It’s one of my favorite movies.
I’m a big Paul Douglas fan. He’s one of the best things about A Letter To Three Wives.
Reported.
[Moderating]
To be clear, I am aware of this thread. I know that it’s largely about politics… but given that the original movie was also about politics, I don’t see how that’s avoidable in any discussion of the movie. That’s why I haven’t moved or closed this thread, because, as a discussion of a movie, this is still the right place for it.
I hate to be a nitpicker but it was Broderick Crawford, not Paul Douglas, in the 1950 film version of Born Yesterday. I’m aware Crawford and Douglas seem similar but, to me, Crawford comes across as more crass and thuggish than Douglas.
That’s not a nitpick. OMG, you are so right, and my face is beet-red. :o Thank you.
Paul Douglas co-starred with Judy in The Solid Gold Cadillac, another great movie of that era.
And Paul Douglas played the Harry Brock role on Broadway in *Born Yesterday. * But, yeah, Broderick Crawford is cruder and more low-class than Douglas.
Watch it as a double feature with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; the small-town everyman is the only righteous one in a world of corrupt, big-city, machine politics.
I think you’re *slightly *off base, or at least putting emphasis in the wrong place.
Harry Brock is boorish and uneducated, true, but that’s not why he is so offensive. The reason Judy needs rescuing is that Harry is a crook, a man who scorns and disrespects the law. Harry is implicating Judy in his crimes by having made her a silent, stupid partner whom he is able to control because her values are shallow and superficial. Yeah, William Holden introduces her to Beethoven as an aside, but central to the story, he introduces her to the United States of America, its history, principles, and its laws. He makes her care about the law. He wakes up her curiosity, so she starts asking about all the documents that Harry has been having her sign.
THAT is the problem with educating someone, Beethoven notwithstanding, and THAT is the theme of this movie. “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” (Quote variously attributed to Oliver W. Holmes, Ralph W. Emerson, and Einstein.) If you want to control people, you have to keep them ignorant, keep them stupid, mock education, discourage curiosity. Tell them lies, feed them fake news. In fact, you can make them proud of being ignorant and stubborn in their ignorance. Harry Brock brags about his ignorance.
<ThelmaLou rolls her eyes and stares at the ceiling.>
This.
Not that Melanie Griffith was bad, exactly. She brought a kind of charming hesitant awareness of her growing understanding that Judy Holliday lacked; Judy Holliday’s Billie Dawn was smart and knew it from the beginning, it was her ethics that grew.
That being said, no line in American cinema will ever top “A car-tel!”
Oh, crap, I knew that, too! One of the few complaints about the movie version was that it DIDN’T have Paul Douglas in it. Paul Douglas made Harry Brock somewhat appealing in the stage version, whereas it’s always been hard to see any appeal in Broderick Crawford to Billie Dawn besides his money.
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I would have enjoyed that movie immensely more if Smith had said during his filibuster “It’s been alleged, I understand, that I was seeking to sell land to the U.S. for personal profit. In response, I ask one of my learned colleagues to draw up a contract in which I, Jefferson Smith, sell any and land owned by me, and all my interests in lands partly owned by me in the vicinity of Willet’s Creek to the United States for the sum of one dollar. I will gladly sign this contract before the witnesses in this chamber and ask copies be delivered to the Department of the Interior for their acceptance of the purchase.”
You are so right. And yet (something the moviemakers would be appalled to know they had foreseen) the loathsomeness of Harry Brock supports the parallel with thump that I drew in my OP. Except for money, what on earth is/was the appeal?? And multiple wives, too.