Readers of these notes from a warm Island know that I have sworn off partisan politics and acceded to the requests that I stick with things show business related. That said, the election of 2020 is all but upon us and Washington and Hollywood are hardly mutually exclusive. No one seems to know exactly who it was that coined the phrase “Washington is show business for ugly people,” but that does not keep it from resonating.
From D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation to Oliver
Stone’s JFK and beyond, film makers have plowed this rich field of
Presidents, congresswomen and men, anarchists, and advocates. To attempt to
list them all would make more of a book than a blog, for almost everything is
political, whether it is what I was trying to say about and for women in Cagney
& Lacey or what Amy Sherman-Palladino has done so brilliantly in The
Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, or what was so proudly put forth (justifiably) by Netflix
with Unorthodox.
Sometimes the political, coupled with film, produces real
social change; sometimes there are unintended consequences. In the 1930s, the
American communist party was overjoyed with the newsreel coverage of thugs and
national guardsmen coming together to beat (and even kill) American workers seeking
a living wage by striking against the Midwest plants where they had been
employed. The filmed footage of this carnage… and of workers attempting to
unite against “the bosses” and the unbridled power of their capitalistic
governors was, from the radical left’s point of view, sure-fire material. They
could not wait to send the reels off to Moscow.
There, in the USSR, with a silver screen in front of them
and the projector’s flickering light behind, the Russian audience saw what was
“really going on in America.” This, it seemed, was perfect political
propaganda… American newsmen filming American soldiers firing on American
workers who were doing no more than demanding their rights. It was simply
perfect, until someone from that impoverished, ragged audience yelled out,
“Look, they’re wearing shoes!”
The audience erupted, and propaganda took a back seat to
spontaneous outburst. “Life is (indeed) something that happens while you are
busy making plans.”
Producer Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong was well
planned, with the very primitive, giant dark ape, lusting after the blonde
starlet and ultimately going on a destructive rampage before being shot down
atop the Empire State Building.
Is King Kong political? Cooper knew what he was up to
and it is no accident that Kong’s facial features were emphasized for anyone in
the audience who might otherwise fail to notice the producer’s racist message. Ironically,
the audience focused on something else. Released in 1933, at the height of the
depression, American audiences found the giant ape to be a sympathetic
character. It seems they identified with Kong who had been so cruelly used by
the men who had hunted him, captured him, and brought him to their shores.
Turns out, in the 1930s, Kong’s exploitation was something with which Americans
could empathize.
Some movies become political well after their time in the marketplace:
Gone with the Wind unhappily finds itself at the top of that list.
Easily one of the best films ever made… and certainly one of the most
successful in cinema history…you would have a tough time screening it today
without a major pre-amble. Even then I have a pretty clear picture of the
hooting that would come from today’s audience as Margaret Mitchell’s intro is
heard as voice over, illuminating the meaning of her title: “There was a
land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South…Here in this pretty
world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of
Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave… look for it only in books,
for it is not more than a dream remembered. A civilization Gone with the Wind.”
The masterly Aaron Sorkin does some remembering of his own
with his latest screenplay, which he also directs. I broke away from
Netflix and the streaming of Sorkin’s brilliant television series The West
Wing (where I am currently in season five at something like the 100th
episode of the seven season-long series that debuted on NBC 20 years ago). I did
not have to break away very far. Netflix is also presenting Sorkin’s
brilliantly executed Trial of the Chicago 7. There are no unintended
consequences here. Sorkin set out (as he almost always does) to do great work
and (once again) he succeeded.
The cast is sensational: Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman,
Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden, Joseph Gordon Levitt as Richard Schultz, Yahya
Abdul-Mateen II as Bobby Seale, Jeremy Strong as Jerry Rubin, Mark Rylance as
William Kunstler, Frank Langella as Judge Julius Hoffman, Michael Keaton as
Ramsey Clark, Alex Sharp as Rennie Davis, John Carroll Lynch as David
Dellinger, Ben Shenkman as Leonard Weinglass and John Doman as John Mitchell.
There are, of course, many more actors as well as others to be credited. I have
listed only those I felt compelled to acknowledge. Dorman’s lone scene at the
very beginning of the film is so compelling…so well acted, written, and
directed that I instantly relaxed (knowing I was in the hands of true professionals).
My sense of envy was palatable as I imagined what my fate might have been had I
been lucky enough to have found Aaron Sorkin 40 years ago and convinced him to
be my television partner for life.
See this glorious historical and very political re-creation
and, if you are anywhere close to my age, reflect on where you were and what
you were thinking while this was all going on in the streets and the courts of
Chicago in the 1960s. One more shout out: I almost wrote that Mark Rylance is a
“national treasure,” but then remembered he is English, so fuhgeddaboudit. That
tiny country has enough of those.
Stay with Netflix for one more limited series in The
Queen’s Gambit. It has a touch of politics and a whole lot of genius,
mostly in the leading role, played by Anya Taylor-Joy. She is mesmerizing and
the directoral visualizations of both the real and imagined game of chess
deserves a shout out as well. It is seven episodes long. You should see each
one of them.
As politics dominates our television screens on an hourly
basis… you just might be feeling a little nostalgia for how we got here and the
way we all once were. Here, off the top of my head and in no particular order,
is a partial list of must-see movies with obvious political themes (in every case,
the title referenced is to the original… not the re-make):
All the King’s Men, JFK, Seven Days in May, The
Manchurian Candidate, All the President’s Men, Nixon, The Candidate, Primary
Colors, The American President, Bulworth, Wag The Dog, Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington, Citizen Kane, It’s a Wonderful Life, Grapes of Wrath, Meet John
Doe, Bob Roberts, Inherit The Wind, Coming Home, Being There, Reds, Spielberg’s
Lincoln, Dr. Strangelove, The Way We Were, Face in the Crowd, The President’s
Analyst, Frost/Nixon, State of the Union, the aforementioned television
series The West Wing as well as other TV series, including: Berlin
Babylon, The Good Wife, Scandal, Brain Dead, Veep, Newsroom.
Along with others, the above films feature such luminaries
as Burt Lancaster, Angela Lansbury, Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, John
Travolta, Michael Douglas, Annette Benning, Warren Beatty, Robert DeNiro, Jimmy
Stewart, Orson Welles, Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper, Jean Arthur, Julianna
Margulies Barbara Stanwyck, Jane Fonda, Jon Voight, Barbra Streisand, Kerry
Washington, Spencer Tracey, Katharine Hepburn… this is more than Washington for
pretty people, this is America, the beautiful.
Barney Rosenzweig
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