Word: capra
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...course, the movies started driving toward all this long before the Clintons came along. In Frank Capra's 1948 State of the Union, Spencer Tracy plays a straight-talking businessman having an affair with Angela Lansbury. A newspaper magnate and political kingmaker, Lansbury decides to push Tracy into a presidential run. That means getting his estranged wife, played by Katharine Hepburn, to agree to act the contented spouse on the campaign trail...
...bouquet money says that State of the Union (1948) is just the thing to warm the voters' cockles on this schizophrenic weekend. No one does a Washington fable better than Capra, and no one flings woo like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Tracy plays a self-made man who, when lured into an idealistic run for the presidency, makes a stop at the vipers' nest. Along the way, he tracks down his soul, ditches chippie Angela Lansbury and falls back in love with wife Kate, who shimmers here with inside-and-out loveliness. Yes, this one outwags...
...quirk in this year's calendar brings to mind the question: Can presidents and valentines truly share a weekend? (Don't answer that, Mr. Clinton.) If anyone can bring the be-mine spirit to the Beltway, it's Frank Capra...
...movie, however, such considerations are merely hurdles on the way to the sight of bugs eating people. Some half-hearted references are made to the setup of this quasi-socialist republic, and there are several clips of propaganda-type films, which seem to be poking fun at Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" series of publicity movies for World War II. More than anything, the film seems confused at these points, as if going through the motions of something it would rather not bother with. The political concerns are therefore glossed over with alacrity and a minimum of depth...
...finds its model in the communal comedies of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges: films like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Hail the Conquering Hero, in which a mild-mannered, small-town fellow is unfairly ostracized or lionized, and in which the prejudices of the vox pop are silenced in the last reel. Here it's a graduation-day ceremony that angrifies into a town meeting and then into a coming-out party. Everyone is happy, everyone...