Word: capra
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Imagine Clark Gable anchoring one of Frank Capra's psychodrama parables of Americana and you get a hint of Jeff Bridges' performance in Tucker: The Man and His Dream. The roguish, can-do smile looks welded on. No boardroom backstabbing, no political malfeasance can wipe that salesman's grin off his face. It is the smile of a cockeyed optimist whose tragic flaw is that he refuses to believe anything can go wrong. And it is attached to a mind racing with ideas and a mouth that motors even faster. Bridges' Preston Tucker is a man in perpetual motion -- gesticulating...
...simple as a Frank Capra script. Dukakis has followed the movie star theory of politics, so effective for President Reagan. Voters love a star and the Democrats are giving them one of America's most beloved actors...
...were growing up, if any of us were going to do something naughty, Tony would go home," recalls Lawyer John Hamlyn, a childhood friend who now lives four doors away. Indeed, the beardless and bespectacled Kennedy has a life story that sounds as if it were directed by Frank Capra. Married in 1963 to Mary Davis, an elementary schoolteacher with whom he has three children, Kennedy has stuck to his roots. He was born and raised in Sacramento, and he lives in the same white colonial house on a curving, tree-shaded street that his lawyer father built half...
Henry Grunwald's career reads like the script of a Frank Capra movie. At 15, he fled his native Vienna after the Anschluss swept Austria into Hitler's Reich. He honed his English in movie theaters while attending New York University and started at TIME as a copyboy. Now at retirement age, he is stepping down as editor-in-chief of Time Inc., only the third person in 64 years to hold this position...
None of these people are larger-than-life Jimmy Stewarts in a Frank Capra piece; rather, they are obscure citizens who felt slighted on their home patch and sought redress. As subjects, they are what crusty journalists of another age called the "little people." Forty years ago, Joseph Mitchell, the New Yorker writer, bridled at this condescension: "They are as big as you are, whoever you are." With that in mind, herewith the cases of the guitarist, Carew-Reid; the student, Cat Nguyen; and the entrepreneur, Edward Lawson...