Don't Make a Scene: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

The Story: There are probably 25 scenes I could use from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but for this July 4th week-end, I'll use the least likely one, the one with the fewest words—a diversion from the story—a montage, in fact, created in the studio, lasting about two minutes, and, at its densest, comprising three images fading in and out of each other. Director Frank Capra didn't even create this, although I'm sure he had a hand in shooting the location footage, and supervising the edit.

The name of the man who put this montage together is not a household name, demonstrably so, because you'd remember a name like Slavko Vorkapić. He's obviously, like Frank Capra himself, an immigrant to the United States, both finding prominent livelihoods in "the pictures." No wonder there's such feeling in this sequence—they're both thankful, grateful.

It begins on a tour-bus (the music starts with a rousing version of "Yankee Doodle went to town...") with Smith rubber-necking the D.C. buildings, The Supreme Court, the White House, the Capitol—the three branches of government—to the statues of "the framers" in the rotunda.

At that point, the sequence becomes something more than a guided tour. It is a phantasmagorical combination of iconography, historical recreation, and a background of a ringing Liberty Bell and a wind-blown American flag.

The missing element from this presentation here is the music, a melding of American folk music and standards*** that reaches its emotional peak with a keening violin when Smith turns to look back at Lincoln in his shrine. His shrine. One could feel uncomfortable with this sequence with its emphasis on cold marble—one could say it displays "an edifice complex"—but one must remember the year this was made, 1938, pre-World War II, Nazism was on the march, and Leni Riefenstahl was its chief propagandist, and this sequence borrows from her play-book.

But it ends up with words—and a general acknowledgment of sacrifice—before Smith ends up at the temple-like Lincoln Memorial—there are shots of the Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers, and the sequence ends with a cross-generational reading of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, one of the humblest of acknowledgments of sacrifice. Again, words...that define a spirit, a cause...chiseled into that cold marble lest it fade from memory, but also spoken aloud and re-affirmed by a child to whom that legacy is being handed down.

"Capra-corn" is what the director inventively called the sentimentality in his pictures, but that didn't stop him from filling them with heart and feeling, anyway. And this sequence will be called back during the course of the film, even at its darkest moments.

Now, for the cynical side. That inserted shot of the old black man's face when the little boy says "Freedom?" It lasts just as long for the boy to say that—that way if any theaters in the South objected, they could just clip those 12 frames out...you could say "with extreme prejudice." And I know I'll break a couple hearts saying that James Stewart was the second man to be offered the role of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (the first was Universal contract star Rock Hudson). Stewart said "no" to the part, saying that the script was "too liberal," and that the film would be too controversial. Stewart was a rock-solid conservative—he just didn't make a big stink about it. The part went to the third choice—Gregory Peck—who considered the role "a great gift."

And some thoughts for this election year of 2016. May we take those words of Lincoln's seriously. America, now in its 240th year, after impudently and pugnaciously declaring it was going to take care of its own affairs and not listen to the mandates of an absent and capricious landlord, is still an experiment in democracy. It can still fail if not tended, as if by a gardener, with care, respect, and a steady hand guided by the foresight of its past. It is the state of Nature to grow, but one must be patient and not succumb to "slash-and-burn" techniques to speed things along. Burning things to the ground may feel pro-active in the short term, but recovery time takes longer, and destroys necessary ingredients for recovery. Let us resolve—again—that government OF the people, BY the people, FOR the people shall not perish from this Earth.

The Set-Up: The junior senator from an unnamed state has died, and the area's political machine run by Boss Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold) has already decided on the patsy to fill the seat. But under pressure from constituents (and his family) Governor Hopper (Guy Kibbee) decides to appoint Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), leader of his state's Boy Rangers but a complete babe in the woods to politics. He's also the son of a good friend of the state's surviving Senator, Joe "The Silver Knight" Paine (Claude Rains) who has presidential aspirations. Things, however, don't go according to plan from the get-go—once the Senators get to D.C., Smith follows his patriotic bliss and goes AWOL aboard a site-seeing bus.

Boy(reading): ...that from these honored dead we take increased...
Boy(reading): ...devotion to that cause for which they...
Boy(reading): ...gave the last full measure of devotion...
Boy(reading): ...that we here highly...
Grandfather: ...resolve...
Boy(reading): ...resolve...
Boy(reading): ...that these dead shall not have died in vain --
Boy(reading): ...that this nation, under...
Boy(reading): ...God, shall have a new birth of...
Grandfather: ...freedom --
Boy(reading): ...freedom --
Boy(reading): ...and that government of the people...
Boy(reading): ...by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Words by Abraham Lincoln (edited by Sidney Buchman)

Pictures by Joseph Walker and Frank Capra and Slavko Vorkapich

Mr. Smith Goes To Washington is available on Sony Home Video.

*** The music is composed by Dimitri Tiomkin, a Russian immigrant who, ironically, is most synonymous for composing scores and songs for westerns, like Rio Bravo, Red River, Duel in the Sun, the song from the television series "Rawhide" and the source for his greatest hit, High Noon, for which he composed "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling," based—it should be pointed out—on a Russian folk-tune. The music he weaves for this sequence includes "Yankee Doodle," "America," The National Anthem, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Taps, and "The Red River Valley," which dominates the Lincoln Memorial section.

The Silver Chalice

The Silver Chalice (Victor Saville, 1954) Legend has it that when The Silver Chalice was first scheduled to appear on television, Paul Newman—who made his debut in the film—purchased an ad in Variety emploring people not to watch it. The movie was horrible and he was terrible in it, being the reasons.

Paul Newman was rarely wrong. And I can only hoist a glass of Newman's Own Virgin Lemonade to him that he was right on the money about this one.

No doubt designed to repeat the success of 20th Century Fox's 1953 adaptation of The Robe, The Silver Chalice is quite another kettle of loaves and fishes. Sure, they're both religious epics based on historical novels surrounding Christian relics and filmed in Cinemascope (to lure the crowd from their little television boxes). Sure, they have charismatic young stars making names for themselves (Richard Burton, Paul Newman). Sure, they're both movies.

Newman, trying to look casual in a toga.

But, The Robe is big in scope and epic in scale. A "cast of thousands" kind of thing. The Silver Chalice looks like it was shot in the studio with available crew as extras. It starts out with crowded street scenes, but eventually everybody goes home and the streets are deserted and bare, often resembling a bare stage with some odd architecture that might fit well in a movie designed by William Cameron Menzies. The interiors are "Star Trek" (the series) simple, done with an emphasis on stretched space for Cinemascope and design. The exteriors are achieved by model overlays obscuring the stages and lights.

The sets are "Star Trek" simple. 3rd SEASON "Star Trek" simple.

The plot is rather simple, too: Basil (Newman as an adult), a talented sculptor in Greece, is sold to a rich childless nobleman (E.G. Marshall) to be his son and heir, much to the consternation of Mr. Noble's brother. When the patriarch dies, Basil is sold into slavery, due to the corrupt machinations of the brother, the magistrate, and the craven testimony of one of the witnesses. Basil becomes a sculptor for a local artisan wanting to increase his trade. Upon adulthood, he is sold to Joseph of Arimathea, one of Christ's apostles, who tasks Basil with creating a silver chalice for the cup Jesus used at the Last Supper, to be designed with the faces of the Apostles and Christ.

Things are tough in Lego-Jerusalem

There is a side-story of the slave girl Helena (Natalie Wood as a child, Virginia Mayo as an adult—which defies belief) who becomes the courtesan and assistant of Simon the Mage (Jack Palance), a magician of simple illusions. Simon is approached by a sect leader (Joseph Wiseman) in Jerusalem, who sees the rise of Christianity as a "sapping of manhood" of the populace rising against Rome by following the ways of love and peace. In Simon, he sees an impressive, less passive alternative to Jesus and his miracles ("A true miracle is nothing but a good trick," says Wiseman's rabble-rouser, "They were VERY good," says Simon admiringly).

Helena and Basil have a "thing," but he is attracted to Deborah (Pier Angeli), a devout Christian. Although Basil does wonders with the faces of the Apostles, he has a block when it comes to Jesus, unable to capture his face to anyone's satisfaction. It is only when he travels to Rome, and with the love of Deborah, that the true face of Jesus is revealed to him.

Let's just call this bust of Jesus a work in progress.

The design of the The Silver Chalice (credited to Rolfe Gerard) is cheesy, a low-budget compromise to the vistas and exotica of DeMille and The Robe and the religious mainstays of the 1950's. But, the dialogue is the issue, a too-formal-by-half torturing of "marmish" speaking that turns lines of dialogue into paragraphs.* Nobody does well with this falderal, but Newman can't seem to find a grasp of it or any sense of human feeling to it. He sounds like he's reciting. The ones that fare best are the stentorians—like Alexander Scoursby and Lorne Greene—who deal with the purple dialogue by playing it without any sense of humor or irony, reading it like it was the Gettysberg Address, not unlike the way DeMille's actors intoned their way through his films. A lot of the acting is egregious with Wiseman coming off the best—he plays everything like he's grousing about a bad meal—Newman the worst, and Palance...Palance is off doing his own thing, but then, he's playing something of a demented charlatan, which is sometimes amusing, sometimes very puzzling.

Palance: what the hell is he doing...what the hell is he WEARING?

It's a mess, not unlike watching an Ed Wood movie, but with the disappointing sense that there is taste and intelligence not working somewhere. It just goes to show that if you're making a religious movie, you need a miracle or two to pull it off.

* Shakespeare is easier than this drivel. Harrison Ford threw a great line at George Lucas during the filming of Star Wars: "You can't speak this shit. It can only be typed." But that stilted B-dialogue of the old serials is brilliant next to this narration posing as dialogue. Newman must have had a hell of a time trying to dig out "the truth" of this doggerel with $5 words. There is no "method" here, only madness.

The BFG

Be Careful What You Wish For
or
Dreams That Go Bad

In 1982, a couple of big things happened in the world of kid's entertainment: Steven Spielberg directed E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, a re-imagining of an earlier screenplay idea in which evil aliens harass the residents of an American town—he became dissatisfied with it and reversed it with the help of screen-writer Melissa Mathison (who had written the equally magical The Black Stallion) to fashion it into the biggest movie hit of the year, and, for awhile, of all time; In London, Jonathan Cape published Roald Dahl's "The BFG," an expansion of a concept the author had dabbled with in his 1975 book "Danny, the Champion of the World," about a giant who makes frequent visits from "giant territory" to deliver dreams to sleeping Londoners. Both stories featured outcasts and their eventual relationships with their more-normal counterparts among the human community. It seems fated that the two would meld into a project that combined those two powerhouses of children's fantasy.

Producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, Spielberg's usual production partners, had been trying to make a live-action version since 1991 (an animated version was produced by ITV in 1989), but for one reason or another, never materialized, going through different screenwriters and directors until Melissa Mathison got the job from Dreamworks in 2011 (Spielberg's old production arm, Amblin, is credited as production studio so as to not imply a collaboration between distributor Disney and animation rival Dreamworks—"The Mouse" can get testy about such things). Spielberg came on board in 2014, filming began in March of 2015 and, incredibly, the thing got finished in time for a release by July 2016, including elaborate special effects by WETA that encompasses wholly 90% of the picture. Spielberg's upper ecehelon of collaborators all worked on it—cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, editor Michael Kahn, production designer Rick Carter, costume designer Joanna Johnston, and composer John Williams.

Melissa Mathison died, after battling cancer in November 2015, and the film is very early on in the credits dedicated "For Our Melissa"—not unlike Dahl's book being dedicated to his daughter Olivia, who died of measles encephalitis in 1962. A slight air of melancholy hangs over the project, which is fine as it frequently leavens Spielberg's penchant for the sugary, something that has been largely absent from his Senior work as a director.

And The BFG is remarkable—stunning in all sorts of applaudable ways. The effects work is stellar, making up the vast majority of the mise en scene of the movie with a fluidity and attention to detail that draws one in with fascination. This is spectacular world-building, similar to the care and beauty that went into Disney' 2016 version of The Jungle Book from earlier this Summer. And the motion-capture performances of Mark Rylance (who was the very sly stand-out for his underplayed work in Spielberg's Bridge of Spies), Jemaine Clement and the other giant actors is truly amazing, completely stepping over "The Uncanny Valley" as nimbly as if there truly were giants of great stride. Spielberg also retains his reputation as a deft director of children, getting a terrific performance from newcomer Ruby Barnhill as the heroine of the story, Sophie

Also, in this era of "no limits" cinema (thanks to the digital imaging revolution) it is refreshing that Spielberg takes care in the pacing, not throwing the movie into "editing over-drive" as seems to be the norm for "blockbuster-filmmaking" among the Spielberg acolytes. It is nice to see a movie not being made "by stop-watch" and trying to make Guinness by squeezing as many shots into a sequence as possible.

All noteworthy. But, I must confess for all the splendor there is to be seen, the overall effect left me uncharmed. This takes a certain amount of self-examination and confession. I am not the target audience, which is younger by decades. Saying that, I can still be moved by a film aimed at the youngsters and entertained—Pixar makes a regular habit of achieving that. And I'm a big fan of Spielberg as a filmmaker; I think he is the best of the current directors out there, eking out over Martin Scorsese by frames.

I was dissatisfied with the film, however, despite it hitting all its marks, and bringing the wonders and chills of childhood to the fore. Way past my sell-date, I can't imagine the reaction the film will have over young audiences. But, a great children's film should also appeal to adults, as well. And I found that the film dragged (despite my delight that it wasn't a roller-coaster). Bits of business and Spielberg's scrupulous sense of place by making sure the audience knows where it is at all times bogs the movie down no matter how fluid the camera work and intricacy of the choreography. I found myself drifting off, losing focus and the sense of caring about what was going on. Perhaps it was the circumstances under which the film was made. Maybe the filmmakers couldn't bear to part with a single word or sequence that had been worked out by "Our Melissa." Gifted she is, but in the editing room, a filmmaker must be equal parts story-teller and butcher. Maybe the affection for the screen-writer overwhelmed the cruelty of the knife that is required to make a tight, concise film that isn't in love with itself, so determined is its aim to win over the audience.

I always consider a Spielberg film "an event," so I went to an evening-before-opening screening of the film—saw it in 3-D—and sat down in the theater. Easy to find a seat, as I was the only one in the theater. True, 10 pm is past the bed-time of the targeted demographic, but I was still surprised at there being only an audience of one—the film is competing against the new "Tarzan" movie and the latest "Purge" film, both probably more suited for late night audiences. Still, I was shocked at the lack of humanity.

Hard to know what to make of this. Perhaps Spielberg has, indeed, become the director who makes great scenes but can't make a complete movie (as one internet snark put it—I really MUST stop reading comments sections). I don't think so. Bridge of Spies and Lincoln were both terrific films. I think this was a case of too much affection for the material to the point of protection, and maybe some hubris that a Spielberg children's film was a certain home-run. Nothing is certain in the market-place. This one may be big, it may be friendly, but its quite a few feet below giant stage.

Disney with Dahl at the time they were making their "Gremlins" short for the Armed Forces.