The Screengrab : something wild

Phil's Film Faves, Part Two

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

STOP MAKING SENSE (1984) & SOMETHING WILD (1986)

Jonathan Demme's movies were essential to my having survived the 1980s. I had the closest thing I've ever had to a religious experience during the week when I saw Stop Making Sense five times; I've never seen another movie, including dance films and martial arts flicks, that conveyed to me so much of the pleasure of physicality, of moving your body, and there was something about seeing all those people joining their skills together and losing themselves in the shared experience of being simultaneously brainy, goofy, and hot that suggested everything I wanted to get, and never got, from college. The mixed-tape road trip of Something Wild, where the wild weekend gives way to a trial by fire that leaves the hero and heroine stronger, was everything I wanted out of the rest of life, including the handcuffs and the used-car-salesman cameo by John Waters.

RE-ANIMATOR (1985)

I've always loved horror movies, I've always loved comedy, and I've always loved the idea of comic horror midnight movies that go just far enough in the direction oftoo far. Maybe if more movies that light out in this direction got it right, it would matter less to me that Stuart Gordon got this one just right. But most of them don't.

DUCK SOUP (1933)

What I just said about midnight movies? It goes double for crackhouse-rat comedy.

SONGWRITER (1984)

This movie, starring Willie Nelson and Rip Torn, written by Bud Shrake, and directed by Alan Rudolph during those three weeks a decade when his meds are working, captures the spirit and flavor of Texas hipsterdom as it has always come across in the best of Nelson's music, Torn's acting, and Shrake's writing, and that's about as hip as things get in the South. I myself, a product of the Louisiana/Mississippi border, have spent about a month total in Texas my whole life, but am not above resorting to a contact high.

BEFORE SUNRISE (1995)

Can we talk? I don't get girls. Never have, never will. I miss signals, I misread situations, I don't know...I just don't get girls, okay? And if I may presume to speak for the losers of the world for a second, being one of those people who doesn't get anywhere with other people in that way can sometimes make it a sobering experience to sit in the dark watching a lot of movies in which couple effortlessly hook up. But if I ever saw a movie in which my own fantasy of the best way you could hook up with somebody, this is probably it. Two nice, smart people just run into each other, take a chance, and for as long as the movie is running, it pays off, only to end with a cliffhanger. The director, Richard Linklater, later resolved things with his sequel, Before Sunset, and I like it fine, but I think I may have enjoyed the nine intervening years of wondering even more.

I met Linklater once, not that he would remember. It was at a festival where he was showing his first movie, Slacker, and someone tried to introduce the two of us, and I actually, fairly elaborately snubbed him, because I'd heard about--hadn't seen--his movie and thought it sounded like a pile of shit. After snubbing him (and mortifying the person trying to make the introductions(, I walked away invisibly pinning a medal to my chest, and the last time I looked back at Linklater, he was smiling at me in a very nice way that I may only imagine seemed to say, "Gee, before I made a movie, this fellow would be one of the biggest jackasses I've ever met, but now, he wouldn't even make my personal top 500!" Maybe I don't deserve to get girls.

MAGNOLIA (1999)

I could get very personal here too, but I'll just say that I saw this movie at a moment when I very badly needed to see this movie. It is, of course, the movie that, of all P. T. Anderson's works, is the one most likely to get a shoe thrown at you if you sing its praises before a mixed audience. Both these facts probably have something to do with the fact that, while there are other movies of Anderson's that I think are better, his having made this one is the reason I'd be happy to take a bullet for him.

When Charles Napier Talks, People Twitter

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

We don't want to oversell it or anything, but Nathan Rabin's interview with Charles Napier for The Onion's A.V. Club is the greatest thing ever and deserves to be republished in the slimmest-ever edition of the Library of America series. For the benefit of those so benighted they have a moment's difficulty placing a name to the face or vice versa, the 73-year-old Kentucky-born Napier broke into the business as a space hippie on a 1969 episode of Star Trek before becoming a part of Russ Meyer's stock company. He subsequently became part of Jonathan Demme's stock company, playing the bigamous trucker Chrome Angel in Citizens Band and sticking on a chef's hat for Something Wild and a judge's robe for Philadelphia. (It was his performance in Citizens Band that inspired Pauline Kael to describe him as looking like "a Brian Keith made of concrete." He's done the rounds of TV series guest spots and a lot of voice work, channeling Ted Turner for his regular stint on the Jon Lovitz cartoon The Critic, and he can now be seen in the straight-to-video One-Eyed Monster, in which he does battle with Ron Jeremy's killer penis. (No, for real.) So it's not as if he doesn't have a career to talk about. It must have seemed, going in, that the trick would be to get him to open up. Turns out he was wide open with the screen door banging.

On "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: "I was associate producer on that. They brought me, [Roger] Ebert, and Russ Meyer over to 20th Century Fox because Daryl Zanuck saw this movie we were making, and they wanted a part of it. So we did the movie, they released it. It made lots of money, and it kind of went away for 15 years, ’cause the country club where the producers all went didn’t want to be associated with an X-rated movie. Anyway, they finally re-released it again. It was a very successful hit. It was Russ’ big time at a major studio. He was very pleased with it. Of course, it was my fun too until the day they walked in and took our names off the door and said “Get off the lot.” Everything you did with Russ Meyer was a nightmare, everything was a total fucking catastrophe. It had to be done the Army way, it had to be done his way...This is how we made those first movies: we camped, we stayed outside, we cooked outside. No permits, nothing. We took two cameras, he handheld both of them, edited all of them, and I did all the stunts, I did all the car driving, I did all the makeup and that shit. It occurred to me later that we shot in the desert so the women couldn’t run away from the shoot."

On breaking into the Universal TV series factory: "So now I’m 40 years old and I’m back living on the streets of Hollywood in a parking lot under Russ Meyer, who owned the parking lot. And I said 'It’s over, man. I have no agent, I have no phone, I have no address, I have no nothing.' I had a little unemployment to go. And one day some guy came down the street with a megaphone asking my name, and I’m sitting there with the rest of the winos. I go 'Yeah, what’s up, that’s me.' I hadn’t had a haircut in two months, or a shave, or whatever. He says, 'They want to see you at Universal.' I go, 'What for?' He goes, 'You’ll find out when you get there, you want to go or not?' I go, 'I’m assuming if I don’t go, your ass is gonna be in a lot of trouble, is that correct?' He goes, 'That’s correct.' And we go straight to the lot in the back of the limo, straight to the office of Alfred Hitchcock. They said, 'Don’t say a damn word to him, don’t even look at him. He’s gonna be 10 feet away, and he’s gonna spin around a chair in a dramatic way. He’s gonna say "Go away," or he’s gonna say "Sign him."' So Hitchcock is looking at the guy standing beside him, and he says 'Tell him to turn around.' So I turned around, and Hitchcock said, 'Sign him.' And that was the end of it. I worked from then on, because I worked for Alfred Hitchcock. He owned a big percentage of Universal."

On working with Meyer: "I don’t really have a favorite of any of the pictures I did for him. There’s some stuff in there that scares the shit out of me, frankly, like the frontal nudity in Cherry, Harry & Raquel where I thought, 'Maybe I shouldn’t do this shit.' All it does is show me and whatever her name is galloping toward the camera, me in a cowboy hat and boots and nude. Years later he asked me—we were in a theater, actually, at the Paramount—and he said,'“Charlie, are you ever sorry you did that?' And I go, 'No, but my mother is.'"

On playing a space hippie: "... the writer was 65 years old. What did he know about hippies, right? And Shatner and all of them were upset about it, and of course I didn’t know any difference. I still get letters about that today. In fact, I just got one yesterday. Thirty years later, they wanted me to come back and do a Deep Space 9 and I just—not to be an a-hole about it—I just said, 'Look, I don’t want to wear that silly shirt again. If you can write a role where I’m a general of an army base…'”

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

RAY & AUDREY, SOMETHING WILD (1986)

“I HATE YOU!” Melanie Griffith’s Audrey (a.k.a. Lulu) screams at her ex-con husband Ray (Ray Liotta) towards the end of Jonathan Demme’s indie cult fave. “I HATE YOU, TOO!” Ray screams back. Ah, romance. Sure, Audrey may toy with an occasional square like Jeff Bridges’ yuppie rebel Charlie Driggs, but only if they’re married (or at least seem to be married) so she won’t be tempted by a genuine connection outside the established dysfunction of her abusive relationship with Ray. A fizzy pop fantasia for every nice guy who ever wished he could steal the girl of his dreams away from the jerk she seems to prefer, as well as a dark reminder of the inexplicable bonds that sometimes bond even the worst couples together like Super Glue.

JOHN McCABE & CONSTANCE MILLER, McCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971)

He’s got poetry in him. If only she could see it. But, of course, she can’t. Or won’t. Or maybe it’s not there in the first place. I think it is, though. Only a hopeless romantic could look at a town as hardscrabble and bitter as Presbyterian Church and see a promising future. Only a hopeless romantic could entertain thoughts of love with the shrewd and removed (and, yes, beautiful) Constance Miller. She loves only two things: money and opium. And those will have her full attention at his time of greatest need. But there’s moments well before that time where you can see the nascent feelings between them, and you can believe in those feelings. When you see the way the camera captures them, you know that it, at least, believes in their love, even when they can’t even accept the possibility. Unfortunately, the Wild West was no place for love, despite what the movies have told you. Without laws, community, or the sure knowledge that you would live until tomorrow, the frontier was not a place to put your trust or life in the hands of a fellow human being. It was certainly not a place to put stock in the poetry in your soul.

DIX & LAUREL, IN A LONELY PLACE (1950)

He was born when she kissed him. He died when she left him. He lived a few weeks while she loved him. No, let’s go back. Let’s say you’re a washed-up movie writer (are there any cinematic depictions of movie writers who aren’t all washed-up?). This girl you were seen with has turned up dead, see? And you don’t care, because inside you’re all cold and twisted. But you meet a girl. She inspires you to write. But you can’t control your anger. Being accused of murder makes you angry enough to kill! Someone! Anyone! You think a lot about the dead girl -- enough to convincingly describe the murder scene to your agent and his wife. And now you love the girl, see? You want to marry her. But she’s frightened of you, too. Here’s the question: can you stop yourself from killing her? He loves her. He might be an amoral killer. It’s a hardhearted romance. It’s a flowery film noir. They were made for each other. They were completely wrong for each other.

DAVID & AMY, STRAW DOGS (1971)

Several years ago, my friend and colleague Dana Knowles wrote the best damn article on Straw Dogs I’ve ever had the fortune to read. She argues that David is the real monster of Straw Dogs and Amy is the real victim. And she’s right. David treats Amy with little but contempt, and Amy’s only crime is being beautiful and light-hearted. Knowles points out that Sam Peckinpah was not some Neanderthal or fascist or any of those other words that various critics have leveled at him after seeing this movie. He was a man with a keen grasp on the real-world consequences of violence for the sake of violence (see The Wild Bunch) and macho pissing matches (see, heck, pretty much all of his films). Peckinpah made films designed to provoke a response, but he didn’t necessarily condone that response. Here’s Knowles on David and Amy’s marriage:

Theirs is a horrible, hurtful marriage, though it’s not technically “violent” until quite late in the movie. David seems to have married a beautiful, flirtatious, girlish woman only to hate her for being exactly what he thought he wanted. There’s a revealing moment during his contretemps with the pastor that cuts to the heart of his mixed feelings about having a trophy wife. David is attempting further one-upsmanship by describing his academic objective to Rev. Hood, but the holy man is so distracted by the sight of Amy mixing a drink that he’s obviously not even listening. The look on David’s face is priceless, as if Amy is a weapon so thoroughly unsuited to this exchange that she’s morphed into a liability and wrecked his shot at the intellectual knockout punch he was winding up to deliver. Immediately after they say their goodbyes, Peckinpah cuts to the Sumners preparing for bed, and Amy complains about how awful he’d been to the reverend. David responds with, “No … I like him. And his wife is very attractive.” It’s practically a non sequitur, except that it betrays the moment upon which David is still most focused: when Amy’s allure got the attention that he’d wanted for himself. Even when she’s doing nothing but being, she’s a bit of a thorn in his side. Again and again, Peckinpah shows David incapable of being happy with her as is. In fact, the one and only time that David is entirely loose and playful with Amy comes directly after he’s probed her for information about her past relationship with Charlie and she’s claimed that nothing sexual ever happened between them; a revelation that makes him positively giddy. He never comes close to that state again until the final shot of the movie, and Amy’s nowhere in the frame.

Of course, it’s hard to talk about Straw Dogs without mentioning the rape scene, which cuts between David sitting quietly in a field on a snipe hunt while Charlie assaults Amy. No less a critic than Pauline Kael claimed bluntly that Amy enjoyed being raped, and indeed this is one of the received stories about this movie. Knowles punctures that argument by simply describing what Amy is doing on-screen: looking at the fireplace, the only exit in her line of sight, and then trying to remind her rapist that she is a human being that he nominally cares about, trying to regain some control. But it happens, and it’s ugly and horrible, and her husband David doesn’t even notice that she’s different afterwards. And all that the future holds for them is violence and murder, none of it in service of avenging her honor. And at the very end, she doesn’t even rate a lift into town from David. And that’s just plain cold.

HARRY & WILLA HARPER, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1953)

The clip above is only a snippet, but it captures some of the rotten delusion in Willa Harper’s marriage to Harry Powell. Her prior husband, the father of those adorable/creepy children, killed a couple of men while stealing a bunch of money, and she can’t live with the guilt. Her boss at Spoon’s Ice Cream (the wonderfully named Icey Spoon) is a horrible manipulative wretch of a person who has pushed her into courtship with Powell, a self-styled man of the cloth. There’s a couple of little snags in their marriage. One is that Powell has a thoroughly misogynist view of women, and he will never touch Willa in their union. Well, ok, once, but it’s not for sex. See, the other little problem is that Powell is a serial murderer of widows. When he finally puts his hands on Willa, he’s not so much thinking of le petit mort as the big sleep. Willa’s quivering all right, but for exactly the wrong reason.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, Brian De Palma)

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the prestige projects of the 1990 awards season, few had more potential than The Bonfire of the Vanities. To begin with, it was based on Tom Wolfe’s first fiction book, which had been widely read in serialized form in Rolling Stone before becoming a bestseller upon its publication as a novel. The director was Brian De Palma, who made his reputation with a series of kinky, Hitchcock-inspired thrillers during the seventies before branching out into more mainstream fare such as Scarface, The Untouchables and Casualties of War. With a wildly popular novel and an A-list director, Warner Bros. had visions of Oscars dancing in their heads, and they consequently filled the cast with big names, from recent Oscar nominees Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman to newly anointed action superstar Bruce Willis, and backed them with plenty of first-rate character actors.

Ideally, The Bonfire of the Vanities should have been one of the biggest movie events of 1990. But then, if it had been, I would be writing about it in my Yesterday’s Hits column instead of When Good Directors Go Bad. As it stands, the big-screen adaptation remains one of the most notorious fiascos in Hollywood history, earning back a mere $15 million of its then-extravagant $50 million budget, and receiving mostly savage reviews. As a De Palma fan of long standing- I’m the guy who liked The Black Dahlia, after all- I’d like to say that the film was merely misunderstood, but even I have to admit that it’s a failure.

Part of the problem is the casting of the principal roles, from the top on down. If you were casting the role of an ambitious commodities trader and self-anointed “Master of the Universe”, whose name would come to mind? Michael Douglas? Tom Cruise, perhaps? But after Warner Bros. deemed the character too unsympathetic on the page, they decided to cast Tom Hanks in the role, which is sort of like casting Jimmy Stewart as Gordon Gekko. Also problematic was the casting of Willis. The character of journalist Peter Fallow was written as a dissolute Brit (the role was originally offered to John Cleese), but Willis ended up being cast for marquee value, and gave one of his laziest performances, smirking his way through the role and pissing off most of the people involved with the production with his ego.

Worst of all is Griffith. During the eighties, Griffith’s dumb-blonde persona proved to be surprisingly adaptable to a number of filmmakers’ visions, from the tart-with-a-heart of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild to the streetwise porn star of De Palma’s own Body Double. However, the role of Maria Ruskin was far beyond her limited talent. On the page, Maria may be the trickiest character in the novel, a wily manipulator whose ditzy façade hides a pitch-black heart. But Griffith can only manage the ditzy part, so when the character begins to reveal her shameless nature after Sherman’s life begins to go down the tubes we never believe it. The two halves of her personality- sexy and cunning- never mesh convincingly, so rather than lacing her manipulations with an erotic charge, her dark side makes the sexy stuff creepy, which surely wasn’t what the film was aiming for.

But while the casting issues might have been out of De Palma’s hands, he’s far from blameless. Admittedly, Wolfe’s novel is something of a tough nut to crack, simultaneously a cross-section of New York City life, a morality tale, and a savage takedown of the craven greed and ambition that fueled the eighties. However, it fails on all three counts. Much of its power as a snapshot of the Big Apple’s social strata is lost because its characters are sketchy and one-dimensional, a problem that might have been partially alleviated by spot-on casting, but not entirely. Likewise, the film places its morality tale aspects on the back burner for most of its running time, only to have judge/voice of reason Morgan Freeman bust out an extended monologue about decency in the film’s final five minutes, at which point it comes off as a tacked-on moral rather than a natural outgrowth of the story.

This leaves only the exposé aspect of the story. In nearly 700 pages, Wolfe was able to lay bare the motivations of nearly all of the major players in the story, from Sherman, Maria and Peter, to the lawyers, politicians and community leaders who opportunistically seized upon his case for their own personal gain. Without the time to do this onscreen, De Palma instead focuses on the circus (political and media-driven) that ensues. But while a more assured comic filmmaker might have been able to spin even an abbreviated Bonfire into a bitter little pill (imagine what an Ace in the Hole-era Billy Wilder might have done with this material), De Palma brings almost nothing to the material aside from the liberal use of unflattering wide-angle close-ups to underline the grotesqueness of the characters. Sure, there are a handful of cool camera tricks- especially the nearly five-minute-long opening Steadican shot- but for the most part they don’t really work in the context of the story, and mostly just call attention to themselves. I hate to use a criticism that De Palma’s detractors are wont to levy at him, but in this case, they’re right.

In the end, the biggest failing of The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of tone. The scathing satire of the original novel was replaced by a more hamfisted style that was both broad and shrill. A few of the jabs hit (I love how Andre Gregory’s poet is introduced: “he’s on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. He has AIDS.”), but most of the time they whiff. Scenes like the one where Maria’s cuckold husband (Alan King) suddenly dies in mid-conversation or the famous “crumbs” monologue by Sherman’s wife might have worked on the page, but they flounder and die onscreen, the former because it’s not inherently funny to see a minor character kick the bucket, the latter because Kim Cattrall plays the character as such a high-strung harpy that it’s hard to focus on anything she says.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Ebert was right when he wrote that The Bonfire of the Vanities might be enjoyable to those who are unfamiliar with the book. But I wouldn’t bet on it. De Palma and the studio took a powerful and lacerating story and adapted it in the most pedestrian way possible, and replaced the prickly citizens of Wolfe’s New York City with characters who are both cartoonish and, worse, uninteresting. If anything good came out of my watching Bonfire again, it’s that I’ve been inspired to re-read the book, to immerse myself in Wolfe’s language and marvel at the world he created. By now, it’s become a cliché that people are generally better off reading the book, but in this case that’s the only way to go.

America the Beautiful: 15 Movies That Show What's Right With U.S. (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE RIGHT STUFF (1983)

The title of Tom Wolfe's book refers to the ineffable, super-American quality that Wolfe attributed to the anonymous test pilots who paved the way for the NASA space program -- whose stars, the Apollo astronauts, Wolfe depicted as media puppets by comparison. Phil Kaufman's movie version hangs onto the romantic mythology of the test pilots and treats the astronauts' public packaging as comedy, but it also honors the astronauts as real heroes who, by learning to play the media and sticking together to face down the bureaucrats and the scientists with the Dr. Strangelove accents, proved their mettle and created a new kind of savvy icon for the TV age. Amazingly, this satiric yet stirring popcorn epic wasn't much of a hit in theaters but has since achieved classic status as a home video perennial. It has so many high points that it's practically made for the rewind button.

SOMETHING WILD (1986)

Jonathan Demme's road movie/screwball romance crams every getaway fantasy destination you can think of into one wild weekend: shanghaied from his lunch hour by Lulu, the boho funk priestess (Melanie Griffith) in the thrift shop accouterments and Louise Brooks 'do, Charlie the office drone (Jeff Daniels) stops by the liquor store, gets screwed to within an inch of his life in the roadside motel, meets his new flame's mom, hits the dance floor during the high school reunion, and barely makes it home Monday morning with the small town sociopath (Ray Liotta) in hot pursuit. Demme keeps things fresh with the jumping soundtrack and the crowded supporting cast, which includes fellow directors (among them John Waters, perfectly cast as a used car salesman) and faces from other Demme movies (such as Steve Scales, from Stop Making Sense, as a tourist-shop cashier who offers Daniels the sage advice, "Charlie, attempt to be cool."). They don't just liven up the screen; the way Demme uses them, the many bit players passing through suggest the variety of life that you pass by and rub up against in just a couple of days spent on the American road. The movie seems to be hinting at a hundred other stories that are out there, ready to be told; the camera just happened to latch onto Charlie and Lulu first.

O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? (2000)

Just your typical Depression-era musical comedy based on Homer's Odyssey, O Brother Where Art Thou is often dismissed as one of the Coen Brothers' sillier efforts. Well, sure, it is pretty silly at times, but it's also the Coens' richest, most satisfying serving of pure Americana to date. While Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing and Fargo had drilled into very specific subcultures, regionalisms and genres, O Brother is as expansive as the American South itself – a melting pot of prison flicks, road movies, musicals, social issue pictures and screwball comedies. From the golden-hued landscapes beautifully photographed by Roger Deakins (and later computer-enhanced) to corny-but-right images like a pie cooling on a windowsill to the Ku Klux Klan/Wizard of Oz mash-up that might have been disastrously offensive in the hands of less skilled filmmakers, the movie is a technical marvel. But more than that, it's a love letter to the pure American music forms of folk, country and blues – the Harry Smith Anthology come to life. And in moments as when the casually integrated Soggy Bottom Boys take the stage to a raucous ovation from an audience that literally runs a racist politician out of town on a rail, it's a celebration of community, holding a cracked mirror up to the best aspects of our national character.

DAVE (1993)

Like all nations, the U.S. has its share of assholes, but even our critics generally concede that Americans, by and large, are basically decent people: optimistic, can-do types, generally willing to help out and do the right thing, especially when our leaders quit pandering to our fear and greed and inspire us to roll up our sleeves and achieve worthy goals. Of course, for all the talk of elites, political insiders, change and the American mainstream in the current election, no president, congressman or media pundit is ever really an average citizen, living as they do in a bubble of power and privilege the nation’s true average Joes (and Daves) can only dream about...which is part of what makes Ivan Reitman’s good-natured political comedy so appealing. Released during the honeymoon period of the Clinton administration, when Bubba was still viewed as a charming, sax-playing, fast-food noshing everyman, Dave tells the story of part-time presidential impersonator Dave Kovic (Kevin Kline) who winds up in the Oval Office after the real president (Kline again) suffers a stroke while cheating on his imperious wife (Sigourney Weaver). Oily, Cheney-esque chief-of-staff Bob Alexander (Frank Langella) arranges the charade, intending to use Kovic as a puppet mouthpiece for his own agenda, but the plan goes awry when the impersonator starts acting more presidential than the corrupt president he started off imitating, using his newfound power to actually, y’know, help and support the American people rather than fleecing them like a vast herd of sheep. After outsmarting Alexander, romancing the First Lady and ensuring that a conveniently upstanding deus ex machina of a vice president (Ben Kingsley) will take his place, Kovic leaves the White House behind and returns to his regular life, where he decides to run for his local city council, echoing the film’s underlying message that our government functions best when our best people are in government.

MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939)

He's often cited as America's most patriotic filmmaker, and there's no doubt that to a certain degree, Frank Capra – born in Sicily, and the very image of an immigrant boy made good – deserves the title. But most of his films aren't simply pro-American jingoism: they're patriotic in the truest sense, in that they recognize the flaws of Capra's adopted country and seek to address them, never pretending that this isn't a nation with profound problems, but likewise never succumbing to cynicism and always holding out the hope that even one individual can make a difference. Nowhere is this more evident than in the wonderful Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Although today, the film – buoyed by a tremendously charismatic performance by Jimmy Stewart as the naïve but determined junior senator Jefferson Smith – is considered a classic depiction of grass-roots democracy and the way the little guy can succeed in his struggle against entrenched forces, it wasn't quite so warmly received at the time. Since Capra didn't flinch from portraying Washington as a deeply corrupt place full of crooked politicians and smear merchants, both Democrats and Republicans denounced it as a vicious attack on our noble democracy; some even pegged Capra as a communist agitator determined to stir up trouble. But in the end, the image of Sen. Smith's desperate filibuster has stayed with us as a lasting reminder of Capra's philosophy that one man, no matter how many forces are arrayed against him, can triumph against evil – and what could be more American than that?

Click here for Part One & Part Three

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce