Word: capra
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...desperate to reunite with his wife Gracie Allen, who preceded him to heaven way back when and is now a Level Six angel. The only way Burns can make Level Six himself is by returning to Earth, coming to a mortal's aid and thereby earning his wings. Frank Capra is not coming back to direct. Nor is Marshall Herff Applewhite...
...grinning over the budget deal, it's almost as if there were suddenly a functioning democracy in Washington. Of course, there's still Jesse Helms. Confused? Get to the guts of the Beltway, Hollywood-style. Follow Jimmy Stewart to town with 1939's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Frank Capra's valiant paen to all that's great about this country of ours. Back that up with Born Yesterday, the 1950 Holden/Holliday original, and you'll be running for city councilman by the time the tape's rewound. So be sure to wash it all down with a movie...
Which Jimmy Stewart do you mean? The hometown boy of romantic comedy, goshing and gollying his way into Margaret Sullavan's heart in The Shop Around the Corner? Or the tortured Capra hero whose trust in American values was tested past all endurance, till he tumbled close to madness? Or the pixilated Elwood P. Dowd of Harvey, his best friend an invisible rabbit? Or the vengeful loner of the Anthony Mann westerns of the '50s--taut epics like Bend of the River and The Man from Laramie--in which Stewart often played a bitter Moses leading settlers...
From then on, the sanctified edginess in Stewart's movie parts took on the tinge of bitterness, despair. His typical character--the complicated man with a questionable past--was pretty much in a bad mood for the whole '50s. The Capra hero played by Stewart had been a figure of wild gestures; the Hitchcock hero was a man in moral traction, drawn to look at evil and wonder at its awful seductions. This was daring stuff. It took a bold man to twist and extend his star quality from sunny Jim into the darker shades of his mature roles...
...there were other sides to the Stewart performances. He is most often thought of as the sentimental avatar of "Capracorn," though he made only three pictures with Frank Capra. He made only four films with Hitchcock. But he made eight with Anthony Mann, more than with any other director, and five of those were westerns with a cynical edge that anticipated the "dark" westerns of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. These appeared in the 1950s, when American innocence was challenged and betrayed by a worldwide conspiracy, by a treason of the knowing and elite, when even Stewart had to show...