Best Classic Films of American Politics

With the inauguration of our 44th president, I got to thinking about some of my favorite classic films that focus on politics, politicians, and on both the cynical and naive in the American dream. Take a look and see if you agree that these are some of the best.

1. ADVISE AND CONSENT (1962) A very timely tale of a political nominee with a secret, based on Allen Drury's best-selling novel. The dark wheeling and dealing that takes place in Washington's smoke-filled rooms is sadly reminiscent of the most cynical side of American politics. An amazing cast that includes Charles Laughton, Henry Fonda, Walter Pidgeon, Lew Ayres (as the nice-guy Vice President nobody talks to), Burgess Meredith, Gene Tierney, Frnachot Tone, Paul Ford, Peter Lawford, and Will Geer.

2. BORN YESTERDAY (1950) The blonde mistress of a junk king who has come to Washington to buy himself a few congressmen, gets a civics lesson from an idealistic reporter. The Pygmalian story re-told with red, white, and blue thrown in. Judy Holliday won an Oscar for her role as Billie Dawn the show girl who learns from William Holden that the peoples' government is not up for sale.

3. THE GREAT MAN VOTES (1938) Thanks to some political gerrymandering, an alcoholic professor ends up holding the one deciding vote in an important election. Will he sell himself to the highest bidder? I learned of this film from NBC's Chris Matthews and have loved it ever since. John Barrymore in one of his last films, still great, even at sunset.

4. THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962) An idealistic lawyer on the frontier goes to Washington as a Senator on the strength of a legend that he rid the town of Shinbone of its cruel bully. But did he? Another sly offering from that old Irish magician John Ford with Jimmy Stewart as the lawyer and (who else but?) John Wayne as the angel Stewart needs to fufill his destiny. "When truth becomes legend, print the legend."

5. SEVEN DAYS IN MAY (1964) All the paranoia of the Cold War era wrapped into a taut film. Are there communists under every bed or are the right wing militarists one step ahead of them and planning a coup? A far-fetched tale but an interesting look at its time, with a cast that includes the great Frederic March, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmund O'Brien and John Houseman.

6. THE GREAT McGINTY (1940) Writer/director Preston Sturges' first big hit. The tale of a down-and-out hobo who parlays some crooked votes into a political career. As the director described it: "This is the story of two men ... One of them never did anything dishonest in his life except for one crazy minute. The other never did anything honest in his life except for one crazy minute. They both had to leave the country." Brian Donlevy is the star but Sturges provides the great plot and dialogue.

7. YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (1942) The story of patriotic vaudevillian George M. Cohan. Only the flag-waving music is political, but its worth the show to see tough-guy James Cagney dancing. At the end, he dances down the steps of the FDR White House. Very good show and an Oscar for Cagney.

8. JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG (1961) An out-of-office American jurist is tapped for the job nobody wants: heading a panel hearing the case of Nazi judges who corrupted the law to suit Hitler. Maximillian Schell (who fled the Nazis) won an Oscar as the German defense lawyer, Spencer Tracy plays the idealistic judge. Everybody is in this including Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Werner Klemprer, and (here's a surprise for you young folks) William Shatner (pre Star Trek) as a handsome American officer.

9. THE FARMER'S DAUGHTER (1947) Its corny, but Loretta Young won an Oscar for her role as the Cinderella who takes on the corrupt political machine and wins a seat in Congress and a congressman in the process. A good look a stereotypes, in a year when we hope to have moved beyond them. Joseph Cotton, Ethel Barrymore, and Charles Bickford make it all irresistible.

10. MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939) I had to include this, though I think it is over-cited on lists like my own. In real life, the evil Claude Rains character would not have had that epiphany nor saved us all from lengthy prosecution by conviently bumping himself off, but, oh well. This is Frank Capra's Washington and we have to love it. Jimmy Stewart should have won his Oscar for this role, but it was the year of GONE WITH THE WIND, THE WIZARD OF OZ, and STAGECOACH, among other great offerings, so he won it the next year for the PHILADELPHIA STORY, not nearly so great a part (and that year the Oscar should have gone to Henry Fonda for THE GRAPES OF WRATH.)

Oh, and one I remembered as I was driving around this afternoon:

11. THE TALL TARGET (1951) As Abraham Lincoln takes the train to his inauguration in Washington, a discredited police officer and a black servant girl thrwart a plot to assassinate him. Ruby Dee stars as the servant, and when I interviewed her one year at the Zora Neale Hurston Festival in Etonville, Florida she was surprised I knew of the film and said she remembered it with great affection. Also starring Dick Powell, Adolphe Menjou, and Will Geer.

Enjoy!
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Obituary for Old Mr. Con

Old Mr. Con died this morning. He was one the first men to make a million dollars developing real estate in Florida after World War II. Everybody had a story about him: one man told me about a guy who hauled dirt for Mr. Con for thirty years. The man was poor and had just one truck and each week, so the story goes, Mr. Con would dispute Mr. Dirt’s bill. If it was $200, Mr. Con would offer him $150, and if it was $100, Mr. Con would offer him $75. Finally, Mr. Dirt started padding his bill by about twenty-five percent so that when Mr. Con got him to knock it back down, Mr. Dirt could collect the actual amount of money that was due.


(At right: Old Mr. Con at the Reagan White House. You could go there if you gave enough money to the Republican party. Old Mr. Con always gave to both parties, so he would always have a friend in high places.)


Most people laughed when they told a story like this because Mr. Con was so charming that even when he was conning you it was hard to dislike him. To regional business people, Mr. Con gradually became—to borrow a phrase from Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s—a real character from characterville. Eccentric and funny, ethically-challenged and extremely cunning, he told anyone who would listen that God talked to him each night and was responsible for helping to make him rich. This was Mr. Con’s most inspired assertion: first of all, He is the best reference a man can give, and, even better than that, He is the only reference for which the failure to verify can be seen as a triumph for the referring party. What? You couldn’t contact Him? Too bad sonny, I’ll speak to Him about it tonight.

In 2006, when he was 85, Mr. Con asked me to work with him on his biography. After doing some research on his life I pondered this proposal. How would we handle, for example, the conflicts he had with local governments over the chronic sewer backups in some his developments? Would he let me be honest about his federal indictment for allegedly breaking into his own safe deposit box—which had been seized and sealed by the IRS—and trying to scoot with at least $800,000 in disputed assets he’d stashed there? After much thought, I convinced Mr. Con to call the project “memoirs” instead of “biography.” I figured the memories this man had might be of interest to history, even if they were not always literally true.

Unlike many elderly people who are up at dawn, Mr. Con liked a late start. He explained this by saying that since God spoke to him each night in his dreams, “I have to wake up and write down what He says before I can go back to sleep again. So He keeps me up late.” In fact, Mr. Con ran late all day, often keeping local dignitaries cooling their heels in his outer office for hours. During those long waits, guests could while away the time reviewing the cheerful words on Mr. Con’s business cards, including a long list of exhortations like; “Keep your mind free from worry. Keep your heart free from hate. Think of others. Scatter sunshine. Give much.” If you took all this advice, you could become one of Mr. Con’s most affable victims, popping his Keys to Happiness into the pocket on one side of your pants while he took your wallet out of the other. The cards also carried this admonition in capitol letters: “EXPECT A MIRACLE!” Always good advice for anyone arriving on time to a meeting with Mr. Con.

Each day at his mansion, Mr. Con had the unusual—for a heart patient, certainly—breakfast of Lorna Doone Shortbread Cookies and a quart of chocolate milk. Then it was time to dress; and old Mr. Con had an extensive wardrobe from which to choose. He bought his trademark searsucker blazers by the dozen (on sale) and always had more than 300 pairs of shoes. Once dressed, he climbed into one of his seven luxury cars and headed to his office.

He was a notoriously bad driver and had two nearly fatal accidents in the last two years of his life. “I think I fell asleep at the wheel that second time,” he told me, “and my car just slid right under the back of that truck!” The accidents did not, however, keep him off the road. It might have helped his driving if he had worn eyeglasses. But he claimed to have learned a set of mysterious eye exercises once on a trip to Asia that enabled him to maintain his “perfect” eyesight on into his ninth decade. This was another unverifiable claim. He did have a huge magnifying glass the size of a fish tank in his office, but even with that his secretary read all of his mail to him aloud. Whenever I finished a draft of a new chapter on his “memoirs,” he would join me in his conference room to review the work—always an hour or two late—and would lean back in his chair and say: “Now just read that to me honey, I’m feelin’ a little tired.” Then I would remove his hand from my knee and begin to read to him.

He employed hundreds of people in his businesses over the years and was proud that he never paid any one of them health or retirement benefits. “One young fella came to me one time and kept asking me about my company’s benefits,” he said in an oft repeated story. “After a while I told him to jump in the car with me and we drove down here and turned left and then right, and finally he wondered where we were? I said to him, ‘Son, we’re in the cemetery. See those headstones? Those are my company’s benefits. You work until you die.’” Ha, ha, ha.

His pension-less plan for his employees seemed to stem from something close to a phobia he had about losing his fortune. Born in 1921 into poverty he spent most of his young life able to afford just one pair of shoes. His apparent fear that those days might come again—I’m being generous here—would so overwhelm his reason that he would not infrequently refuse to pay his bills, even for those whose services he valued, such as his lawyers, his doctors, and, eventually, for me. Rather than try to negotiate these invoices, as he had with Mr. Dirt, he’d just throw the bills away and say he’d lost them. If a person was willing to crawl back and work for him after he’d been stiffed by Mr. Con, the old guy knew he had himself a willing victim.

I was aware of this quirk and wrote into our agreement a provision that would void our deal if he failed to pay an invoice within ten days. For almost a year he paid me on time. Then, about a year and a half ago, he told me he was going on vacation. I gave him an invoice for the previous week and went on to other projects. After ten days, I had not received a check and called his office. His secretary, a very nice lady who, fortunately for her, was already receiving Social Security and Medicare and thus did not suffer from the lack of health and welfare benefits at the Con Company, told me with some embarrassment that she was “trying to convince him to pay” me. A week later I called again and still no check. I endured this tango for eight weeks and then wrote a letter resigning from the project. A week later he sent me my check and a note saying he was looking forward to “finishing the book.”
I did not go back.


I knew that life itself was ultimately con-proof and that one day soon, especially if he kept knocking back those Lorna Doones and chocolate milk, the cemetery would claim him as it would claim us all. He would follow his own guidelines and work until he died. But then—and I can say with absolute impunity since I’ve been talking a lot with God lately and He has been giving me some very special details of His plans—I understand He will have a number of things to say to old Mr. Con when He sees him. Before He sends him on to his final destination.
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