The 100 best conservative movies - includes list of 20 best liberal movies - Cover Story

National Review, Oct 24, 1994 by Spencer Warren

In Mr. Deeds, Gary Cooper, greeting-card poet and best tuba player in Mandrake Falls, Vermont, gives away his inherited $20 million to purchase ten-acre farms for the unemployed, who will gain ownership provided they work their farms for a specified number of years. He triumphs in the end over an avaricious Wall Street lawyer (played by Douglas Dumbrille, a Lawrence Walsh look-alike!), who tries to have him declared insane.

Capra recognized that some people, as Mr. Deeds says, need help "getting up the hill," but he believes personal virtue produces social compassion, while government produces dependency. In Meet John Doe, local community clubs assist the destitute directly, prompting the head of New Deal relief to complain in the film that no one will be left on relief.

In Mr. Smith, the idealistic senator, played by James Stewart, introduces a bill to promote a "Boy Ranger" camp for needy kids, who are to pay back the cost with their earnings of "nickles, dimes, and quarters."

Capra had a jaundiced view of politics and government. His critical depiction of the U.S. Senate ganging up against Stewart to protect one of its own does not seem so far off the mark as it may have in 1939, when an enraged Washington establishment ran Capra out of town following the film's premiere in Constitution Hall. (Many in the gala audience walked out during the film.)

Capra's films are not only about economics and politics, though. At the climax of Wonderful Life, a distraught James Stewart asks God to "show me the way." And He does, in the form of Clarence the Angel. (Capra always uses humor to convey his serious themes.) In the film's finale, which rises in a crescendo like a Bach chorale, the community unites in love and mutual support.

From Frank Capra, whose life exemplified the American Dream: let us turn to:

Best Picture Celebrating the American Dream: An American Romance (1944) This unsung film follows its immigrant hero, Steve Dangos, from processing at Ellis Island to his rise from miner to foreman to entrepreneur, and from bachelor to husband and proud father of the high-school valedictorian. Among the film's many moving scenes are Steve's trek on foot across the industrial heartland and the vast farm belt to join his cousin working in the iron mines of Minnesota. "I want to work," he proclaims.

Director King Vidor paints some charming vignettes of Americana: nineteenth-century Fourth of July picnic, Steve's first, where he attends his first baseball game and hears the local orator hail "America, the land of unbounded opportunity," where anyone's son might someday be President. Steve quietly asks, in his halting English, "He say my son can be President of United States. Is that true?" Another lovely scene is his eldest son's high-school graduation and valedictorian address on the school's front steps. When Steve offers his graduation gift, his son answers that the best gift would be for Dad to become an American citizen - which he does, proudly reciting at the ceremony, with his heart in every word, the Pledge of Allegiance. In striking contrast to today's multiculturalist heresy, this film exemplifies the assimilationist truth of American society. The true star of the movie is Steel, a metaphor for the determination, endurance, and belief that have made America. Laboring as a digger in the Mesabi pit, Steve is driven by a curiosity and ambition his cousin lacks. He has "iron in him" and proclaims he'll "make steel." In a magnificent montage, Steve, penniless, runs off his job and accompanies the iron ore by rail to Duluth, then via freighter to a great industrial city, where he sneaks into a mill to get work. The iron has been torn from the earth, we are told, "all to add strength to a mighty nation, growing mightier." In An American Romance, capitalism spells not greed but opportunity and achievement.