Hollywood Goes to Washington

American Politics on Screen

Michael Coyne

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781861895776
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Fantasy and politics are familiar dancing partners that rarely separate, even in the face of post–Election Day realities. But Hollywood has a tradition of punching holes in the fairy tales of electoral promises with films that meditate on what could have been and should have been. With Hollywood Goes to Washington, Michael Coyne investigates how the American political film unravels the labyrinthine entanglements of politics and the psyche of the American electorate in orderto reveal brutal truths about the state of our democracy.
From conspiracy dramas such as The Manchurian Candidate to satires like Wag the Dog, Hollywood Goes to Washington argues that political films in American cinema have long reflected the issues and tensions roiling within American society. Coyne elucidates the mythology, iconography, and ideology embedded in both classic and lesser-known films—including Gabriel Over the White House, Silver City, Advise and Consent, and The Siege —and examines the cinematic portrayals of presidents in the White House, the everyman American citizen, and the nebulous enemies who threaten American democracy. The author provocatively contends that whether addressing the threat of domestic fascism in Citizen Kane or the disillusionment of Vietnam and paranoia of the post-Watergate era in Executive Action, the American political film stands as an important cultural bellwether and democratic force—one that is more vital than ever in the face of decreasing civil liberties in the present-day United States.
Compelling and wholly original, Hollywood Goes to Washington exposes the political power of the silver screen and its ramifications for contemporary American culture.

CHAPTER 1

American Politics, American Movies:
Movie America, Movie History

‘Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.’
Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) in Mr Smith Goes to Washington
(directed by Frank Capra, 1939)

Since the early 1930s, the American political film has constituted an important part of Hollywood’s output. The genre has been qualitatively significant rather than quantitatively substantial, but it has served as a persistent and subtly pervasive mirror for twentieth – and now early twenty-first century American society, reflecting those ideals, aspirations, crises, turmoils and disillusions of the wealthiest, most powerful and most technologically sophisticated nation in world history. The supremacy of American film from the dawn of the sound era has unerringly paralleled America’s assumption of global dominance.

Six key phases in the genre mirror political events and anxieties in contemporary US society – and each one corresponds to a period of considerable drama in American political, social and cultural history:

I. The Mythic / Idealistic Phase: FDR, Celebrations of Democracy, Threats of Fascism

II. The Pragmatic Phase: ‘Tough Liberalism’ in the ‘Camelot’ Era, Kennedy and Johnson

III. The Paranoiac Phase: Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate and its Aftermath

IV. The Nostalgic Phase: Reagan, Bush I and the Early Clinton Years

V. The Schizophrenic Phase: Movies in the Age of Oklahoma City and Whitewater

VI. The Apocalyptic Phase: Bush II, 9/11, Iraq and the Patriot Act

The Mythic / Idealistic Phase: FDR, Celebrations of Democracy, Threats of Fascism

The first political films of the sound era emerged from Hollywood while America was still in the throes of the Great Depression. D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930) was a hagiographic treatment of the life of America’s sixteenth president starring Walter Huston. Griffith, master of the sprawling epic in the silent era (The Birth of a Nation, 1915; Intolerance, 1916), crammed too much into this, his first sound film, which ran for only 94 minutes. The result was an ambitious albeit rather plodding chronicle ranging from Lincoln’s birth in a log cabin to his tragic appointment with destiny at Ford’s Theater. The final shot of the film depicted the Lincoln Memorial bathed in rays of heavenly light. Yet most film-makers in the Depression era preferred a more contemporary focus and, certainly, a less reverential approach. The year 1932 witnessed a cycle of political narratives, both melodramas (Washington Masquerade and Washington Merry-Go-Round) and comedies (The Dark Horse and the George M. Cohan vehicle The Phantom President, in which the chosen candidate of political bigwigs is an uninspiring lackey named Blair). All these films caught the mood of a nation which sensed that its political as well as its economic system was in the grip of serious malfunction. A common theme was that political solutions and national salvation lay in the leadership of decent, honest, plain-speaking citizens guided by horse sense, genuine patriotism and an abiding concern for ‘the little guy’ in the face of ‘special interests’. Indeed, it is possible to interpret the political films of 1932 as sentimentally prescient (if ideologically incoherent) votes for Franklin D. Roosevelt in the presidential election that coming autumn.

The most remarkable, most controversial political movie released at the dawn of the New Deal, however, was Gabriel Over the White House (1933), directed by Gregory La Cava, who specialized in sparkling comedies – but produced by the enthusiastically pro-FDR Walter Wanger, and co-scripted by the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (later the prototype for Orson Welles’s most celebrated creation, Citizen Kane). Again, the president in Gabriel was portrayed by Walter Huston; but this Chief Executive is (initially) as far removed from Lincoln as one can imagine. Huston’s Judd Hammond is a party hack akin to those cronies who had looted Warren Harding’s administration a decade earlier. He owes his position to the party bosses, and his first loyalty as president is to their agenda – until a road accident in the country leaves him near death.

Apotheosis: the end of D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930).

At this juncture, the angel Gabriel intervenes, infusing the corrupt president with his spirit (and, it seems, a substantial part of Lincoln’s). It is the most explicit example of a deus ex machina in the entire genre. This celestial visitation transforms Hammond into a fearless champion of social justice and international harmony – with the downside (clearly unlamented within the film) that he is just a wee bit careless about Constitutional niceties. He suspends Congress, feeds the hungry, combats unemployment, proclaims martial law, summarily executes the gangsters who perpetrate and profit from America’s ills and, finally, intimidates all the other world powers into disarmament before destroying the US fleet, thus proving good faith and guaranteeing equality in a peaceful new global order.

Hammond (and, by implication, the film itself) embraces the concept of America as a ‘redeemer nation’ to usher in a new era of world peace – and then retreats to the less vaunted stance of ‘one nation among many’ to ensure it is, indeed, a peace of, by and for the world rather than a militarily enforced pax Americana. Moreover, the film ends with Hammond – like Lincoln – dying at the moment of his greatest triumph, so that now the mythic, heroic (even godlike) saviour belongs not so much to the ages as to the angels.

Gabriel Over the White House premiered four weeks after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Inauguration. The film was a hyper-dramatized template for presidential response to dire national emergency. Although FDR’s New Deal reforms were principally concerned with America’s economic infrastructure rather than with law and order or global security, both Hammond in Gabriel and Roosevelt in actuality provided 1933 America with the reassurance of swift, decisive, bold – indeed, radical – national leadership. The reformed Hammond also fulfils the mythic ethos and expectation cardinal to both Hollywood movies and American presidential campaigns – that one man, the right man, truly can make all the difference and ensure the triumph of virtue.

This faith in one good man was central to two classic films of 1939, by which time the United States had weathered the worst of the Depression but stood poised on the brink of World War II. These two films are, in effect, the mythic cornerstones of the genre and its innate faith in democracy. They were as fundamental to the evolution of the American political film as the same year’s Stagecoach was for the Western. These films were career milestones for their directors, and crucial in defining the screen images and cementing the star iconography of their leading actors, who were best friends in real life: James Stewart in Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington and Henry Fonda in John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln. Mr Smith evokes both the Founding Fathers and Lincoln to demonstrate its young hero’s idealism and his determination to combat the ‘special-interest’ corruption he finds in the US Senate (a fictional representation, but one that aroused the fury of many real-life senators). The hero’s very name is an ingenious stroke: ‘Jefferson Smith’ is suggestive of both extraordinary qualities and simple honesty. Smith thus functions as both political sage and Everyman, steeped in the classic American philosophies of liberty and democracy, reinforced by down-home virtues of personal honour, plain speaking and common sense (akin to the protagonists of the political films of 1932).

The lone hero battling injustice: Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) persists in his filibuster despite the indifference of his colleagues in Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

Man of destiny: Henry Fonda shot to stardom as Young Mr Lincoln (dir. John Ford, 1939).

In convincing Henry Fonda to take the role of Lincoln, John Ford stressed that his film would be centred not on Lincoln as the Great Emancipator but rather as a youthful, idealistic small-town lawyer – and that is exactly how the narrative unfolds. Fonda’s Lincoln is an amiable, self-deprecating country boy with a flair for homespun wit, yet Ford cannot help but present him as virtually a secular saint on the brink of great destiny.

A markedly different portrayal appeared in 1940, with the release of Abe Lincoln in Illinois (a.k.a. Spirit of the People), directed by John Cromwell, from the play by Robert Emmet Sherwood, and featuring Raymond Massey as an extremely melancholy Lincoln. (Later that same year Massey would be cast as that most contentious of Northern icons, John Brown, in Michael Curtiz’s Santa Fe Trail, co-starring one Ronald Reagan.)

Hollywood films of the 1940s were just as committed to the ideals of freedom and democracy, but they were a good deal less optimistic about their inevitable triumph over tyranny. Both during and after the war to conquer fascism in Europe, several movies warned that a domestic strain of the same virus could slip in, unnoticed, by the back door. The threat of home-grown fascism was one of many undercurrents running through Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941), widely considered to be a thinly disguised bio-pic of the press baron William Randolph Hearst. It was also central to the narratives of Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941), George Cukor’s Keeper of the Flame (1942) and H. C. Potter’s The Farmer’s Daughter (1947). Yet the archetypal saga about domestic fascism was Robert Rossen’s Oscar-winning All the King’s Men (1949).

Broderick Crawford won an Oscar for his performance as the demagogic Willie Stark in Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men (1949).

Based on Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the King’s Men reworked the life and career of Huey Long, the demagogic Louisianan governor-cum-senator who was assassinated in 1935. Broderick Crawford won an Oscar for his role as Willie Stark, who begins as an honest backwoods idealist but is corrupted and ultimately destroyed by his ego and his insatiable lust for power. Crawford’s jowly demagogue was uncomfortably prescient of a real-life opportunist who was just about to burst upon the national political scene.

It is worth bearing in mind that explicitly political films have tended to be made in eras dominated either by presidents who projected liberal activism, and whose agendas many film-makers have supported (Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton), or by conservatives whom many movie-makers have distrusted, perceiving civil liberties to be under threat (Richard Nixon, George W. Bush). Yet during one extremely rich but tumultuous era in Hollywood history, political films seemed to be largely in abeyance; and the dominant figure on the political stage in the early 1950s was not the incumbent president.

If the 1950s now seem bathed in the warm glow of Dwight Eisenhower’s grin, that is nostalgia at work. At the time, the first half of the decade was overshadowed by a much less congenial figure. Republican Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin ruined countless careers and lives with his reckless bullying, wanton headline-grabbing and vicious character assassinations. Film-makers encoded criticism of McCarthyism and the witch-hunts in Westerns (High Noon, Johnny Guitar), war films (From Here to Eternity, Stalag 17) and Biblical epics (Quo Vadis?, The Robe), rather than in movies focusing on contemporary politics. Films of the 1950s were bolder in certain respects, e.g., tackling institutional corruption in Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953) and Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954). Still, like Mr Smith, these films ultimately depended on a ‘systemic guarantee’. As long as one man stands up to be counted, other good men in the Establishment will ensure justice prevails. Beneath sensationalized plots drawn from a best-selling novel (Eternity) or the headlines (Waterfront), these were, in essence, safely conservative films.

There was a batch of explicitly anti-Communist films, mostly long on ideological intensity but short on overall quality. The most memorable were two from 1952: Edward Ludwig’s Big Jim McLain, in which HUAC agent John Wayne duked it out with Commies in Hawaii; and Leo McCarey’s My Son John, in which an All-American family (named Jefferson, no less) is shocked to find that son Robert Walker is a Red.

The later 1950s saw a couple of affectionate portrayals of lovable but devious old-style politicos, with Bob Hope as New York Mayor Jimmy Walker in Beau James (1957) and Spencer Tracy’s grand James Michael Curley-type mayor (of Boston in all but name) in John Ford’s The Last Hurrah (1958). Yet during the 1950s, the first amoebae of paranoia infected the genre politic. James Cagney as another Huey Long-type demagogue in Raoul Walsh’s A Lion Is In the Streets (1953), Frank Sinatra’s chilling assassin in Lewis Allen’s Suddenly (1954), Andy Griffith’s media-created monster Lonesome Rhodes (blood-brother to Willie Stark and, later, Bob Roberts) in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957) and nuclear holocaust in Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959) all prefigured ogres and nightmare scenarios that would blight the genre and political culture over the ensuing generation.

Frank Sinatra as a gunman hired to assassinate the US President in Lewis Allen’s chilling
Suddenly (1954).

The Pragmatic Phase: ‘Tough Liberalism’ in the ‘Camelot’ Era, Kennedy and Johnson

The first American political movie of the 1960s was Vincent J. Donehue’s Sunrise at Campobello (1960), a roseate valentine to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in which Ralph Bellamy repeated his stage triumph as FDR, with Greer Garson portraying Eleanor Roosevelt. The film focused on the pre-presidential FDR’s battle with polio and climaxed with Roosevelt nominating Al Smith for president at the Democratic Convention of 1924. The subtext and contemporary significance of this scene would certainly not have been lost on American audiences in 1960. Smith had been the very first Catholic to secure a major party’s presidential nomination (unsuccessfully, in 1928). Sunrise at Campobello was released only sixteen days after the second such nominee, John Kennedy, had assured a gathering of Protestant ministers in Houston th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction: Once Upon a Nation: The Ideology of American Political Films
• Chapter 1 - American Politics, American Movies: Movie America, Movie History
• Chapter 2 - Hail to the Chiefs: White House and Silver Screen
• Chapter 3 - Modern Presidential Parables: John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Beyond
• Chapter 4 - Country Boys and City Slickers
• Chapter 5 - The ‘Brief, Shining Moment’: Political Movies in the American ‘Camelot’
• Chapter 6 - Enemies Within: White Hoods, Red Scares, Black Lists
• Chapter 7 - Conspiracy Central
• Conclusion: Twilight’s Last Gleaming?
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Filmography
• Acknowledgements
• Photo Acknowledgements
• Index