Word: capra
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...Department had called on director Frank Capra to amass a film unit, mainly for documentaries that would instruct soldiers and citizens on the government's enemies, aims and ideals. (From this unit came the "Why We Fight" series and many other powerful non-fiction films.) Geisel, who had sold bug spray and motor oil through humor, and honed his satirical skills on the isolationists for PM, was the prefect recruit for this task. At the end of the war this son of German-Americans wrote a training film called "Your Job in Germany," which said that the German people would...
...crockery and punched-out supporting players. All the ingenuity goes into justifying sociopathic behavior--for example, how can Sandler beat the pacifism out of a Buddhist monk and keep the audience's sympathy? It's classically infantile comedy, ending in a payoff so corny it would have made Frank Capra wince. (This time Sandler has all of Yankee Stadium as his theater of catharsis, with Rudy Giuliani cheering...
That night I did not want to see one of Capra's heavily political films (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or Meet John Doe, for example), all chicken fat and diatribe, in which endearing little people go up against incipient corporate fascism. I wanted the pure, innocent allegory of It Happened One Night, which won five Oscars...
...Most of the story takes place aboard a bus making its slow way up from Miami toward New York City, with Gable acting as Colbert's chaste protector--honorable knight disguised as roadwise cynic--as she tries to elude her father's detectives. The bus is the real Frank Capra America, a gallant little vessel pushing through sparsely settled American countryside, the passengers, ensemble, singing The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, checking into roadside motor cabins when a bridge washes out and waiting in line next morning for the outdoor showers...
...accepts a bribe of $100,000 to go away. King's narcissistic autogyro is a sort of 1930s version of the Osprey, or of those personal motor-scooters-of-the-air that the writer James Fallows envisioned, pre-9/11, as universal transport in a coming yuppie paradise. In Capra the real Americans take their chances with one another traveling overland. (Contemplating the current plan to use $15 billion of taxpayers' money to bail out the aviation industry, one thinks that Capra, long ago, had his heart in the right place...