“Mr. Smith” is not only one of the greatest films ever made, but it also shows the love that Mr. Capra had for his adopted country.  For those of you that do not know, Frank Capra was an Italian immigrant.  He came to this country with his family as a young man and somehow ended up in Los Angeles during the early years of the motion picture industry.  He started in silent films as basically a gopher and eventually became one of the top five directors of the Golden Age of Motion Pictures.  Some would even argue today that he is one of the top five directors of all time.

In addition to “Mr. Smith,” Capra is also responsible for some of the great motion pictures of all time.  Among them are “It Happened One Night,” “Meet John Doe,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “You Can’t Take it With You,” and, of course, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”  From 1933 to 1946, Capra was nominated for six Academy Awards for Best Director and won three.  “It Happened One Night” was the first movie to sweep the Oscars in all five major categories.  This did not happen again until “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest” in 1975.  It has only happened once since.

Capra single-handedly kept Columbia Pictures afloat.  He was the first of the star directors and one of the first to have his name about the title.  His movies were not just movies, they were Frank Capra movies.  And, they were basically all the same.  It was the little man taking on the establishment and usually winning.  Many of the current Hollywood stars love Capra and emulate him.  In fact, Adam Sandler has already remade two of Capra’s films, one directly and one indirectly; “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” and “Click” was basically a remake of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

In “Mr. Smith,” Jefferson Smith, as portrayed by Jimmy Stewart, is appointed to the Senate from a small western state as a result of the death of the sitting Senator.  He is appointed with the intent of the political machine in his home state to maintain the status quo and to protect the illicit dealing of those in charge.  He is not supposed to upset the apple cart.

However, the machine in power underestimates Smith.  They see him as a dumb patriotic man who could be manipulated and controlled.  But, his patriotism and his love for the people create just the opposite.  He believes in the “city on the hill,” as did Ronald Reagan.  He believes that good will always triumph and that the evil and greedy will be defeated.

When he uncovers a scam within his state to further enrich the machine at the expense of young boys, he takes the machine on.  The machine fights back with all its force and attempts to destroy Smith.  But, Smith uses the rules of the Senate to his advantage and begins a 24-hour filibuster in an attempt to save himself and destroy the machine.  This last 15 minutes of the movie contains some of the most patriotic speeches ever put on film.  Smith quotes the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bible.  And, each of these quotes and dialogue in between show both Smith (and Capra’s) love for this country and its ideals.  It is without a doubt one of the most powerful 15 minutes in any movie ever made.

Another very poignant point of the film occurs when Smith first arrives in Washington.  Instead of going to his office and being controlled by his handlers, Smith wonders off and begins a tour of historical Washington.  The tour takes him to all of the major sites in the nation’s capital.  This sequence reaches its climax at the Lincoln Memorial where Smith sees a little boy reading the Gettysburg Address out loud to his dad.  During the sequence, Capra cuts to Smith and various other bystanders at the memorial including a black man.  Every line of the Address takes on a new meaning and leads us to an emotional high.  It is film making at its best.

In closing, I recommend that every one watch this movie and many of other Capra films.  You should also look up the series of war films that were made by Capra in response to WWII.  These films, known as the “Why We Fight” series, were made at the request of the War Department to educate the public on the reasons the US entered the conflict.  They too are very patriotic and full of Capra’s love for his country.

I just wonder, why doesn’t Hollywood show it’s love for America anymore?  Why does the product coming out of my industry only show the bad and not the good?  I just cannot answer that question!

TCM recently aired a seven part documentary on the foundation of Hollywood through 1970 that covered about eighty years of film history. This impossible task was a nice change of pace for the network and hopefully will spark a follow up series. However, taking on so much history in such a short amount of time forced the show to grossly oversimplify certain elements and leave other crucial happenings completely out of the picture. Sure, there were more conservatives in Hollywood in 1940 than today, but the political landscape was different (conservatives and liberals joined against Fascism and Socialism, for starters).

Big Hollywood’s John Nolte, who certainly knows a thing or two about classic Hollywood, recently caught up on Moguls and Movie Stars and was not happy. His criticism was that the series dwelled on the idea that the Studio System, complete with a self-censoring office, held back the full potential of the film industry. Nolte makes a great point in telling us that this doesn’t mean that Hollywood’s full potential is necessarily better. The same reason I argued that conservatives love TCM is why so many people prefer classic films over the new garbage spewing from Tinsel Town. Nolte notes that the series constantly reminds us of why the moguls and their politics were in the way, which is far from the truth:

“Most importantly, these were the men who created, oversaw, guided, and managed an industry that earned the affection of the free world for decades through the bringing together of all the arts — performance, design, dance, music, lighting, the written word — into works that still capture our imaginations. Compare that to today’s Hollywood, an industry that’s now a culturally divisive punch line in jokes about sequels, remakes, spoiled celebrities, and self-importance.”

The truth is that Hollywood would be nothing without men like Jack Warner, Walt Disney, Adolf Zukor, Irving Thalberg, David O. Selznick and many, many more like them. Sure, most of these guys were conservative (leftist historians constantly remind us of this but forget these moguls, many who were immigrants, embodied the American Dream), but the truth is what they did worked. Thomas Schatz, author of the excellent study on the Studio Era The Genius of the System, explores how the system wasn’t perfect, “but somehow it worked, and it worked well.” The nature of the Studio System was conflicted, but it was also drastically more collaborative than most of today’s productions.

While I enjoyed Moguls and Movie Stars, as a film historian it was frustrating to see the single network dedicated to classic filmmaking show such ignorance to some of the most important aspects of the system. They didn’t explain why it worked, only that the conservative moguls were tyrants who oppressed actors and filmmakers. On some occasions they did, but it doesn’t come close to the whole picture. Even director Peter Bogdanovich, who was interviewed for the series, explains that another seven hours or more is necessary to get a better picture of Hollywood. While Bogdanovich (who is also a film historian) may approve of the historical slant of the series, I assume he realizes the oversights that were made.

It takes much more than a matter of hours to understand the depth of the Hollywood Studio System. I have been studying film history for many years and am still continually digging into this magnificent and engaging era. Anyone who loves classic movies and is told that the Golden Age was only full of oppression, censorship and blacklisting needs to do further research on their own. It is impossible to picture Martin Scorsese without Raoul Walsh, John Hughes without Frank Capra or the Coen brothers without Billy Wilder. The Golden Age demanded excellence and has earned eternal respect from anyone who takes the time to see the whole picture.

Remember, the Studio System was a success not a travesty. More people will be appreciating classics like Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, and It’s a Wonderful Life than will be watching Avatar, Harry Potter, or even good films like The Social Network in the next year. Why is this? Because the Studio System continuously churned out great pictures by the month instead of by the decade. Films of the Golden Age were driven more by what the public wanted and less by political ideology, the greatness of this era will no doubt trump today’s Hollywood for many years to come.

I also abhor false or frivolous claims of racism. Of course, according to the media, the end of this scourge was supposed to be of the many dividends of making Barack Obama President, but those of us on the right certainly know this has so far turned out to be one of many lies we were told during the 2008 campaign. 

Why mention two concepts with apparently nothing in common except my antipathy for them? The reason is that as I found myself watching the Emmy broadcast (I wasn’t that into the football game and Entourage hadn’t started yet) when it suddenly occurred to me that, based on liberal Hollywood’s definition of racism, I was witnessing an event that was barely one notch above a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan.

This offensive truth first hit me when they showed the crowd via a wide shot from the Los Angeles stage. I hit pause on my DVR and a comprehensive scan of the audience revealed that it resembled a film newsreel from the early 60’s (appropriate, I guess, since Mad Men won best drama) with row after row of skin pigmentation-challenged faces. I literally haven’t seen such a Caucasian dominant crowd in LA since I attended the USC/Texas Rose Bowl a couple of years ago.

But it wasn’t just those in attendance who were lacking this century’s greatest virtue: diversity. The host was white. All of the presenters I saw were white. Those who were nominated were almost all white. And Caucasians completely dominated the winner’s circle. Heck, even the guy who used to play the “White Shadow” won one.

But the overt “racism” didn’t stop there. Tracy Morgan, arguably the most prominent black nominee, plays a character on 30 Rock that is easily among the most dangerously stereotyped black roles in modern television (I guess since the show’s two real stars, Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin, are hardcore liberals, this is not relevant). If that wasn’t enough, the black person who got by far the most attention during the telecast was Kayne West, and that was because he was being made fun of all night.

And yet despite the Nokia Theater being transformed into the liberal caricature of the Republican Convention (except with Tina Fey being honored instead of Sarah Palin), absolutely NOTHING has been said about this obvious and, based on what we have constantly been taught, horrifying development.  I have Googled all sorts of combinations of the words “racism, black, white, and EMMY awards” and not even one mention of Al Sharpton or Jessie Jackson comes up.

At first glance this all may seem to be cause for celebration. Perhaps we really have turned a racial corner in this country and inequality of outcome is no longer seen as automatic proof of inequality of opportunity. Maybe it is even now okay for whites like me to beam in pride at my race’s ability to finally kick ass again in something “important” now that we have ceded even golf to the Cablinasians.

But I actually think there is something very seriously wrong going on here. What was showcased last night was less Hollywood’s “good old boy” network at work, and more the ramifications of over a decade now of massive fragmentation within the television media.

In the Golden Age of television (the 70’s and 80’s) there were only four or five channels and the networks were forced to broadcast. Now there are hundreds of channels and television has become all about narrowcasting to an economically preferred demographic (which, for the major networks, is apparently mostly made up of white people). So instead of Good Times, Sanford and Son, or The Jeffersons airing on major networks with big budgets and automatic mainstream audiences, the fragmentation has created a self-segregation phenomenon that is only surpassed by the dramatic racial disparity in religious worship. There is still plenty of “black” television programming; it is now just on channels that mostly only other black people watch.

To me this is a sad and dangerous development.  Television used to be the ultimate uniter and now has become the definitive divider of our culture. The major networks used to create a de facto “team photo” of our nation which (after a slow start) eventually included everyone in the picture. Now, each race, gender, and age group has their own “team” and tends to watch programming that is built to only appeal to them. In short, we end up living in very different realities with almost nothing in common (this same ominous trend can of course be seen in news coverage with the advent of cable news networks with obvious political leanings).

While this modern reality has its advantages (HBO’s non-Bill Maher original programming and The Golf Channel immediately come to mind), there seems to be little doubt that it is a net loss to the strength of the fabric of our country.  What is most surprising however is that no one seems to be noticing it, even when the evidence is as black and white as it was Emmy night.

[ed. note: In a scheduling reshuffle this piece accidentally published for a few minutes last week.]

The film had a rather surprisingly strong opening weekend at the U.S. box office, finishing on top of the heap with a take of $34.1 million in North American ticket sales.

It’s the first film starring Sandra Bullock in a decade to reach number one. Men accounted for a healthy 37 percent of the audience, according to Reuters. The film’s trailers and commercials strongly established the film as a by-the-books romantic comedy centered on a distinctly meager and unoriginal comic premise: female executive fakes engagement to her assistant in order to escape deportation (she’s from Canada). When she takes him to meet her family, hilarity ensues.

Obviously that’s recycled from Green Card and numerous recent romcoms such as Meet the Parents, but the routine nature of the film’s concept may actually be a very good sign. In Hollywood’s Golden Age of the 1930s and ’40s, plots were routinely recycled and varied in amazingly minute ways, yet the wit of the writing, the appeal of the performers, and the understated competence of the direction made the resulting films quite appealing and still enjoyable today.

The Proposal is a clear throwback to that approach, though in a more vulgar contemporary cultural context. Unfortunately, the latter works greatly against the film, though first-weekend audiences wouldn’t have known that, as the trailers and commercials for the film presented it as a charmer. But in the actual film, Bullock’s character is decidedly unlikeable, and only Bullock’s inherent sweetness rescues the character from being a horror.

Bullock’s appeal has always been far from glamor or sensuality; instead she has typically projected in her performances a sense of kindness, intelligence, and fundamental decency. In addition, costar Ryan Reynolds fits well in this film as a clean-cut romantic lead for the likable Bullock. Reynolds’ evident personal charisma keeps his character from appearing to be an awful wimp in the early sequences.
Thus it seems evident that the producers realized that mean-spiritedness would not be a good selling point for the movie, and they took steps to mitigate it in the casting and public relations. Hence it’s interesting that The Proposal and the brilliant, positive Pixar film Up finished first and third while the very successful raunchy comedy The Hangover and the newly released raunchy comedy Year One finished second and fourth.

If the initial success of The Proposal holds up for a solid theatrical run–it won’t be number one this weekend with the release of the second Transformers film, but can still do well if Bullock and Reynolds have sufficiently overcome the meanness and cliches of the screenplay and thus audience word of mouth is positive–perhaps it can help establish a trend toward greater charm, wit, and decency in romantic comedies.

More of that in Hollywood’s output would be quite welcome.