Word: capra
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...interim shows sound tired (a two-part Rescue from Gilligan's Island), they may fare better than the lameduck series that they will preempt. Among them are such rock-bottom offerings as Sword of Justice (Sept. 10, 8 p.m. E.D.T.), a contemporary rehash of Zorro, and The Eddie Capra Mysteries (Sept. 8, 9 p.m.), yet another rip-off of Perry Mason. Though Grandpa Goes to Washington (Sept. 7, 9 p.m.) has Jack Albertson playing a U.S. Senator, it seems as old-hat as The Farmer's Daughter. NBC's principal new sitcom, The Waverly Wonders (Sept...
...year's Car Wash, has a loose, uninsistent style that gives the picture the quality of a yarn being retold on someone's back porch. The film will put many in mind of Rocky, but its real antecedents are in the '30s, when directors like Frank Capra were giving us inspiring little slices of life about ordinary people accomplishing extraordi- nary things when their own determination was sustained by good friends and tolerant family. There is not a more likable movie currently on view than Greased Lightning...
Inflation overtakes everything, even movie plots. Back in 1936, when Frank Capra made Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, an inheritance of $20 million was sufficient to surpass the ordinary man's dreams of wealth. Today, it seems, nothing less than $1 billion will do. In Mr. Billion that is the value of the conglomerate a San Francisco financier bequeaths to an obscure nephew in Italy (Terence Hill). The hitch is that the nephew, a garage mechanic who idolizes John Wayne and Steve McQueen, must reach San Francisco within 20 days to sign for his legacy...
...Hill installs as his new board of directors all the little people who helped him beat his deadline - a widow, a kindly barfly, a dispossessed rancher, a cable-car conductor, and so on. The Frank Capra of Mr. Deeds would have used this simplistic notion to say something stirring, if sentimental, about social inequities and financial gouging. Here the situation is squandered for a few strained jokes. The viewer is left with the uncharitable suspicion that the conglomerate - and the film - would have been better off in the hands of experts with less good intentions...
Here are some others we liked: It's a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946); Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964); Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933); The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972); Mean Streets (Martin Scorcese, 1974); Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955); The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz, 1935; The Man on the Flying Trapeze (Charles Bogel, 1935); Swing Time (George Stevens, 1937); Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1935; and the Road to Utopia (you've got us, with Hope and Crosby...