Word: capra
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...when classic Deco pieces were mostly to be found at the Goodwill, actually evokes aspects of the previous three decades. Most especially you should not be musing about why a movie that wants to be a funny social commentary -- the press kit hopefully evokes the names of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges -- is shot in the impersonal expressionist manner that was literally foreign to these American masters, a style that was favored by glum and self-important German directors like Fritz Lang...
This choice is particularly odd since the film is about the kind of naif Capra adored and Sturges affectionately satirized. His name is Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) and he's plucked out of the mailroom and made president of Hudsucker Industries when its founder (Charles Durning) commits spectacular suicide. You can imagine either Jimmy Stewart or Eddie Bracken in the part, but Robbins has a tricky modernist charm all his own. And you can just as easily imagine Edward Arnold as the evil genius of the board of directors, Sidney J. Mussburger, although Paul Newman brings a sprightly spite...
...colleagues can pick up shares in a basically sound company on the cheap. The tough newspaper gal (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who's supposed to expose the fraud and falls for Norville is distinctly Capraesque too. There's even angelic intervention and a touch of time warping, devices Capra employed in It's a Wonderful Life...
...original movie is really special to you, the filmmaker, don't make it over. A sequel is essentially a commercial venture, designed to extend a product's shelf life. Not wanting to taint the memory of their most personal films, Steven Spielberg left E.T. alone, and Frank Capra refrained from making Son of a Wonderful Life. But Wim Wenders felt no such scruples about redoing Wings of Desire, the 1987 philosophic fantasy that is his masterpiece. This try-everything director correctly saw Wings as an open-ended excuse for considering the changing state of his native Germany. So here, with...
...wife. It acknowledges their marital troubles. It describes Lincoln as lazy, lacking in ambition, needing prodding to seek office. It depicts him as ideologically cautious and passive, resistant to reform, hesitant even to take up the abolitionist cause against slavery. Sherwood was echoing the populist message of Frank Capra's contemporaneous films, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: the only hero to trust is one who doesn't want the job. But Sherwood was also humanizing an outsize figure, pointing out that nobility does not require perfection and that anyone can grow better...