged by an individual worthy of his allegiance.

THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT Argosy Productions Corporation, 1953,92 mins.

Producers, Merian C. Cooper and John Ford; director, John Ford; screenplay, Laurence Stallings, based on stories by Irvin s. Cobb; art director, Frank Hotaling; set decorators, John McCarthy and George Milo; costume design, Adele Palmer; music, Victor Young; cinematographer, Archie Stout; editor, Jack Murray. Charles Winninger (Judge William Pittman Priest); Sfepin Fetchit (Jqf Poindexterj; John Russell (Ashby Corwinj; Arleen Whelan (Lucy Lee Lake); Jane Darwell (Aurora Ratchitt); Eve March (Mallie Cramp); Mitchell Lewis (Sherifl Andy Redclip); Ludwig Stossel (Herman Felsburg); Paul Hurst (Sergeant Jimmy Bagsty); Russell Simpson (Dr. Lewt Lake); Ernest Whitman (”Uncle Plez” Woodford); Elzie Emanuel (U. S. Grant Woodford); Milburn Stone (Horace K. Maydew); Dorothy Jordan (Lucy Lee’s mother); Clarence Muse (Uncle Zack); James Kirkwood (General Fairfield); Grant Withers (Buck Ramsey). John Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright is a remake of his earlier Judge Priest, which starred Will Rogers as an aging Confederate Army veteran who, as a turn-of-the-century circuit court judge, governs his Kentucky community with humanity and tolerance. Ford was quoted as saying, ”The Sun Shines Bright is my favorite picture-I love it. And it’s true to life, it happened. Irvin Cobb got everything he wrote from real life, and that’s the best of his Judge Priest stor i e ~ . ” Whatever ~* the relationship of Irvin Cobb’s stories to reality, Ford derived from them a clear notion of what would constitute an ideal community and an ideal political leader. In the remake, Charles Winninger takes the role of “BilIy” Priest, but the character’s virtues remain the same. He has judicial integrity: “Race, creed, or color: justice will be done in my courtroom.” He deals respectfully with the downtrodden, from the local madam, Mallie Cramp (Eve March), to a black youth, U. S. Grant Woodford (Elzie Emanuel), falsely accused of rape. Billy is Ioyal to his Confederate comrades in arms, to whom he has given political offices, and loyal, in his heart, to the spirit of the Confederacy. He is, however, equally devoted to the Republic, to which he gives his political alle144

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giance. (When the U.S. flag passes, he salutes; when the Confederate flag passes, he puts his hand to his heart.) Equally valid virtues, in Ford’s eyes, are Billy’s habit of beginning the day with a drink, his tendency to oversleep on court days, and his shrewd political sense. These last virtues mark him as a Fordian icon: a loveable rogue made accessible and human by venial sins. Billy is up for reelection. His opponent, Horace K. Maydew (Milburn Stone), asks, ”How long will the progressive and up-to-date city of Fairfield be subject to Confederate rule? To the sentimental appeal of empty sleeve and timber toe? To the doddering relics of a lost cause? To a machine headed by the whiskey-drinking William Pittman Priest?” Billy Priest, in return, vows ”to prevent Horace K. Maydew from making a mockery of justice.” (Though in fact there is no specific instance in the film of his doing evil, Northerner Maydew lacks true congeniality-a damning lack, in Ford’s view.) Priest reminds a meeting of Union Army veterans that Maydew is ”the son of a carpetbagger from Boston who came here to feather his nest before you game roosters who did the fighting could get back home.” The worthy are those who shed blood for their cause, no matter (at this point in history) for which side. The good are united by the sacrifices they have made in the past and by their participation in creating and maintaining the humane community of the present. Maydew has an effective campaign organization and the backing of the respectable elements of the community ( e g , the prohibitionist ladies organization). The election will therefore be hard-fought. Billy, who passionately wishes to defeat Maydew and his philosophy, is offered many opportunities to gain support, but only at the cost of forsaking his own core values. He could, for example, win the approval of the upright women of Fairfield by inflicting harsh punishment and humiliation on Mallie Cramp, but he insists instead on treating her with dignity in his courtroom and encouraging his friend ”Doc” Lake (Russell Simpson) to provide medical service to her prostitutes. These actions further discredit him with respectable quarters of the population. Later, when Mallie wishes to honor a dead prostitute with a proper funeral, Billy agrees to participate, against his own political interests, and even to officiate at the funeral service when no regular clergyman can be found to do so. When promised the electoral support of a lynch mob bent on hanging young Grant Woodford, he instead stands them down with a pistol in his hand: ”If that’s the price of your support, I won’t pay it.”

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In the end, the noble community Billy Priest has created comes over to his side and votes him into office for a final term. The tuming point in his fortunes occurs during the well-filmed funeral procession for the dead prostitute-a swelling march of goodness. At first, it consists of Billy, afoot, with Mallie and two of her women in a carriage behind. As they make their way through the center of town-it is election day-they are initially greeted by jeers: ”No respectable woman will vote for Billy Priest now.” But slowly, one and then another of the decent people of the community join in. The first at Billy’s side is the leader of the Union Army veterans group (heart and mind form an alliance to represent true honor). Billy’s comrades-in-arms next fall into place. Even the leader of Fairfield society, Aurora Ratchitt (Jane Darwell), abandons her society friends to march with them. (She is the daughter of a Confederate hero: therefore, her heart is good.) The funeral becomes the occasion for transformation and redemption throughout the town: Confederate General Fairfield (James Kirkwood), who had disowned his daughter after his wife left him, acknowledges her publicly; Ashby Corwin (John Russell), a noble but dissolute young man, finds a reason to live decently. After Grant Woodford is discovered to be innocent, the mob that had tried to lynch him gratefully provides Billy with the votes he needs to win. In his victory parade, they march behind a banner that proclaims, ”He Saved Us From Ourselves.” As Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington point out, ”It is the superannuated and socially disreputable communities within the disorganized community of Fairfield which are its real source of unity and strength.”42 From our perspective, The Sun Shines Bright is rife with stereotypes. Black actor Stepin Fetchit, who used his fumbling, semi-moronic characterization to achieve a significant Hollywood career, was having trouble getting work in the 1950s. Ford hired him to reprise his role of Jeff Poindexter, the Judge’s “boy” from Judge Priest. The performance was offensive enough back then, but the result here (despite some modification of dialogue) is simply depressing to behold. The other black characters fall into stereotype as well: “Uncle Plez” Woodford (Ernest Whitman) is decent and courageous in all his actions, but obsequious in the extreme. (He is remembered fondly by Judge Priest for faithfully carrying his dead ”master” back from a Civil War battlefield. Uncle Plez leads a black chorus in singing ”Deep River” at the prostitute’s funeral.) For all that, Ford did man-

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age to work in a near-lynching scene that he had courageously filmed for Judge Priest in 1934, but that was cut out by his producers; and he does include a montage of fearful black farmers fleeing from the rampaging lynch mob. Basically, however, black characters function here as cultural markers to establish the virtue of Billy Priest: we know he is a good man because he protects them, and because they in turn revere him. Reviewers gave the film a harsh reception when it was released: it earned such adjectives as ”amateurish,” ”saccharine,” and “laborious.’’ Students of Ford have been kinder to it. They have stressed Billy‘s tragic condition as a man who strives to bring happiness and justice to others, but himself remains lonely and unfulfilled. Billy’s sadness, says J. A. Place, ”comes from within himself. It comes from a sense of loss of something so nameless it cannot even be represented except through his intimate connection with the past of the town, with death, and with a tolerance in dealing with those the rest of the town consider unworthy.”43 The Billy Priest of The Sun Shines Bright is a political savior, but at a personal cost. He is “an individual who gives his life to his society, but cannot get back from it the value he requires. He becomes a solitary existential figure who acts from a sense of need and of self, not from any hope of fulfillment.”After his election victory, Billy walks back into his empty house alone, into darkness. ”He moves into the past as it moves into the future he made possible.” As the name ”Priest” suggests, it may be required of this political savior that he sacrifice companionship to make himself available for service to others. John Ford makes the character imperfect; but he revels in those imperfections, and turns them into enduring strengths.

SUNRISE AT CAMPOBELLO Schary Productions Inc.; Warner Bros., 1960,143 mins.

Producer, Dore Schary; director, Vincent Donohue; screenplay, Dore Schay; production designer, Edward Carrere; costume designer, Marjorie Best; music, Franz Waxman; cinematographer, Russell Harlan; editor, George Boemler. Ralph Bellumy (Franklin D. Roosevelt); Greer Gurson (Eleanor Roosevelt}; Hume Cronyn (Louis Howe); Jean Hagen (Missy Le Hand}; A n n Shoemaker (Sara Roosevelt); Alan Bunce (A1 Smith}; Tim Considine (James Roosevelt); Zina Bethune (Anna Roosevelt); Frank Ferguson (Dr. Bennett). Playwright and producer Dore Schary, a liberal Democrat and admirer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, eulogized his favorite politician and promoted some of his own favorite causes through Sunrise at Campobello (based on his Broadway play of 1958). Though the film, like the play, covers a period in Roosevelt’s life before he enters politics, it anticipates the key issues that were to mark his political career. By invoking FDRs warm support for Woodrow Wilson and the old League of Nations, Schary championed the UN and the ”big and noble” cause of internationalism. By portraying Roosevelt’s indignation at the Harding administration’s indifference to the plight of the unemployed, he anticipated FDRs social policies during the Great Depression. By including an episode in which Roosevelt endorses the then-controversial idea of a Roman Catholic presidential candidate, he boosted the unfolding campaign of John F. Kennedy. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States from 1932-1945, came from a background that was both privileged and devoted to public service. FDR served in the New York state legislature and as assistant secretary of the Navy, ran for vice president (under John M. Cox in 1920), and was elected governor of New York in 1928. Serving an unprecedented four terms as president, he led the nation through the Great Depression (during which he achieved an amazing agenda of social legislation, including unemployment relief, Social Security, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Na148

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tional Labor Relations Act, among many others) and through World War 11. He was, and remains, the absolute stuff of legend. Sunrise at CampobeZZo begins with the attack of poliomyelitis that left a vigorous FDR (Ralph Bellamy) crippled in 1921 and nearly ended his career. Detailing the physical and spiritual tribulations that ensued, the film ends with his courageous decision to reenter into politics-his endorsement speech for candidate A1 Smith (Alan Bunce) at the 1924 Democratic convention. Though well done, Sunrise at Cumpobello is essentially a conventiondriven ”bio-pic” of the struggles of a great man realizing his inner potential despite tribulations and temptations. Fearing for his Me, Roosevelt’s mother, Sara (AnnShoemaker), strives to make him aware of his limitations and to encourage in him feelings of self-pity (“My poor boy!”). Considering politics ”a tawdry business for a man,” she urges him to retire to Hyde Park where he might live what she considers a “full life,” writing and enjoying the moral pleasures of noblesse oblige in comfort. Close political advisor Louis Howe (Hume Cronyn), on the other hand, feels that FDR is foreordained to serve a great national role, and devotes his life to helping him fulfill it. Sara dismisses Howe as ”a vulgar little man” because of his line of amusing patter, his dialect humor, and his asthmatic wheeze, but the film portrays him as a shrewd shaper of the Roosevelt image, driven by an absolute conviction that he serves a great man. Howe feels that because fate has dealt Roosevelt a devastating blow, he needs to be reminded of his sacred destiny and to be guided past his fears and self-doubts. In an acting tour de force, Cronyn’s Howe gives a rendition of William Ernest Henley’s lnvictus that begins by mocking the poem’s rhetorical flourishes-’‘I thank whatever gods there be / For my unconquerable soul’’-but ends with an affectingly sincere reading of the relevant final lines: ”I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul.” As a political hero, Schary’s Roosevelt combines social conscience with a strong faith in self-reliance. At first, Roosevelt hopes to recover the use of his legs through exercise, as he had regained the use of his hands and arms. When that fails, and he realizes that his confinement to a wheelchair will be lifelong, he endures a period of ”deep, sick despair,” but concludes in the end that he “must go through this trial for some reason.” Admitting that “it’s a hard way to learn humility,” he teaches himself to crawl-a sight that distresses Sara-and learns

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“something about the human heart” in the process. After a volcanic confrontation with his mother, he commits himself to an active political life: ”I am not going to let myself go down a drain.” Eleanor Roosevelt (Greer Garson, in a justly admired performance that won an Oscar nomination) must steer between Sara Roosevelt, the emasculating mother, and Louis Howe, the driven advocate. Eleanor silently resents Sara’s dominance, which extends to the upbringing of the Roosevelt children, but deals with her mother-in-law diplomatically at all times: it is Franklin’s task to confront and defeat the temptation to idleness that she represents. But though herself fearful for Franklin, Eleanor shares with Howe a sense of his destiny: “God takes man into deep waters not to drown him but to cleanse him.” Her real test comes when, in support of Franklin’s career, she is sent out to speak on various political occasions. At first shy and inept (her voice famously quavery), and suffering Sara‘s severe disapproval of women involving themselves in politics, she eventually becomes an able spokesperson for Roosevelt’s social causes. (In life, she was in fact the origin of some of the most progressive of them, especially with regard to race, labor, and welfare.) Roosevelt’s final challenge is to summon the physical strength to disguise the extent of his disability while nominating A1 Smith at the 1924 Democratic convention. To sustain Roosevelt’s robust image, Howe had controlled reporters’ access to him, creating the jaunty icon so familiar in photographs of FDR. At the convention, FDR’s specific challenge is to take ten steps from his wheelchair to the podium, with the aid of heavy metal braces, and then to stand for the forty-five minutes required for his address. For this, Franklin trains himself intensively, often falling from his wheelchair in the process, and then dragging himself up again, building his upper body muscles to endure the trial. The movie ends not with the speech itself, in which he dubbed Smith ”the happy warrior of the political battlefield,” but with his reaching the podium, to the acclaim of a crowded convention hall. Even a great man must have faults, but of course those the film assigns Franklin hardly diminish his greatness. Confessing that he had been a “mean cuss” in his youth-”snobbish, haughty”-he admits that he has advanced politically in large part because he had the advantage of the Roosevelt name, and a tradition inherited from Eleanor’s cousin Theodore, ”thrust in with ambition.” But he denounces these bad traits in the process of casting them off. He shows

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little talent for business, losing money on schemes involving oil wells, dirigibles, and lobsters; but he also shows a moral sense, selling off stock in profitable mining companies that exploit workers. Told by the pragmatic Howe that, “You can’t make it the same world for all people,” he responds that it is nevertheless incumbent on him to try. He is an adept politician, but he frets about the temptations of office: “I sometimes wonder if maybe the dreams and aspirations for public service would disappear in the hard light of practical politics.” In each instance, he projects the qualities associated not with a perfect man, but with a great man successfully overcoming common human imperfections. Later film biographies of the Roosevelts have been far more frank about the actual state of their marriage. They do not omit the fact that Franklin has sexual relations with Missy Le Hand (Jean Hagen, in a “nice girl” performance so circumscribed as to be nearly invisible) and others, to Eleanor’s deep distress. At the time the film was made, however, Mrs. Roosevelt was alive, still politically active, and fiercely protective of her husband’s legacy-which was, in large measure, her own as well-so the film projects the pair simply as a devoted, loving couple.

TANNER ’88 Home Box Office, 1988,300 mins.

Producer, Scott Bushnell; associate producers, Robert Altman and Gary B. Trudeau; director, Robert Altman; screenplay, G a r y B. Trudeau; production designer, Stephen Altman; Cinematographer, Jean Lkpine; editors, Alison Elwood, Judith Sobol, Ruth Foster, Doran Harris, and SeanMichael Connor; stage manager, Allan E Nicholls; political consultant, Sydney Blumenthal. Michael Murphy (JackTanner);Pamela Reed (T. J. Cavanaugh);Cynthia Nixon (Alex Tanner); Sandra Bowie (Stevie Chevalier); Wendy Crewson (Joanna Buckley); Daniel Jenkins (Stringer Kincaid); Greg Procaccino (Barney Kittman). Tanner ’88 follows the primary campaign of Jack Tanner (Michael Murphy), a liberal seeking the 1988 Democratic nomination for president whose decency is tested and ultimately compromised. Partly scripted and partly improvised, the nine-part HBO miniseries follows a large cast of characters, mainly campaign workers and reporters, who mingle and interact with the real politicians running that year, including Bob Dole, Pat Robertson, and Gary Hart. (Bruce Babbitt, Hamilton Jordan, Kitty Dukakis, and Waylon Jennings appear as themselves and pretend convincingly that Tanner is in fact a factor in that race.) The series leaves unresolved the protagonist’s struggle to retain political and personal integrity: no indication is given about what Jack Tanner will do after his fictional defeat by the actual 1988 Democratic candidate, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Tanner’s liberal credentials are impeccable. He boasts an extensive FBI file; he is arrested at an antiapartheid demonstration during his campaign; he favors legalization of drugs. A civil rights activist in the 1960s, he still speaks warmly of the period. (He believes that the question, ”Who was your favorite Beatle?” is one all candidates should be prepared to answer: his was John.) In what is perhaps too broad a gag, he proposes a startling cabinet, with Ralph Nader as attorney general, Gloria Steinem as secretary of health and human resources, and Studs Terkel as secretary of labor. Playing along, Steinem and Terkel appear bemused by the suggestion. 152

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Tanner’s personal decency is also established. Divorced, he dropped out of politics to care for his daughter, Alex (Cynthia Nixon), when she contracted Hodgkin’s disease as a child. Now recovered, she is deeply involved in his campaign-sometimes to his embarrassment when she enunciates radical positions he does not hold. Tanner’s campaign slogan is “For Real.” He challengesthe electorate rather than pandering to them. He declares to his staff, in a spontaneous speech caught on camera, ”In our darkest hours, leaders-real leaders-have always stepped forward to hold the American people to the responsibilitiesof citizenship.” His backers use this outburst as his campaign ad, adding, “There’s no battle for Jack Tanner’s soul. His passions are palpable, they’re real.” The slogan has a basis in reality: Tanner is genuinely shaken when a child is found dead near the spot where he held a rally against violence. The campaign has many rough moments. When Jack visits a black associate from his civil rights days, an overzealous aide sends cameras, convincing his friend that Jack is an opportunist. A cameraman trusted to photograph family photos uncovers an embarrassing journal. Jack’s father, a crusty retired general (E. G. Marshall), expresses open disapproval of his life and his candidacy. Jack‘s romantic relationship with Joanna Buckley (Wendy Crewson) is exposed. She is Michael Dukakis’s (fictional) deputy campaign director, and must leave her post as a result. In general, Tanner’s staff-especially his campaign manager, T. J. Cavanaugh (Pamela Reed)-wishes he would mn a rougher campaign. They resent his ability to retreat within himself, to ”disengage” while they scramble for advantage: such behavior may calm his soul, but it doesn’t seem good politics. Tanner complains to Bruce Babbitt, ”Every day I give up a little dignity, a little of my soul. I make a deal with some guy that I would have walked away from a few months ago.” Babbitt urges Jack to stay honest and take risks, to call for sacrifice for the common good (while admitting that he himself-his own campaign over-is living proof that honesty costs votes). He urges Jack to avoid compromise: “You’ll never win that way, and if you win, you won’t be prepared to govern.” In the series, a tactical blunder by Tanner’s team on the convention floor hastens his defeat: history prevails, and Dukakis takes the nomination. The issue then is whether Jack will support Dukakis,

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with whose politics he is in harmony, or run as an independent. His staff, T. J. especially, urges him to run;Joanna (after a personal plea by Kitty Dukakis) urges him to throw his support behind the winner. Jack, unready to let go, yearning still to stay in the game, ponders his course as the film ends. He seems on the verge of a corrupt choice. with episodes imThe series was made very much "on the run," provised throughout the actual 1988 race for the democratic nomination, during which Bruce Babbitt dropped out for reasons political, and Gary Hart for reasons sexual. The series has technical flaws, including inaudible overlapping dialogue, but stands as an amazing production feat. The acting is uniformly fine-Reed and Nixon are especially convincing-but singular honors go to Murphy for maintaining authenticity in impromptu situations. Garry Trudeau underlined the relationship of this project to earlier political films by remarking to a reporter, "It's almost like we're asking what Robert Redford says in the last line of The Candidate: 'What do we do now?"' For Maureen Dowd, Trudeau and Altman had created a "Midwestern Faust" emptied of character during the political process, becoming very like the tabula rasa of Chauncey Gardner, in Being There.@ The "emptying" of Jack Tanner is not quite articulated in Tanner '88, but since HBO had cancelled the series before the actual election, Altman and Trudeau had good cause for leaving their protagonist staring into the abyss.

THANKS A MILLION Twentieth Century Fox, 1935,87 mins.

Producer, Darryl F. Zanuck; director, Roy Del Ruth; screenplay, Nunnally Johnsonand Melville Crossman (pen namefor Darryl E Zanuck); art director, Jack Otterson; music, Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, Gus Kahn, Arthur Johnson, and Arthur Lunge; cinematographer, J. Peverell Marley; editor, William Lumbert. Dick Powell (Eric Land); Ann Dvorak (Sally Mason); Fred Allen (Ned Lyman); Patsy Kelley (Phoebe Mason); Raymond Wallburn (Judge Culliman); David Rubinof (Orchesfra Leader); Benny Baker (Tarnmany);Andrew Tombes (Mr. Grass);Margaret Irving (Mrs. Kruger); Paul Whiteman (himsey.

Owing to his pompous style, lack of charm, and fondness for alcohol, Square Deal Party candidate Judge Cullinan (Raymond Walbum) is runningpoorly against his Republican opponent for the governorship of Pennsylvania. Hoping to cash in on the candidate’s problems, a down-on-its-luck musical comedy troupe offers its services to Cullinan’s campaign. By treating politics as a branch of entertainment, singer Eric Land (Dick Powell) and manager Ned Lyman (Fred Allen) soon attract huge and enthusiastic crowds of voters. When Judge Cullinan gets too drunk to speak at a great rally, party leaders install the popular Land as their candidate, against his will. He has no interest in politics and, anyway, his political activitieshave cost him the affection of the woman he loves, Sally Mason (Ann Dvorak). On top of that, Land discovers that the leaders of the Square Deal Party are crooked. He denounces them and, to win back Sally, resigns as candidate. Nevertheless, to everyone’s surprise, he is swept into office and becomes governor, and after some romantic complications, regains Sally. The film reflects Hollywood’s standard mid-1930s take on politics: the nation’s problems are blamed on inept and boring politicians (like the statistic-minded Republicans of the film), and cured by a combination of comedian Fred Allen’s cynical wisecracks and tenor Dick Powell’s cheery songs. The ability to capture the public’s imagination and engage their hearts is represented as the most potent of political talents, and a social cure to boot. 155

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Singer Eric land (Dick Powell), originally hired merely to spark up a dreary candidate‘s campaign, becomes the nominee himself and entertains his way to victory. (Thanks a Million, Twentieth Century Fox, 7935.1 Source: tarry Edmunds Bookstore, Los Angeles, Calif.

Thanks a Million is rich in musical talent, including Paul Whiteman’s King’s Men and Patsy Kelly as a member of the troupe. The film features Milton Ager and Jack Yellen’s “Happy Days Are Here Again,” which the Democratic Party had adopted as its anthem at the 1932 convention. The film’s other songs include ”Thanks a Million,” I’m Sitting High on a Hilltop,” ”I’ve Got a Pocketful of Sunshine,” and ”Sing Brother.” (Thanks a Million was remade in 1946 as I f I’m Lucky, starring Perry Como as the singer and Phil Silvers as his manager.) The film created controversy over Ned Lyman’s comment that ”Up in Washington they elected a jazz band leader lieutenant governor, and if the people will vote for a jazz band leader, they’ll vote for anybody.” Eric Land had a real-life equivalent in celebrated bandleader Vic Meyers, who in 1932 entered the race for Lieutenant Governor of Washington as a gag and, after a hilarious and outrageous campaign, was actually elected.

THIRTEEN DAYS Beacon Communications LLC, 2001,145 mins.

Producers, Marc Abraham, Peter 0.Almond, Armyan Bernstein, Kevin Costner, and Kevin O‘Donnell; director, Roger Donaldson; screenplay, David S e e production designer, J. Dennis Washington; art directors, Ann Harris, Thomas T. Taylor, and Tom Targownik; set decorator, Denise Pizzini; costumes, lsis Mussenden; music, Trevor Jones; cinematographers, Andrzej Bartkowiak, Roger Deakins, and Christopher Duddy; editor, Conrad BufllV Kevin Costner (Kenneth O’Donnell); Bruce Greenwood (John F. Kennedy); Steven Culp (Robert E Kennedy); Dylan Baker (Robert McNamara); Bill Smitrovich (General Maxwell Taylor); Henry Strozier (Dean Rusk); Michael Fairman (Adlai Stevenson); Tim Kelleher (Ted Sorensen); Len Cariou (Dean Acheson); Kevin Conway (General Curtis LeMay); Elya Buskin (Anatoly Dobynin). Thirteen Days can be usefully viewed as a repudiation of Dr. Strangelove. In Kubrick’s satiric masterpiece, men of goodwill are thwarted by acts of lunacy, mutual suspicion, and automated mechanisms of destruction that cannot be stopped once started. The result is nuclear annihilation. The very few sane figures in the film, like President Merkin Muffley and Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (both played by Peter Sellers), cannot contain the madmen who initiate the conflict or contain the destructive technology they set in motion. Muffley can do no more than make a stuttering apology to the Soviet leader for the pending attack on his nation; Mandrake is reduced to stealing coins from a soft drink machine in a futile effort to phone the White House with information that could avert a nuclear holocaust. In Thirteen Days, by contrast, resolute political leaders find ways to control events. They do not allow destructive individuals or mindless technology to get between them and the forces of destruction they command. President John F. Kennedy (Bruce Greenwood) specifically invokes historian Barbara Tuchman’s book The Guns of August, a study of the events that led to World War I. Leaders on both sides, Kennedy points out, followed outmoded ideas of war 157

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and had excessive confidence in their ability to understand each other’s intentions. As a result, ”The orders went out [and] couldn’t be rescinded, and the men in the field . . . couldn’t tell you why their lives were being destroyed.” ‘‘Why,’’ Kennedy asks, “couldn’t they stop it? What could they have done?” The film’s answer is that people can impose their will on circumstances, if they display sufficient character and intelligence. The test of presidential character offered by the film is the ability to maintain a personal moral compass in the face of conflictingpressures from the military, from advisors, from Congress, and from the press. Taking a lesson from the Bay of Pigs incident, in which he followed the disastrous advice of his military advisors, JFK remarks, “There’s something immoral about abandoning your own judgment.” The film does not underestimate the difficulty of finding the right course or suggest that the president has a monopoly on wisdom. On the contrary, as presidential assistant Kenneth ODonnell (Kevin Costner) says, ”There’s no wise men, there’s-shit!-there’s just us.” (Their sense of their limitations is further conveyed by a brass paperweight on Kennedy’s desk that reads, “0God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”) ODonnell does assure them that their decision to take on the responsibilities of government was soundly based: “We knew we could do a better job than anybody else.” As in Dr. Sfrangelove, the American military leadership is portrayed as a group of brutal hawks itching for war. The joint chiefs of staff, smarting over the failure of the attempted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs the year before, conspire to provoke an attack that will justify an invasion of Cuba. They treat military rules of engagement as a set of unalterable procedures that require US.retaliation for any loss of American life. ODonnell warns President Kennedy “This is a setup. The chiefs want to go in. They need to redeem themselves for the Bay of Pigs.” He goes on, ”They’re boxing us in with these rules of engagement. If you agree to them and one of OUT planes gets knocked down or one of the [Soviet]ships won’t stop for inspection, the chiefs will have us by the balls. They will force us to start shooting. They want a war, Jack, and they‘re arranging to get one.” When one ploy to initiate hostilities fails, the chiefs try another. A rabid General Curtis LeMay (Kevin Conway) sends low-flying reconnaissance planes to photograph missile sites, hoping that the loss of an American aircraft will require American reprisals: “The big red

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dog is digging in our back yard, and we are justified in shooting

him.”General Maxwell Taylor (Bill Smitrovich),without presiden-

tial approval, orders military exercises in the Caribbean. Admiral George Anderson (Madison Mason), also on his own, orders provocative flares to be fired over a Soviet ship. Unauthorized atom bomb tests are conducted. In each case, direct intervention by the White House team is required to neutralize the military’s provocative acts. LeMay assumes that the plane he sends to photograph the missile sites will be shot at, and that the shooting will justify American retaliation. To head off this possibility, ODonnell speaks directly by telephone to the pilot involved before the mission, and asks him to lie about the result: ”I know this must fly in the face of everything you’ve come to serve. But I’m asking you to look through this to the other side,” he tells the officer. The plane is in fact riddled with holes, but the pilot denies the attack to LeMay, thwarting the general’s wish for a provocation. Later, President Kennedy, in personal contact with a naval commander who is about to attack a Russian submarine that is escorting vessels to Cuba, cancels the strike at the last moment when the Russians, responding to American pressure, turn back. Robert McNamara (Dylan Baker) faces down Admiral Anderson on the issue of flares. Similarly, when a U2 pilot taking high altitude photographs of Cuba is shot down, and another U2 gets lost over Russia itself, the president’s team quickly identifies each event as a “mistake” rather than an act of hostility, thus avoiding confrontation. The hands-on control exercised by the Kennedy team prevents the escalations that would have occurred if events were left in the hands of the military. Even as they fend off the clamorous military, the Kennedys and O’Donnell also must divine the intentions and goals of the Soviets. Which strategy will work best: threats, diplomacy, or negotiations? The Kennedys carry the burden of their father’s reputation as an appeaser of Hitler in the days before World War 11. In the film, hawkish former Secretary of State Dean Acheson (Len Cariou) recalls the Kennedy patriarch as ”one of the architects of Munich,” infamous as a location for disastrous diplomacy. ”Let’s hope appeasement doesn’t run in families,” Acheson says after JFK defers a decision about air strikes: ”I fear weakness does.” Is dealing with Khrushchev the same as dealing with Hitler, or different? No one is sure, so options must stay open.

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Using an effective narrative strategy, Thirteen Days does not dramatize the Soviet side of the drama. We, like the Kennedys, are left in doubt as to what exactly is going on at the Kremlin. At one point, messages from the USSR suggest that Premiere Nikita Khrushchev, with whom the Americans have been negotiating, may have been overthrown in a coup, and that the leaders who have replaced him are luring the Americans into a trap so that they can launch a first strike. Kennedy, not knowing how far to trust the Soviets, gives in to the chiefs by establishing a deadline for confrontation, thus giving Robert Kennedy (Steven Culp) and Kenneth ODonnell the task of arranging a settlement in a very short time. O’Donnell does the detective work required to verify that a conciliatory proposal, informally conveyed to newspaper reporter John Scali (Jack Blessing) by a Soviet diplomat, is, in fact, an authentic communication from Khrushchev. ODonnell also participates in the strategy by which the American negotiators neutralize a belligerent Soviet demand by ignoring it and assenting instead to an earlier conciliatory proposal. Finally, O’Domell accompanies Robert Kennedy to the Soviet Embassy where a deal is struck between the president’s brother and the Ambassador: if the missiles are withdrawn by the Soviets, the Americans promise not to invade Cuba and, in due course, to withdraw comparable missiles in Turkey that are pointed at the USSR. O’Donnell also provides the perspective of the nation at large into the deliberations and negotiations: it is with him alone whose domestic concerns we share. Negotiating a way to avoid a threatened military confrontation, Russian ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin (Elya Baskin) tells Attorney General Robert Kennedy: ”You are a good man. Your brother is a good man. I assure you there are other good men. Let us hope that the will of good men is enough to counter the strength of this thing that was put in motion.” Point of view character ODonnell remarks, “If the sun comes up tomorrow, it is only because of men of good will. That’s all there is between us and the devil.” Later, after the conflict between the United States and the USSR has been resolved, he concludes, “The sun came up. Every day the sun comes up says something about us.’’ Kennedy, only reluctantly accepting applause from his cabinet at the successful resolution of the conflict, says, ”I don‘t think we should be gloating too much. It was just as much a victory for them as it was for us.”

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The film ends with words John Kennedy spoke at American University in his last major address. Stressing the need for humanity to control its own destiny as it searches for a "genuine" peace, a peace that "makes life on earth worth living," he concluded: "Our problems are man-made. Therefore, they can be solved by men." The film, then, is a sermon on character and leadership that locates ultimate political virtue in the capacity of individual human beings to remain decent in the face of all provocations to act otherwise. The great foe is not corruption so much as callousness allied with egotism. The excessive role given to ODonnell is a fault of the film. He was, indeed, slightly older than the Kennedys, and quarterback of the Harvard football team for which Robert Kennedy played, but here he is oversold as coach, enforcer, morale booster, and conscience for the Kennedys. When they flag or despair or lose their way, it is O'Donnell who puts them on the right track. This narrative strategy serves Costner ' s star power, but, by personalizing political virtue, by locating all strength of character in him and in a tight group of Irish Bostonians true to each other and to their sense of community, the film diminishes the role of American institutions and traditions. Women, certainly, have no role: they are passive observers awaiting outcomes determined in rooms commanded by men who are redeemers sui generis: we, too, are merely passive observers of their greatness.

TRUE COLORS Paramount Pictures, 1991,111mins

Producers, Herbert Ross and Laurence Mark; director, Herbert Ross; screenplay, Kevin Wade; production designer, Edward Pisoni; art director, William Barclay; Robert Franco, set designer; costumes, Joseph G. Aulisi; music, Trevor Jones; cinematographer, Dante Spinotfi; editors, Robert Reitano and Stephen A. Rotter. John Cusack (Peter Burton); James Spader (Tim Garrity); Imogen Stubbs (Diana Stiles); Mandy Patinkin (JohnPalmieri); Richard Widmark (Senator James 8. Stiles); Dina Merrill (JoanStiZes); PhiZip Bosco (Senator Steubens). Taking on a topic that most movies about politics either skirt or ignore, True CoZors centers on the corrupting process of fundraising. Though the film does suggest, through one example, that it is possible to maintain a measure of integrity within the world of political influence, peddling, and deal-making, its young protagonists are forced to choose between principle and political success. Blueblood Tim Garrity (James Spader), whose father is a judge, opts out of politics immediately after law school: "I don't want to spend my life getting people to vote for me." Instead, he takes a position in the Department of Justice, prosecuting corruption. Tim is a "straight arrow," and the movie portrays the Department of Justice as a nonpolitical sanctuary for people of integrity. His choice ultimately loses him the love of Diana Stiles (Imogen Stubbs), daughter of admired and experienced Senator James Stiles (Richard Widmark). Diana tells Tim, "I can't be happy being basically a cop's wife." In the end, however, his choice is vindicated, and he wins her back. Garrity's law school friend Peter Burton (John Cusack), who has a working-class New Haven background, is a fiercely ambitious deal maker and opportunist. His motto is "don't get caught." Using his friendship with Garrity, he joins Senator Stiles's staff, where he displays a capacity for unwelcome but legislatively helpful "dirty tricks," and marries the ambitious Diana, who plunges enthusiastically into his campaign when he becomes a candidate for Congress. 162

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Peter’s morality is tested by real estate developer John Palmieri (Mandy Patinkin), who presents himself as an aid to a friend in need, eager to help a future Congressman from his district, and entices Peter to accept a house and other benefits. The stated price for such perquisites is Peter’s legislative help, when and as Peter can give it. Palmieri formulates the arrangement in a nicely Mephistophelian fashion: “If you’re not comfortable with it, all you have to do is hand those keys back.” Peter takes the keys, under the illusion that he can work with Palmieri and still maintain his independence. In a telling scene that reveals the true nature of Peter’s bargain and of his patron’s character, Palmieri beats a shark to death on his yacht, all the while confirming the details of their arrangement. In the end, in an act that costs him his marriage and, ultimately, his career, a compromised and intimidated Peter betrays Tim and Senator Stiles on Palmieri’s behalf. Despite Diana’s warnings, Peter uses Tim‘s Justice Department connections on Palmieri’s behalf and opens his friend to possible charges of corruption. The betrayed Tim, confronted with the truth by his supervisors, agrees to secretly gather evidence of corruption against Palmieri and Peter. A disgusted Stiles had earlier told Peter of the shortsightedness of his tactics: “You may win an election or two, you may even be able to live with yourself, but God help you when the people find out. They always do.” In the film, the ”people” are represented by the Department of Justice and Tim. The differences between Tim and Peter are grounded in Peter’s psychology as a person insecure of his class position and therefore open to opportunism. That he would betray the privileged Tim was inevitable. Peter declares: ”I’ve got instincts and I’ve got a few moves. Choice is for guys like you.” But Tim puts it to Peter that he in fact made a series of moral choices, all disastrous, and all against people who loved and trusted him. Asked why, Peter’s answer is like Charles Foster Kane’s: ”I needed more than you were able to give. You or Diana or any one person.” Oddly classist in its orientation, the film deals shrewdly with the psychology of resentment.

UNDER WESTERN STARS Republic Pictures Corporation, 1938,65 mins.

Producer, Sol C. Siegel; director, Joseph Kane; screenplay, Betty Burbridge, Dorrell McGowan, and Stuart E. McGowan; music, Eddie Cherkose, lack Lawrence, Johnny Marvin, Charles Rosoff, and Peter Tinturin; cinematographer,Jack A. Marta; editor, Lester Orleback. Roy Rogers (Roy Rogers); Smiley Burnette (Frog); Carol Hughes (Eleanor Fairbanks); Guy Usher (John Fairbanks); Tom Chatterton (Edward Marlowe); Kenneth Harlan (Richards); Alden ‘Stephen’ Chase (Tom Andrews); Brandon Beach (Senator Wilson); Earle Dwire (Mayor Biggs); Jean Fowler (Mrs. Wilson); Dora Clement (Mrs. Marlowe); Dick Elliott (William Scully); Burr Caruth (Larkin); Slim Whitaker (Tremaine); Jack Rockwell (Sheriff);Frank Martin (Deputy Pete); the Maple City Four. The plot of Roy Rogers’s first starring film, Under Western Stars, is weirdly similar to Frank Capra’s MY. Smith Goes to Washington, which was to be made a year later. A local hero, sent to Congress in an unusual manner, champions a reform that will benefit the people of his state. Initially ineffectual because he is naive about politics, he is guided strategically by a capable young woman who has fallen in love with him (and knows how things are done in Washington). Though discredited by his corrupt enemies for a time, he wins out in the end by heroic, unorthodox means. Genre conventions, not conscious borrowings, account for the similarities between the films. The son of a former congressman, Rogers (the film character) takes up the cause of dust bowl farmers and ranchers who, desperate for water during a time of drought, are being charged exorbitant fees by the power company that controls the resources in their area. Rogers is arrested for coming to the aid of frustrated ranchers who have attacked the dam seeking water, and, with the aid of his comic sidekick Frog (Smiley Burnett), for giving them temporary relief by illegally providing water. Instead of jailing Rogers, the sheriff, mayor, and townspeople nominate him for Congress, hoping to oust the corrupt incumbent. Rogers promises to press legislation that will bring ”free federal water” to the area. 164

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Though his father had been a congressman before him, Rogers has no knowledge of Washington politics. He is aided by Eleanor Fairbanks (Carol Hughes), the spirited daughter of the owner of the water company Rogers opposes. Eleanor directs Rogers to influential Congressman Marlowe (Tom Chatterton), a committee chair who can push through the needed bill. Rogers wins Marlowe over by presenting a documentary film depicting the dire conditions farmers were facing (as if that were a great secret in the late 1930s!), but then is discredited when his enemies reveal that the footage he has shown was contrived, and from a different state, not his own. Though he explains that the film nevertheless accurately depicts conditions in his area, Roger’s credibility is damaged and the water company seemingly vindicated in their claim that no emergency exists. Undaunted, the ingenious Roy more or less kidnaps Marlowe and his companions and, aided by an actual dust storm and some carefully staged lessons in survival, gives them not only a live tour of local conditions, but a vivid personal experience of the importance of water. ”Your methods are not only unethical, they’re phenomenal,” Marlowe laughs afterward, promising to support the Rogers bill. As befits a western hero of the white hat/black hat era, Rogers never suffers any internal doubt or temptation. He easily turns down an offered bribe of a high-paying job with the water company. He is not, however, nai‘ve, and shares many traits with the ingenious trickster hero of fable. Lacking campaign funds but wise in the ways of show business, he organizes a raucous parade, featuring starving cattle bearing his election slogans; he invents a corroborating narrative for his fake film; he stages a series of emergencies designed to dramatize the rancher’s cause. His additional forays into outlaw tactics, such as his raid on the dam and his kidnapping of Marlowe and his companions, give him a Robin Hood air. The film contrasts his authentic western ethos with the corrupt eastern values of his enemies. Thwarted in his effort to contact Marlowe through official channels, Rogers ”crashes” a foxhmt he has arranged to impress a supporter, and in the process ingratiates himself with the legislator. Rogers then invites Marlowe to a comterevent, a western party, at which he shows his film of dust bowl conditions. As Depression-era social symbols, hoedowns win out over fox hunts every time.

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Rogers’s main resource, besides his wits, is his charming singing voice, which gives him personal appeal and political eloquence beyond the ordinary. Hearing him on the radio causes Eleanor Fairbanks to cast off her boring and sycophantic fiance and, covertly, help Roy advance the ranchers’ cause. Not that Eleanor is a political radical: when her father complains that she is ruining his water company, she points out that it is only one of his water companies-the family will not go broke on her account. The film takes the same populist line that Frank Capra took social problems are not systemic, but the fault of greedy individuals. The “radicals“ in the film-the desperate ranchers whose raid on the dam draws Roy into the action-in the end go too far and must be stopped: Roy’s culminating act of cowboy heroism is to intercept and divert a wagonload of dynamite they send to blow up the offending dam. Songs include the lively “Send My Mail to the County Jail” and ”Back in the Backwoods,” a comic number performed by Smiley Burnette and the Maple City Four for Roy’s guests. Johnny Marvin’s maudlin ”Dust,” which Rogers sings to accompany his fake documentary, won an Academy Award nomination as best song for 1938. Under Western Sfars launched the career of Roy Rogers (the actor, not the character); he and director Kane went on to make over forty feature films together. Rogers thereby took on Gene Autry, the reigning action cowboy favorite (swiping his sidekick Burnette in the process). Autry, who interrupted his movie career for military service during World War 11, nevertheless continued to prosper: there was room enough in this era for both cowboy stars, and many others besides. It is ironic that despite making a hit in this film pressing New Deal ideas, Rogers later became a spokesman for conservative causes.

WAG THE DOG Baltimore Pictures; New Line Cinema; Punch Productions; Tribeca Productions, 1997,97 mins.

Producers, Robert De Niro, B u r y Levinson, and Jane Rosenthal; director, Barry Levinson; screenplay, Hila y Henkin and David Mamet, based on the book American Hero by Larry Beinhart; production designer, W y n n Thomas; set decorator, Robert Greenfield; art director, Mark Worthington; costume designer, Rita Ryack; music, Tom Bahler and Mark Knopfer; cinematographer, Robert Richardson; editor, Stu Linder. Dustin H o f i a n (Stanley Motss); Robert De Niro (Conrad Brean); Anne Heche (WinifYed Ames); Willie Nelson (Johnny Green); Fad King (Denis Leary); Woody Harrelson (Sergeant William Schumann); Andrea Martin (Liz Butsky); William H. Macy (Agent Young). In the worlds of Frank Capra, John Ford, and their successors, the bond between politician and public is sacred, nurturing, and mutually beneficial. Politicians promise to represent, serve, and lead, and when necessary, transcend their individualism in the name of the social good. The social community, from which candidates emerge and to which they return when their term in office is over, is the ultimate judge of the candidate’s worth and the politician’s performance. The spirit of Wag the Dog is, however, closer to the cynical vision of Preston Sturges. The film is less concerned with public and politician than it is with the instruments of communication that mediate them. Focusing on spin doctors and media manipulators, Wag the Dog offers a scarcely seen president who, having molested a ”Firefly Girl” (read: Girl Scout) two weeks before an election, needs to distract the attention of the public in order to rescue his campaign from defeat. For this purpose, he hires media manager Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro), who, following the philosophy “To change the story, change the lead,” concocts a fictional war against Albania. Brean, in turn, hires Hollywood director Stanley (Dustin Hoffman) to stage the war as a television pageant. ”War footage” carried on the evening news consists of a manufactured sequence about an Albanian girl escaping her burning village carrying a cat. (The actress actually carries a bag of snacks in a 167

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studio; the cat and the war are inserted electronically after the fact.) When the American public realizes that it is not at war-or, rather, is made to believe that the war is successfully “over”-the production team quickly invents a new story line: an American soldier caught behind enemy lines must be rescued and returned for a hero’s welcome, to the accompaniment of songs composed for the occasion by country star Johnny Dean (Willie Nelson). That the soldier turned over by the military to Motss and Brean turns out to be a psychotic who has been jailed for rape is a momentary distraction for the production team. But after the soldier (Woody Harrelson) is shot by an irate father whose daughter he tried to molest, the everingenious Motss stages an emotional funeral service for public consumption. Their deceptions work because, in the America the film imagines, there is no person and no institution available to call them quickly to account. Television news, more interested in ratings than in truth, has no stake in exposing or even investigating the imposture. The opposition candidate is unable to convince the public that the events they have actually seen on television are contrived. The public weeps at fabricated images and embraces the sham with heartfelt patriotism, rallying to narratives of sacrifice set to patriotic music. Even the CIA, which is aware that a war is being concocted, is convinced to go along with the fraud when Brean appeals to the self-interest of the agent who momentarily detains him (William H. Macy). Brean argues, and the agent agrees, that wars are fought to preserve a way of life; and he points out that, paradoxically, the agent’s way of life cannot be maintained until it is threatened: “You can call this a drill, you can call this job security, you can call it anything you like, but. . . if your spy satellite don’t see nothing, if there ain’t no war, then you could go home and prematurely take up golf, my friend, ’cause there ain‘t no war but ours.” As the film’s epigraph puts it, “Why does a dog wag its tail? Because a dog is smarter than its tail. If the tail were smarter, the tail would wag the dog.” The film’s America, wagged by a fabricated tale, conspires to deceive itself. Outrageous as the film’s satire may be, several critics have noted the glances it takes at real-life media manipulations. The overtouted American invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada during the Reagan administration looks clearly, in retrospect, like a ploy to distract the public from the deaths of twenty-four marines in a Beirut

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terrorist attack. In their DVD commentary, the producers of the film cite such precedents as William Randolph Hearst’s instigation of the Spanish-American War, D. W. Griffith‘s staging of World War I battle sequences for public consumption, and the cinematic propaganda manipulations of Nazi and Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s. It is difficult to dismiss satire so closely grounded in historical experience. The movie president is scarcely a factor in the film except as the rotten core of the commonwealth. (His contribution to the campaign of deception is to demand that the “Albanian girl” carry a white kitten.) Integrity is the possession of Conrad Brean, the operative who is content to remain faceless and serviceable to his employers, and Stanley Motss, who is not. Motss considers it a monumental injustice that there exists no Oscar category for producers, and, once committed, he treats his assignment as a sacred trust. Temporarily thwarted when the CIA treacherously goes over to the opposition candidate and declares the war to be over, he declares, ”This is my picture. This is not the CIA’S picture. . . . They don’t shut down my picture.” Working up the drama of the rescued prisoner, he declares that ”this is politics at its finest.” After coaching the president on an administration-saving speech, he looks at the Oval Office as an alternative career that might have come his way: “I felt very much at home in there. Simple quirk of fate. I could have gone this way. It’s all a change of wardrobe.” He obliterates the metaphysical dimension of public office: in the end, it’s all-like patriotism, religion, and history-another branch of show business.

THE WASHINGTON MASQUERADE Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1932,75 mins.

Director, Charles Brabin; screenplay, Henri Bernstein, Samuel Blythe, and John Meehan; costumes, Adrian; cinematographer, Gregg Toland; editor, Ben Lewis. Lionel Barymore (Jefferson Keane); Karen Morley (Consuela Fairbanks); Diane Sinclair (Ruth Keane); Nils Asfher (Henri Brenner); Reginald Barlow (Senator Fred Withers);Alan Hinsdale (C. Henry Gordon). Idealistic and popular attorney Jefferson Keane (Lionel Barrymore), champion of the underdog and the innocent, goes to the United States Senate from the state of Kansas with the progressive agenda-taken very seriously in its day-of achieving public ownership of public utilities and resources. In his maiden Senate address, he speaks eloquently in defense of this cause: ”God didn’t grant his natural resources to a few people who would take a strangle-hold on [them]. . . . [People]are making up their minds that the things that belong to them are being taken away and given back at heart-brealung prices.” When his stirring speech makes Keane an instant Washington star, private utilities lobbyist Hinsdale (C. Henry Gordon) employs seductress Consuela Fairbanks (Karen Morley) to “vamp” and marry the lonely widower. Under Consuela’s influence, Keane accepts a bribe from private utility companies and resigns from the Senate to resume law practice on behalf of the very interests that had destroyed his integrity. A Senate investigation follows, at which ex-Senator Keane-now a broken, disillusioned man, newly aware that his wife is having an affair with lobbyist Henri Brenner (Nils Asther)-passionately exposes his own corruption and that of the forces that engineered it. To Hinsdale’s statement that “the business of the country has to be taken out of the hands of Congress,” Keane replies, reverencing then-president Herbert Hoover, ”There’s a man in the White House whose heart is broken because we‘re traitors.” Keane dies in the struggle to expose congressional corruption, but after his death, the Senate acts to break up the crooked trust. 170

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Seduced into a corrupt political act and then exposed, idealistic Senator Jefferson Keane (Lionel Barrymore) is left a broken, disillusioned man. (The Washington Masquerade, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1932.) Source: Larry Edmunds Bookstore, Los Angeles, Calif

The Washington Masquerade was based on Henri Bernstein’s 1926 play The Claw, which concerned a real-life French politician of the previous decade corrupted by love. Barrymore, having acted the role of the doomed politician in the original stage production, successfully Americanizes the character in this transplanted version. His large acting style was admirably suited for a screenplay that required rhetorical grandstanding, both in Keane’s initial advocacy speech and his final bitter denunciation of his foes. The Washington Masquerade features a seductive woman who lures the hero from his integrity, but it lacks the balancing good woman typical of the genre, who wins him back. Keane’s daughter Ruth (Diane Sinclair) does not fill that role, and Washington is, in general, the province of the corrupt. On the other hand, the film represents an era in which presidents were treated with such awe that they did not actually appear on screen. Here, the president (resembling Hoover) is seen at a White House reception only from behind.

WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1932,78 mins.

Producer, Walter Wanger; director, lames Cruze; screenplay, Maxwell Anderson and Jo Swerling; cinematographers, Ira H. Morgan and Ted Tetzlaff; editor, Richard Cahoon. Lee Tracy (Button Gwinett Brown); Constance Cummings (Alice Wylie); Walter Connolly (Wylie); Edward T. Norton (Alan Dinehart); Arthur Vinton (Beef Brannigan); Arthur Hoyt (Willis); Berton Churchill (speaker). Congressman Button Gwinett Brown (Lee Tracy), descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, goes to Congress to relieve constituents ruined by the Depression. Discovering that many of his congressional colleagues-including his original political sponsor, Senator Norton (Alan Dinehart)-have sold out to criminals, he campaigns to drive them from government. They arrange a fraudulent recount to get Brown thrown out of office, but honest elder statesman Representative Wylie (Walter Connolly) and his granddaughter Alice (Constance Cummings) clear Brown’s name. With the help of a group of Bonus Marchers-World War I veterans in Washington to lobby for war benefits-Brown forces the corrupted politicians out of Congress. The evil Norton commits suicide. While some political films of the early 1930s looked with hope to the emergence of a ”strong man” to take the reins of an ineffectual government (e.g., Gabriel over the White House and The President Vanishes), Washington M e r r y Go-Round explicitly warns against the phenomenon. The villain Norton, whose fortune is based on bootlegging and who uses foreign policy to advance his personal interests, declares: ”Italy has her Mussolini, Russia her Stalin. Such a man will come along in America.” He contemplates a dictatorship in which corrupt figures like him will rule a nation devoid of effective government or law. Paradoxically, to be sure, Brown is himself such a man in embryo: a ”one-man vigilante committee,” he goes beyond the law to cure the 172

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ills of government. However, he brings the ”right” values to the task: he is opposed to the effete quality of life in Washington, “a merry-goround of embassies, parties, and tea dances.’’ A war veteran himself, he is able to rally the Bonus Marchers, men of proven patriotism, against the forces that have corrupted their govemment. Like other films of its time, Washington Merry-Go-Round uncomfortably negotiates the issues facing America in the depression by inventing dramatic situations in which to play out the available options. A press release prepared by M-G-M for the film averred, ”never before in our national history has the American public been so critical of its political representatives as it is today.” Calling the film representative of “the new standard of Americanism which has come into being during the recent years of depression and hardship,” the press release notes a public awareness ”that the people are the losers because of our system which makes many of our representatives self-seekers rather than servers of their country.” The offending ”system,” we should note, is neither social nor economic, but rather the political infrastructure that allows corrupt individuals to acquire power.%

WILD IN THE STREETS American International Pictures, 1968,97 mins.

Producers, Samuel 2. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson; director, Barry Shear; screenplay, Robert Thorn; art director, Paul Sylos; costume design, Richard Bruno; music, Les Baxter, Barry Mann, and Cynthia Wed; cinematographer, Richard Moore; editors, Fred Feitshans and Eve Newman. Christopher Jones (Max Frost); Hal Holbrook (Senator Johnnie Fergus); Shelley Winters (Mrs. Flatow); Ed BegZey (Senator Allbright); Diane Vursi (SalZy Leroy); Richard Pryor (Stanley X ) ; Kevin Coughlin (Billy Cage); Larry Bishop (Abraham);Milly Perkins ( M a y Fergus). In Wild in the Streets, a Congressman enlists a popular rock singer to back his campaign for Senate, but finds that the ultimate price of his support is a total capitulation to the youth culture of the late 1960s. Holding the politician’s generation responsible for all social ills, the rock singer initiates a social revolution in which the voting age is reduced to fifteen and eligibility to hold office to twenty-five. Elected president, the singer confines all members of the population over thirty-five to concentration camps (where they are medicated with LSD). He then creates world peace by dissolving America’s armed forces and breaking its diplomatic ties to the world. In the end, however, he faces a challenge from a generation of bitter ten-year-olds. This bizarre exploitation film-a product of AIP, makers of many inexpensive, youth-oriented horror films and beach movies in the 1950sand 1960s-is so much a phenomenon of its time that it is hard to comprehend out of context. The film reflects a number of concerns: contemporary middle-class unease about the growing cultural power of rock music; the then ongoing drug and sexual ”revolutions’’; the hugely disruptive ”Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” going on in China; racial riots in various American cities; the (apparent) drift leftward among youth worldwide that was taking unpredictable forms; and (implicitly) antiwar agitation related to the Vietnam conflict. In the context of these events, an apocalyptic satire was warranted. Though it never approaches the genius of Robert Altman’s MASH (1970), Wild in the Streets speaks meaningfully to a historic moment. 174

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The politician-protagonist in this film is Johnnie Fergus (Hal Holbrook), a California Congressman who hopes to propel himself into the Senate by gaining the support of Max Frost (Christopher Jones), a wildly popular rock singer in the prophetic Jim Morrison mode. Himself youth-obsessed-hs campaign ads stress his vitality and athleticism-Fergus runs on the platform of lowering the voting age to eighteen (it was then twenty-one). Making the argument that historically prevailed in the debate that led to the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, passed in 1971, he argues that men of an age to serve in the military deserve to be enfranchised. He must stand off those of his elders who are repelled by the sneering Max and h s band and alarmed at their power and popularity. Of these, the most outspoken is Senator Allbright (Ed Begley), who responds to Max’s taunting with the declaration that ”Our great republic has found its wisdom in the mysterious will of the electorate.” Ridiculing this sentiment as “some far-out religious bag,” Max recalls the struggle for women’s suffrage: ”You let the chicks vote; we’re going to get the vote.” A shocked Allbright laments that youth has ”become a disease: They have been told that their state is more blessed than any other. They’ll have to stop the clock or go mad.” Fergus is wary of the situation also, but has himself contributed to the growth of the youth culture. One of his sons confronts him on the issue of the ”older” generation’s obsession with keeping young: “You and mother, you’re like our brother and sister. You both say it: ’you‘re so young.’ If nobody wants to be old any more, why should kids want to be old?” (In a moralizing “documentary” moment in the film, a television announcer comments, “The Kennedy mystique would naturally get out of hand in the West, where the pursuit of happiness has long been replaced by a headlong flight back into pubescence.”) Fergus is sure he can handle the electoral force he has unleashed, but soon finds himself struggling to preserve the original terms of his agreement with Max against the singer’s increasingly radical agenda. Max demands that the voting age be lowered not to eighteen, but to fourteen. Fergus’s “control” comes down to compromising at fifteen. Fergus wins election to the Senate, but events quickly pass him by as the pace of alienation between generations only intensifies. Fergus’s children turn against him, and his eldest joins Max‘s brain trust. Fergus tries to make amends for what he

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has brought about by assassinating Max, but he is prevented. Eventually, he and his family are tracked down by Max's troops and hanged. In this film, there is no possibility of political redemption: a corrupt candidate and a corrupt electorate spin toward disaster in tandem, like a planet and its satellite spiraling into the sun. While Fergus represents the familiar figure of the well-meaning politician who makes a Faustian bargain that overwhelms him, Max (born Flatow) follows a more elaborate arc. He is the rebellious offspring of a passive father and a hysterically anal, antisexual, hectoring monster of a mother (Shelley Winters), who here represents the pop culture residue of Freudian gender ideology. As a teenager, Max retreats to his basement chemistry lab to makes bombs and brew LSD, which he sells to save enough money to escape from home. When he leaves for good, he trashes the house and blows up his father's beloved Chrysler. He turns up next as twenty-two-year-old Max Frost, a fabulously popular singer whose band and political brain trust is made up of conveniently high-powered teenage intellects-for example, Billy Cage (Kevin Coughlin), guitarist/accountant, and, at fifteen, the youngest graduate of Yale Law School. Max lays out a radical agenda both through the lyrics of his songs ("I'll blow your mind, baby"; "Free lovin"') and through his concert sermons, where he preaches youth power. He points out that although the 52 percent of the American population that is under twenty-five fuels the American economy-"We make big business big"-they are largely disenfranchised because the voting age is twenty-one. Otherwise, explains one of Max's followers, the nation's economic and racial problems have been permanently solved: "Everybody's rich. And if they're not, they can sleep on the beaches and live like the rich anyway. There aren't any Negroes any more, not the way you Democrats see them. . . . All I see is a man who got down to the shore and started his tan sooner than I did." Elaborating on the actual 1960s youth slogan, "Never trust anyone over thirty," Max's group adopts the view that the main activity of people over thirty-five is to "get guys to kill other guys." Max prefers the company of three-year-olds: "They're better than we are." Max's hatred of the "old" is intensified by the behavior of his mother, who, recognizing her son on television, seeks him out as her

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chance at immortality: ”I’m the mother of a famous man. I’m a celebrity.” Bullying her way through the crowd at one of Max’s concerts, she jams into his Rolls Royce and takes him and his group on a wild ride through the suburbs. Maddened by her desire to be of the young, she loses control of the car and hits a boy sitting on his lawn. Cradling the dead child, Max denounces her and, by implication, her generation: “You’d kill God Almighty himself if you could get your hands on him.” At a later point, Fergus appeals to Max’s mother to convince her son to call off his reign of terror: “We’re desperate, Mrs. Flatow; he’s paralyzed the country.” By then dressed hippie-style and taking LSD ”therapy,” Max’s mother responds that she could not dissuade her son from his purposes any more than the mother of Jesus could dissuade him from his. She assures Fergus, ”I’m sure my son has a good reason for paralyzing the country.” (After Max’s election to the presidency, she assures reporters that she is sure her son will appoint her to some important post, perhaps as ambassador to the Court of St. James. When, instead, his black-shirted youth come to inter her in a camp, she protests-in the film’s glance at the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany-”I’m young, I’m Aryan-I mean, I’m young, I’m very young.”) Max is made eligible to run for the presidency as a result of popular demonstrations, agitation in Congress by one of Max’s followers, and the dumping of mass quantities of LSD in the Washington, D.C., water supply. He runs as a Republican, as it is one of the movie’s more amusingly incorrect assumptions that the sixties have caused a permanent political power shift in America, giving Democrats a permanent monopoly on both the White House and the Congress, and making the Republican Party virtually irrelevant. Max’s campaign speeches call again for a youth revolution: Troops. I have nothing against the president. It’s like running against my own grandfather. But I don‘t understand. Do you really want a man in his sixties running the country? I mean, what do you ask a sixty-year-old man? You ask him if he wants his wheelchair facing the sun or facing away from the sun. But running the country? Forget it, baby.

During forty successive days of mass demonstrations-seen, bizarrely, through the commentary of real-life reactionary broadcaster Walter Winchell-Max’s voice sings a prophecy that actually

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hit the music charts that year (with his fictitious name on the record label): Nothing can change the shape of things to come: New thoughts waiting to explode; New dreams crowding out old realities; Revolution sweeping like a fresh new breeze.

Even Senator Allbright is panicked at this turn of events, assuring youthful protesters, ”I love you, I love all of you, please believe me, I love all of you.” (When we last see Allbright, he is dressed in blue robes, wandering around a ”paradise camp” in a drugged haze singing, ”The best campaign dinners are no campaign dinners; contribute to yourself.”) In his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, Max sets forth his national agenda: “There is a villain in history . . . and it’s not the Jews, it’s not the labor leaders, it’s not the bankers and it’s not the Russians, and it’s not even the Chinese. Who? Who, after all, then, has caused all of our trouble? Those who are stiff, baby, not with love but with age.” With the “elderly” out of power, a television announcer declares, the problems of the world are over: “The president has said that with our immense wealth we will be able to create the most purely hedonistic society ever known. We have already been shipping free grain to all the hungry countries on this planet.” (Just who raises grain in a ”purely hedonistic” society is not revealed.) In the end, however, Max‘s prospects are darkened by a brewing rebellion among the generation to follow. With a merciless glare that haunts Max thereafter, his younger brother declares twenty-fouryear-old Max to be “old”; younger kids whom he alienates, in the film‘s wonderfully nihilistic ending, mutter after him, “We’re going to put everybody over ten out of business.” Max’s prominence and popularity seem, to some of his followers, evidence of divinity. His trumpeter, Abraham “The Hook” (Larry Bishop), asks h u m to restore his missing hand: ”You’re the King,’’ he tells Max. ”Touch me, man; see if you can turn the hook back into a hand.” Max avoids this test of his status: ”I’d change it back, baby, but I don’t want to blow our luck.” However he may enjoy the status of divinity, Max is wise enough to know his limitations. His awareness that he is manipulating reality marks him as a corrupting,

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rather than a corrupted, hero: he knowingly brings contagion to the commonwealth. Pauline Kael, describing the film as “slammed together with spit and hysteria and opportunism,” found it ”enjoyable.”Despite its “banal’’ music, incompletely developed ideas, ”messed up” details, and a ”blatantly crummy” look, she called it ”smart in ways that bettermade pictures aren’t.”47In hth, however, the film‘s lack of a firm satiric point of view makes it, in the end, anarchically misanthropic.

WILSON Twentieth Century Fox, 1944,154 mins.

Producer, D a r y l F. Zanuck; director, Hen y King; screenplay, Lamar Trotti; art directors, James Basevi and Wiard Ihnen; set decorators, Thomas Little and Paul S. Fox; costumes, Rene‘ Hubert; original music, Alfred Newman; cinematographer, Leon Shamroy; editor, Barbara McLean. Alexander Knox (Woodrow Wilson); Charles Coburn (Professor Heny Holmes); Ruth Nelson (Ellen Wilson);M a y Anderson (Eleanor Wilson); Geraldine Fitzgerald (Edith Wilson); Thomas Mitchell (Joseph Tumulty); Cedric Hardwicke (Senator Heny Cabot Lodge); Ruth Ford (Margaret Wilson); Vincent Price (William Gibbs McAdoo); Thurston Hall ( E . H. “Big Ed” Jones). Made in 1944, Wilson has a definite thesis relevant to that historical moment: it asserts that World War I1 resulted from the U.S. Senate’s failure to ratify the Versailles treaty in 1921 and to join the League of Nations. These were causes promoted by World War I President Woodrow Wilson (Alexander &ox), who is presented here as a visionary who understood that the future peace of the world depended on America’s participation in Europe’s affairs, but was thwarted by men of limited imagination, like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (Cedric Hardwicke). Future peace, the film implies, depends on the United States at last heeding the lessons of the past and adopting Wilson’s cause. Wilson is portrayed as a man of noble character who loves peace but can, when necessary, wield force and assert leadership. Of course he is given little human foibles-the great man as regular guy, in the typical Hollywood mode-but because the film celebrates Wilson so unconditionally, it is more a pageant than a drama; a hagiography rather than a biography. The wise, pure, compassionate, far-sighted, courageous, and commanding protagonist suffers no temptation and undergoes no inner moral conflict. The film’s episodic plot is pretty straightforward. While president of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson is drafted by crooked New Jersey political bosses to run for governor. In office, he repudiates them and introduces reforms. He next seeks the Democratic 180

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Party’s nomination for the presidency, wins on the forty-third ballot, and goes on to victory in the 1912 general election. In his first term as president, Wilson steers a political course between pacifists and warmongers, hoping mightily to negotiate a European peace from a position of neutrality. In his second term, goaded by Germany’s continued belligerence, Wilson leads the country into war. After the war, he negotiates with the European powers to ensure a just peace, but Congress repudiates his treaties. Wilson collapses while touring the country to arouse public support for the League of Nations, and dies with his dream unfulfilled. Wilson is identified with American wartime ideals. As president of Princeton, he fights to eliminate ”special privilege” clubs on campus. As a politician he declares a commitment to human rights ”above all other rights.” As peace candidate, he stands fast despite being attacked as a “college sissy” better at elocution than action; as wartime leader, he excoriates the German ambassador for his nation’s barbarism. Wilson knows how to inspire the loyalty of the young. At Princeton, he had consoled a football player whose fumble costs a game; the grateful player later joins his political campaign, and, in due course, goes off to war as a soldier. Wilson can touch people with his eloquence: after the war, with his treaty in danger, he takes a whistle stop tour around the country, and is winning the populace over when he collapses physically, a martyr to his cause. Defeated and ill, he consoles himself with the hope that the next president to face such a crisis will found an even sounder international organization-a bow to Roosevelt and a revived internationalism. In a central scene, representing Wilson’s consecration to a sacred ideal, the president declares to a group of soldiers leaving for Europe that the sole justification for their efforts and sole legitimate purpose for their sacrifice will be the foundation of the League of Nations. The pledge is broken, but not by him. Wilson was allotted many production resources. The political conventions are elaborately staged and packed with extras. Wavering public opinion is conveyed through conflicting songs, extravagantly produced: antiwar numbers like ”Our Hat’s Off to You, Mr. Wilson” and ”I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” and yield to bellicose songs with lyrics like ”When He Grows Up to Be a Man, I’ll Give Him Up to Uncle Sam.” Most effective of all, oddly enough, are the genuine newsreels integrated into the film of war bond rallies, led

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by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and of Wilson’s trip to France to negotiate with Clemenceau and Lloyd George. An experienced stage actor, Alexander Knox makes a resonant Wilson. Whether dressing down crooked politicians, excoriating the German ambassador, or addressing rallies, Knox’s voice helps convey the film’s idea of a great man. Actor Knox had a difficult task: trying to compete with politician Franklin Roosevelt, whose oratorical talents matched or exceeded his own. Less appealing aspects of Wilson’s character are omitted. Avoiding mention of his racial bigotry (he reintroduced Jim Crow laws to Washington), the film has him express his southern roots domestically, in song and dance around the family piano. When the Wilson family arrives in the White House, a black valet from the South expresses pleasure that the new occupants will speak the same language as he. Wilson’s relatively quick second marriage, remarked to his discredit at the time, is handled diplomatically. Devoted to his first wife, Ellen (Ruth Nelson), Wilson sincerely mourns her passing. On her deathbed, however, Ellen warns the Wilson daughters Margaret (Ruth Ford) and Eleanor (Mary Anderson) that their father would need a woman’s help in order to complete his great work. The daughters thereupon conspire to introduce Wilson to the glamorous Edith Bolling Galt (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who becomes, after some bashful wooing and ”feminine” reluctance, his second wife. Screenwriter Lamar Trotti was associated with a number of notable films steeped in Americana, scripting Young Mr. Lincoln, The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, and Drums along the Mohawk (all released in 1939). He produced and wrote the screenplay for The OxBow Incident (1943). He also scripted such notable war films as Guadalcanal Diay and The Immortal Sergeant (both 1943). Wilson was something of an event at the time it was made. Describing the film as “a social document of the first importance,” the prestigious Saturday Review assigned it for review to Edgar G. Sisson, a special emissary for Wilson who helped shape his famous ”Fourteen Points” on which future peace was to be erected. While he caviled at the casting and makeup, Sisson concluded that the film expressed Wilson’s ideals “pervasively,thrillingly”@and could help teach the lessons America had failed to learn a quarter century before. Writing in The New Yorker, John Lardner acknowledges industry “buzz” that the film’s producer considered Wilson a politically risky project, but concludes that “Mr. [Darryl] Zanuck‘s American

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history course looks safe as houses,”49full enough of cinematic conventions to offend no one. The acute James Agee, while granting Wilson to be “a very sincere and even a brave picture,” nevertheless castigates it as a lost opportunity to seriously encounter the issues that would shape the postwar world. “With the best intentions in the world, Hollywood took a character and a theme of almost Shakespearian complexity and grandeur, and reduced the character to an astutely played liberal assistant professor of economics; the theme to a few generalizations which every schoolboy has half f ~ r g o t t e n . ” ~ In his view, the American movie public would have been ready for a shorter, less expensive film that would express “the same story, maturely told.”

YOUNG MR. LINCOLN Cosmopolitan Productions; Twentieth Century Fox, 1939,100 mins.

Producers, Darryl E Zanuck and Kenneth Macgowen; director, John Ford; screenplay, Lamar Trotti; production designers, Richard Day and Mark-Lee Kirk; music, Alfied Newman; sets, Thomas Little; costumes, Royer; cinematographer, Bert Glennon; editor, Walter Thompson. Henry Fonda (Abraham Lincoln); Alice Brady (Abigail Clay);Marjorie Weaver (Mary Todd); Arleen Whelan (Sarah Clay); Pauline Moore (Ann Rutledge); Richard Cromwell (Matt Clay); Ward Bond (1. Palmer Cuss); Donald Meek (John Felder); Milburn Stone (Stephen A. Douglas); Eddie Collins (Efe Turner); Judith Dickens (Carrie Sue); Eddie Quillan (Adam CIay); Spencer Charters (JudgeBell); Cliff Clark (Sheriff Billings); Charles Tannen (Ninian Edwards); Francis Ford (Sam Boone); Fred Kohler Jr. (Scrub White). John Ford’s celebrated film begins with Lincoln’s first hesitant steps into politics and ends with a courtroom victory that signals his maturity. The law case was one Lincoln actually won later in life, when he discredited an eyewitness to a murder with the help of an almanac, but it serves here both as a cinematic climax and a way to represent his special powers of character. Ford ascribes Lincoln’s greatness to a combination of destiny and character. As a modest shopkeeper, he is unsure of his abilities and undecided about his goals. Fate delivers legal knowledge to his hands when the impoverished Clay family pays its food bill with a copy of Blackstone’s Commentaries. The books, which the Clays acquired more or less by accident, mean nothing to them, but to Lincoln, they might as well be holy writ. They contain the core of all law: ”Right, wrong; by gee, that’s all there is to it.” The books inspire Lincoln, but he is torn between self-doubt and a desire for self-actualization. Contemplating a career in law, he says, “I feel such a fool setting myself up as knowing so much.” After the death of Ann Rutledge, who had encouraged him to advance himself rather than remain a shopkeeper, he chooses his future course at her graveside, leaving the matter to chance by basing his decision on the direction in which a stick falls. When it falls in the 184

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BackwoodsmanAbe Lincoln is inspired to great deeds by the words of a law book: ”Right, wrong: by gee, that‘s all there is to it.” (Young Abe Lincoln, Twentieth Century Fox, 1939.) Source: Cinema Collectors, Hollywood, Calif

direction of studying law, however, he acknowledges, to Ann’s spirit, that her faith in him might have influenced the outcome: “Wonder if I could have tipped it your way a little?” Ford’s Lincoln represents two separate mythic types: the trickster, who survives by his wits, and the spiritual hero who embodies the

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values of the community (and who will later be its martyr). As the trickster, he helps his tug-of-war team to victory at a carnival by tying their rope to a horse. Judging a baking contest, he manages to consume two entire pies by deferring his decision about which is best until he has finished both. He displays exceptional physical skill, winning a rail-splitting contest (without guile) and giving himself a haircut in a mirror, and he appreciates skill in others, like the late Mr. Clay, who built a log cabin the ”authentic” way, without nails. To put his opponents off guard, he disguises his shrewd courtroom tactics as folksy antics. But Lincoln also has authentic personal force. As a lawyer, he displays what the editors of Cashiers du Cinema (in a justly famous essay) call his “castrating power”51by physically threatening two stubborn Mormon farmers who have refused to settle a dispute. (He then closely inspects the coins they pay him to be sure he has not been cheated.) Later, he combines the traits of trickster and ”castrator” by facing down a lynch mob seeking to hang the Clay brothers, falsely accused of murder. Initially charming the crowd with selfdeprecation, he subsequently adopts a prophetic voice by pointing out the moral ugliness of mob rule. Lynching, he reminds the townsfolk, can but infect their individual souls and the soul of the commonwealth. He sends them off with a dismissal that invites no reply: ”That’s all I’ve got to say, friends. Goodnight.” To the Clay women, sustained by Lincoln’s visits and support, he seems little short of a divinity. In turn,he learns from them that character transcends law. Mrs. Clay refuses an offer to save one of her sons by accusing the other, though doing so might condemn both to hanging (as happened in an actual case that screenwriter Lamar Trotti had covered as a reporter). Abe extols her choice as a demonstration of the lughest character. Providence manifests itself again as the Clays, who had given Lincoln his first law books, now provide him the almanac by which he will Iater prove the brothers‘ innocence. The good woman/bad woman motif is well represented by the figures of Ann Rutledge, who loves Abe for his intelligence and his general capacities, and the opportunistic Mary Todd, who first rejects him in favor of Stephen Douglas but later pursues him when she senses his greater political potential. The memory of Ann, symbolized for Abe by the recurring symbol of the river next to which he wooed her, sustains and strengthens him, while the presence of

Screening Politics

187

Mary silences and diminishes him. Mary will darken his life, we know from history, but that fact is merely a sad footnote to the Lincoln legend of challenge and martyrdom, which the film foreshadows in his final walk up a hill toward an approaching storm. Director John Ford used many resources to portray Lincoln as a divinely inspired political hero. Careful camera work, symbolic montage, and good editing contribute, but the most effective is the presence of actor Henry Fonda, made to move at a ruminative, careful pace different from anyone else in the film. This Christ-figure walks among us and shares our doubts, infirmities, and awkwardness, but he seems attentive to other voices that call upon him. He is not quite the angel Gabriel, but he seems to have his ear. In truth, the film indulges in silly dramatics, such as Palmer Cass’s hysterical courtroom confession, and it simplifies issues dreadfully in its effort to portray the schoolchild’s Lincoln. John Cromwell’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois does far more justice to historical and psychological truth, and it received due credit on that score from reviewers of the day. Movies thrive not on historical truth but on myth, however, and in that regard, Ford’s film unquestionably carries the day.

NOTES 1. Richard Schickel, D. W. Grifith: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 551-59. 2. "Film Review: Ada." Variety, 26 July, 1961, 12. 3. Allen Drury, Advise and Consent (New York Doubleday, 1959), 36. 4. Leonard Quart and Albert Auster, American Film and Society Since 1945,3rd ed. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), 75. 5. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema (New York Da Capo, 1968), 105. 6. Pauline Rogers, "John Seale's Royal Treatment of the American President," International Photographer (November 1995):37. 7. Jerzy Kosinski, Being There (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971). 8. Frank Capra, The Name above the Title (New York Macmillan, 1971),487. 9. Gore Vidal, Screening History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992),84. 10. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "The White Negro," The New Yorker, 11 May 1998,64. 11. Erin J. Aubry, "Summer of Spike," LA Weekly, 2-8 July 1999,28. 12. Andrew Sarris, Politics and Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978,18. 13. Adam Reilly, Harold Lloyd: The King of Daredevil Comedy (New York: Macmillan, 1977). 14. Richard Schickel, Harold Lloyd: The Shape of Laughter (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1974),208. 15. Cited from The Citizen Kane Book by Pauline Kael (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 351. 16. For an account of the production and controversial editing of the film, see Tom Roston, "Strange Bedfellows," Premiere (November 2000): 93-98. 17. Andrew Bergman, We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films (New York: New York University Press, 1971), 27. 18. Elia Kazan, A Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1989),568. 19. This sequence is analyzed in excellent detail in Frank R. Cunningham's discussion of Fail Safe in Sidney Lumet: Film and Litera y Vision (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 136-57. 20. See Robert L. McConnell, "The Genesis and Ideology of Gabriel over the White House," in Cinema Examined: Selections from Cinema journal, eds. Richard Dyer MacCann and Jack C. Ellis (New York: Dutton, 1982), 202. 21. Walter Lippmann, "Politics over Hollywood," New York Herald Tribune, 4 April 1933. 22. Richard Watts Jr., "Sight and Sound: Masterful President Huston," New York Herald Tribune, 9 April 1933. 23. John J. Pitney Jr., "Fascism in Gabriel over the White House," in Reelpolitik: Political Ideologies in '30s and '40s Films, ed. Beverly Merrill Kel-

188

Notes

189

ley, et al. (Westport, COM.: Praeger, 1998), 47. As Pitney's bibliography demonstrates, this strange film has attracted a good deal of attention in recent years. 24. Robert Ray, A Certain Tendency of American Cinema, 1930-1950 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 82. 25. Brian Henderson, Five Screenplays by Preston Sturges (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 45. 26. Andrew Sarris, "You Ain't Heard Nothing' Yet: The American Talking Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 317. 27. Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford: A Life (New York St. Martin's, 1999),211. 28. Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and His Films (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1986), 101. 29. Peter Stowell, John Ford (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986), 3. 30. "Two with Tracy," Time, 27 October 1958,42. 31. Peter Stowell, John Ford (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986),111. 32. See Capra's entertaining account in his autobiography, Frank Capra: The Name above the Title (New York Macmillan, 1971) and Joseph McBride's retelling in Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (New York Simon & Schuster, 1992). See too Raymond Carney's astute but contrarian view in American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1986), 291-344. 33. Christopher Wilkinson, "The Year of the Beast," in Nixon: A n Oliver Stone Film, ed. Eric Hamburg (New York Hyperion, 1995), 59. 34. I borrow this formulation from Karen Homey. See, among her other works, Neurosis and Human Growth (New York: Norton, 1950). 35. For this and other parallels to Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, see Frank E. Beaver, "Citizen Nixon," in The Films ofOliver Stone, ed. Don Kunz (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1997), 275-84. 36. Stanley Kauffmann, "Acting President: Stanley Kauffmann on Films," The New Republic, 22 January 1977. 37. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, 2nd ed. (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1987), 63. 38. Jeanine Basinger, A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960 (New York Knopf, 1993), 180. 39. Betsy Erkilla, "The Seduction of Joe Tynan," Cineaste (Winter 1979/1980): 50. 40. Robert Hatch, "Wide of the Mark," The Nation, 5 January 1948. 41. Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 91. 42. Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington, John Ford (New York Da Capo Press, 1975), 142. 43. J. A. Place, The Non-Western Films of John Ford (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1979),38.

190

Notes

44. Maureen Dowd, "Eighty-Eightsomething," The New Republic, 1 August 1988,37. 45. It is an odd quirk of screenwriter and playwright David Mamet to give characters oddly spelled names. The "t" in Mobs is silent, as is the "g" in the character "Lingk" in Glengarry Glen Ross. The point of this affectation is hard to discern. 46. Bergman, We're in the Money, 24. 47. Pauline Kael, Going Steady (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 89-91. 48. Edgar G. Sisson, "The Return of Woodrow Wilson," The Snturday Revim, 12 August 1944,22-23. 49. John Lardner, "The World Made Safe for Wilson," The New Yorker, 12 August 1944,40. 50. James Agee, "Films," The Nation, 19 August 1944,221. 51. "John Ford's Young Mr, Lincoln," Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York Oxford University Press, 1985) 723,724.

Bibliography Basinger, Jeanine. A Woman‘s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 193&1960. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Bergman, Andrew. We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films. New York New York University Press, 1971. Bogdanovich, Peter. John Ford. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Capra, Frank. The Name above the Title. New York Macmillan, 1971. Carney, Raymond. American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Christensen, Terry. Reel Politics: American Political Movies from Birth of a Nation to Platoon. London: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Combs, James.American Political Movies: A n Annotated Filmography of Feature Films. New York Garland, 1990. Crowdus, Gary, ed. The Political Companion to American Film. New York Lakeview Press, 1994. Cunningham, Frank R. Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991. Davies, Philip, and Brian Neve. Cinema, Politics, and Society in America. New York St. Martin’s, 1981. Drury, Allen. Advise and Consent. New York Doubleday, 1959. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957. Gallagher, Tag. John Ford: The Man and His Films. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Gianos, Phillip L. Politics and Politicians in American Film. Westport, COM.: Praeger, 1998. Hamburg, Eric, ed. Nixon: An Oliver Stone Film. New York: Hyperion, 1995. Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Henderson, Brian. Five Screenplays by Preston Sturges. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. 191

192

Bibliography

Kelley, Beverly Merrill, ed. Reelpolitik: Political ldeologies in ‘30s and ’40‘s Films. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998. Keyssar, Helene. Robert Altrnan’s America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Kosinski, Jerzy. Being There. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971. Kunz, Don, ed. The Films of Oliver Stone. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1997. McBride, Joseph. Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. McBride, Joseph. Searchingfor John Ford: A Life. New York St. Martin’s, 1999. McBride, Joseph, and Michael Wilmington. John Ford. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975. Novak, Michael. Choosing Our King: Powerful Symbols in Presidential Politics. New York: Macmillan, 1974. Place, J. A. The Nan-Western Films of John Ford. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1979. Quart, Leonard, and Albert Auster. American Film and Society Since 1945.3rd ed. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2002. Ray, Robert. A Certain Tendency of American Cinema, 1930-1950. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985. Reilly, Adam. Harold Lloyd: The King of Daredevil Comedy. New York Macmillan, 1977. Roffman, Peter, and Jim Purdy. The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politicsfrom the Depression to the Fifties. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Rogin, Michael. Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Rollins, Peter C., and John OConnor, eds., Hollywood’s White House: The American Presidency in Film and History. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2003. Rossiter, Clinton. The American Presidency. 2nd ed. New York Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960. Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema. New York: Da Capo, 1968. Sarris, Andrew. Politics and Cinema. New York Columbia University Press, 1978. Sarris, Andrew. “You Ain’t Heard Nofhin‘ Yet“: The American Talking Film. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Schickel, Richard. D. W. Griffrth: A n American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. Schickel, Richard. Harold Lloyd: The Shape of Laughter. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1974. Sklar, Robert. Movie Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. New York: Vintage Books, 1975. Stowell, Peter. John Ford. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986. Vidal, Gore. Screening Histo y. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Index

Abe Lincoln in Illinois, 1-3, 187 Abraham Lincoln, 4-6 Ada, 7-8 Adams, John, xxi Advise and Consent, xvii, 9-11,44 Air Force One, 12-14,53 Alda, Alan, xvii, 133 Alias Nick Beal, xvii, 15-17, 38 Allen, Fred, 155 Allen, Joan, xviii, 47 All the King's Men, xvii, 7, 17, 18, 20, 88,97,125 American President, The, xviii, 21-24, 53 Anderson, Warner, 96 Arthur, Jean, xvi, 105 Auster, Albert, 9 Ayres, Lew, 11,98 Babbitt, Bruce, 152, 153, 154 Baker, Joe Don, 60 Balsam, Martin, 100 Barrymore, Ethel, 69 Barrymore, John, xvi Barrymore, Lionel, xiv, 170 Basinger, Jeanine, 115 Being There, 25-27 Baxter, Alan, 1 Beatty, Warren, xviii, 33

Bellamy, Ralph, 149 Benet, Stephen Vincent, 4,5 Benning, Annette, 22 Bergman, Andrew, 52 Bernstein, Henri, 171 Berry, Halle, 34 Best Man, The, xvii, 28-30,133 Bickford, Charles, 69 Birth of a Nation, 4,85 Bob Roberts, xviii, 31-32 Bottoms, Timothy, 57 Boyle, Peter, 36 Brabin, Charles xiv Bracken, Eddie, 79 Bridges, Jeff, 47 Brown, Georg Stanford, 99 Brown, Tom, 84 Bulworth, xviii, 33-35 Byron, A. S., xv, 115 Burdick, Eugene, 65 Cagney, James, 95 Candidate, The, xvii, 17,3&38 Capra, Frank, xiv, xvi, xvii, 19,21, 25,28,30,35,38,40,59, 78,80, 106,121,126,138,141,164,167 Carlson, Carol, 37 Carradine, John, 92 Carter, Jimmy, 114 193

194

Cat’s Paw, The, xv, 3940 Churchill, Berton, 84 Citizen Kane, 4 1 4 3 City Hall, 44-46 Clinton, Bill, xx, 21 Close, Glenn, 13 Cobb, Irvin, 83,87,144 Cohan, George M., xv, 52,113 Cohn, Harry, 108 Colbert, Claudette, 113 Compromising politician, xvii, xviii, 9, 91 Conlin, Jimmy, 80 Connelly, Marc, 52 Contender, The, xviii, 47-50 Corrupted politician in film, xvii, xviii, 18,37,39,41,44,88, 162, 163,174 Corrupting politician in film, xviii, 31, 38,43,62,89, 135, 174 Costner, Kevin, 158 Cotten, Joseph, 41,69,71 Coulouris, George, 41 Cox, John M., 148 Craven, Matt, 89 Crawford, Broderick, xvii, 18, 29 Crewson, Wendy, 12,153 Cromwell, John, 1,187 Cronin, Hume, 149 Cruze, James, xv, 172 Cunningham, Frank, 67 Curley, James Michael, 91 Cusack, John, xvii, 44,162 Dark Horse, The, 51-52 Da Silva, Howard, 2 Dave, xviii, 53-55 Davis, Bette, 51 Del Ruth, Roy, xv Demarest, William, 76, 79 De Niro, Robert, 167 Deterrence, 5C58 Dewey, John, xix

Index Distinguished Gentleman, The, xvii, 5661 Dole, Robert, 152 Donlevy, Brian, 76 Douglas, Helen Gahagan, 129 Douglas, Melvyn, 25,36 Douglas, Michael, xviii, 21 Dowd, Maureen, 154 Dressler, Marie, xiv, 115,116 Dreyfuss, Richard, 22 Dr. Strangelove, 67, 157, 158 Dru, Joanne, 20 Drury, Allen, 9 Du Bois, W. E. B., 35 Dukakis, Kitty, 152 Dukakis, Michael, 152 Dunn, Kevin, 53 Dvorark, Ann, 155 Dysart, Richard, 26 Ebert, Roger, 26,27,46 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xviii Emmerich, Roland, xviii Esposito, Giancarlo, 31

Face in the Crowd, A, xviii, 62-64 Fail Safe, 6 5 6 7 Farmer’s Daughter, The, xvi, xix, 168-71 Farrow, John, xvii Fetchit, Stepin, 84,87, 146 Fonda, Henry, xvi, xvii, 10,28,65, 184 Ford, Harrison, 12 Ford, John, xv, xvi, 86,87,94,109, 144,167,184,187 Frye, Northrop, xix, xxiii Gabriel over the White House, xv, xvii, xix, 33,72-75,109, 172 Gallagher, Tag, 86 Carson, Greer, 150 Gates, Henry Louis, 35

Index Gershwin, George, 52 Gershwin, Ira, 52 Goodman, John, 88 Grapewin, Charley, 86 Great McGinty, The, 76-78,79 Greenwood, Bruce, 157 Griffith, Andy, xviii, 62 Griffith, D. W., 4, 5, 85, 109, 169 Grizzard, George, 11 Grodin, Charles, 54

Hail the Conquering Hero, 79-82 Hale, Barbara, 95 Hall, Philip Baker, 129 Hammond, Kay, 4 Hart, Gary, 152,154 Haskell, Molly, 115 Hatch, Robert, 137 Hawthome, Nathaniel, xviii, 137 Hayes, Peter Lind, 137 Hayward, Susan, 7 Hearst, William Randolph, 72, 73, 75 Heche, Anne, 89 Hecht, Ben, 137 Hepbum, Katharine, 138,139 Hoffman, Dustin, 167 Holbrook, Hal, 175 Hoover, Herbert, 72 Hopkins, Anthony, xviii Howard, Mary, 2 Hunter, Jeffrey,92 Huston, Walter, xv, 4,72 Ireland, John, 19,20 Jackson, Andrew, xxi James, William, xix Jefferson, Thomas, 32 Jennings, Waylon, 152 Johnson, Lyndon, 57 Johnson, Van, 140 Jones, Christopher, xviii Jones, James Earl, 98

195

Jordan, Hamilton, 152 Judge Priest, xv, xvi, 83-87 Kael, Pauline, 179 Kane, Joseph, 166 Kanin, Garson, xvi Kaufman, George S., 52 Kauffmann, Stanley, 114 Kazan, Elia, xviii, 62 Kelland, Clarence Budington, 39,40 Kennedy, John F., xx, 32,93,148 Kennedy, Joseph, 108 Kennedy, Robert, 33 Kibbee, Guy, 51 King, Martin Luther, 33 Kingfzsh, 88-90 Kingsley, Ben, 53 Kline, Kevin, xviii, 53 Knox, Alexander, 180 Kosinski, Jerzy, 25 Khrushchev, Nikita, 159,160 Kubrick, Stanley, 67, 157 La Cava, Gregory, xv, 72 La Guardia, Fiorella, 44 Langella, Frank, 53 Lansbury, Angela, 138 Lardner, John, 182 Lamer, Jeremy, 36 Last Hurrah, The, xvii, 44,91-94 Laughton, Charles, 11 Lee, Spike, 35 Leighton, Margaret, 30 Lincoln, Abraham, xxi, xxii Lion Is in the Streets, A, 88,9597 Lippmann, Walter, 75 Lloyd, Harold, xv, 39 Lockhart, Gene, 2 Long, Huey, 20,88,91,97 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 89 Louise, Anita, 84 Lumet, Sidney, 65 Lurie, Rod, xviii, 47, 50, 56 Lynn, Jonathan, xviii, 59

196

Index

MacArthur, Charles, 137 MacLachlan, Janet, 99 Maclaine, Shirley, 25 Macready, George, 16 Man, The, 98-100 Man who Shot Liberty Valance, The, 88,9597 Martin, Dean, 7 Marvin, Lee, 101 Massey, Raymond, 1 Matthau, Walter, 64,67 McBride, Joseph, 83 McCambridge, Mercedes, 20 McCarthy, Eugene, 36 McCarthy, Kevin, 60 McConnell, Robert L., 72 McDaniel, Hattie, 86 Mchtire, John, 96 Meet John Doe, 106, 138 Melville, Herman, xviii Meredith, Burgess, 99 Merkel, Una, 4,39 Meyers, Vic, 156 Miles, Vera, 102 Milland, Ray, 15 Mitchell, Thomas, 15 Morgan, J. P., 89 Morley, Karen, 74 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,106, 138 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, xvi, 7, 8, 15-16,21,26,31,33,59, 75, 77, 80,81,105-108,109,138,140, 143,164 Murphy, Eddie, xviii, 59 Murphy, Michael, 152 Murray, Brian, 31 Murray, Don, 11 Nader, Ralph, 152 Napoleon, 49 Neal, Patricia, 62 New Deal, xvii Newton, Huey, 33 Nixon, Richard, xxi, 38, 129

Nixon, xviii, 109-112 Novak, Michael, xxiii OConnor, Edwin, 91 Oldman, Gary, 13,47 Osborne, Vivienne, 51 Pacino, Al, 44 Phantom President, The, xv, 52, 113-114 Pidgeon, Walter, 10 Pitney, John J., 75 Place, J. A., 147 Poe, Edgar Allan, xviii Politics, xiv, 115-116 Polly Tix in Washington, 115-117 Potter, H. C., xvi, 69 Powell, Dick, xv, 155 Powell, William, 136 President Vanishes, The, xv, 119-120, 172 Prima y Colors, xvii, 44, 121-125 Pullman, Bill, xviii Purdy, John, xx, xxiii Preminger, Otto, xvii, 9 Quart, Leonard, 9 Raines, Ella, 82 Rains, Claude, 105 Ralph, Cheryl Lee, 57 Ray, Robert, 78 Reagan, Ronald, xxi Redeeming politician in film, xx, xv, 8,31,33, 39,53,55, 70, 72,79, 1321,135,147 Redford, Robert, xvii, 36,37,38 Reiner, Rob, xviii Reisner, Charles, xiv Reitman, Ivan, xviii Rhames, Ving, 55 Rickman, Alan, 32 Ritchie, Michael, xvii Rivkin, Allen, 71

Index Robbins, Tim, xviii, 31 Robertson, Cliff, 28 Robertson, Pat, 152 Roffman, Peter, xx, xxiii Rogers, Roy, 164 Rogers, Will, xv, 83,85,87, 144 Rogin, Michael, xxi, xxii, xxiii Roosevelt, Franklin, 29,57,68,72, 87,89,90, 120, 148 Ross, Herbert, xvii Rossen, Robert, xvii, 20 Rossiter, Clinton, xxiii Roth, Lillian, 8 Rowell, Victoria, 60 Running Mates, 126-128 Rush, Benjamin, xx Ryskind, Morrie, 52 Sacred element in political films, xx, xxii, 18, 24, 65,66, 70, 74’94, 101,108,122,147,178,187 Sandburg, Carl, 4 Sarris, Andrew, 9,10, 81 Schaffner, Franklin, xvii Schary, Dore, 68 Schatzberg, Jerry, xvii, 133 Schickel, Richard, 5,6,40 Schulberg, Budd, 62,64 Secret Honor, 129-32 Seduction of Joe Tynan, The, xvii, 125, 133-135 Sellek, Tom, 126 Sellers, Peter, 25 Senator Was indiscreet, The, 136-137 Shaud, Grant, 60 Shear, Barry, xviii Sheen, Martin, 22 Sherwood, Robert E., 1 Sisson, Edgar G., 182 Slater, Christian, 50 Smith, Al, 148 Smith, Lane, 60 Sorkin, Aaron, xviii, 21 Stanbery, Henry, xxi

197

State of the Union, xvii, 16, 28,29, 64, 138-143 Steinem, Gloria, 152 Stewart, James, xvi, 101,105 Stockwell, Dean, 13 Stone, Oliver, xviii, 109, 111 Stowell, Peter, 103 Sturges, Preston, 76,78,79,82,167 Sun Shines Bright, The, xvi, 86, 144-147 Sunrise at Campobello,69, 14S151 Tamiroff, Akim, 76 Tanner ‘88,152-154 Taurog, Norman, xv Taylor, Sam, xv Temple, Shirley, 117 Terkel, Studs, 152 Thanks a Million, xv, 155-156 Thirteen Days, 157-161 Tiomkin, Dimitri, 197 Tone, Franchot, 10,74 Totter, Audrey, 16 Tracy, Lee, xv, 28,172 Tracy, Spencer, xvii, 91,139,139 Travolta, John, xvii, 121 Trotti, Lamar, 86, 87, 182 Trudeau, Garry, 154 True Colors, xvii, 17, 162-163 Truman, Harry, 28,29 Tuchman, Barbara, 157 Twain, Mark, xviii Tweed, Thomas F., 72

Under Western Stars, 164-166 Vidal, Gore, 28,29,31,32, 133 Vorkapich, Slavko, 108

Wag the Dog, 167-169 Wallace, Irving, 98 Walthall, Henry, 85 Wanger, Walter, 120 Warden, Jack, 25

198 Warren, Robert Penn, 20,97 Washington, George, xx Washington Masquerade, The, xiv, 170-171 Washington Merry-Go-Round, xv, 172-1 73 Watts, Richard Jr., 75 Wayne, John, 102 Weaver, Sigoumey, 54 Welles, Orson, 41 Wellman, William, xv Wheeler, Harvey, 65 Whittier, John Greenleaf, xvi

Index Widmark, Richard, 162 Wild in the Streets, xviii, 174-179 Wilkinson, Christopher, 112 William, Warren, 51 Wilson, Woodrow, xxi, xxii, 69, 120 Wilson, 180-183 Wininger, Charles, xvi Young, Loretta, xvi, 71 Young Mr. Lincoln, xvi, xix, 1,86, 109,1&2-187 Zanuck, Darryl, 182

About the Author

Harry Keyishian is professor of English at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey, where he teaches courses in drama and film. His other publications include The Shapes of Revenge, a study of Shakespeare, and books on William Saroyan and Michael Arlen. His articles and reviews have appeared in a number of publications, including The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, Studies in English Literature, English Language Notes, Modern Language Studies, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, On Stage Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Book World.

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