Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Maltin, Leonard [91]
The movie spans a year and a half, from mid-1999 to the end of 2000, as the company tries to strike a balance between pie-in-the-sky promises and the reality of running a day-to-day operation.
Paralleling the mounting drama of whether or not these young partners can make a success of their venture is the evolving personal relationship between them. It doesn’t take long to see that they are moving and growing in different directions. Their goals and philosophies diverge—even their attitude toward family and the women in their lives—and one can sense that this is creating a fault line in their company’s foundation.
Startup.com doesn’t take sides in the conflicts that arise, allowing each viewer to ask himself questions about personal goals, ethics, and morals, and test his resolve, as the people on-screen are forced to do over and over again. What’s more important, loyalty or success? If you had to choose between losing a friend and losing a strategic business alliance, what would you do? Because each person will answer these questions differently, each one will take something different away from the experience of watching the movie. I defy anyone to find a fictional film as compelling as this.
126. STATE OF THE UNION
(1948)
Directed by Frank Capra
Screenplay by Anthony Veiller and Myles Connolly
Based on the play by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse
Actors:
SPENCER TRACY
KATHARINE HEPBURN
ANGELA LANSBURY
VAN JOHNSON
ADOLPHE MENJOU
LEWIS STONE
RAYMOND WALBURN
MARGARET HAMILTON
CARL (ALFALFA) SWITZER
CHARLES LANE
IRVING BACON
TOR JOHNSON
I suppose it’s symptomatic of human nature that every generation thinks it’s the first to experience life’s great lessons. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy watching old movies; they may not always present an accurate picture of “real life,” but they do reflect the attitudes and mores of their time.
That’s why I love Frank Capra’s State of the Union, which goes behind the scenes of a presidential campaign and reveals that little has changed over the years where politics is concerned.
There are other good reasons to see the film: it teams Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn for their fifth time (although Hepburn was a last-minute replacement for Claudette Colbert). The costarring cast is just as strong. Van Johnson had become America’s favorite boy-next-door in the mid-1940s, but here he plays a cynical columnist (with a nonstop arsenal of wisecracks) and shows what a fine comedic actor he could be. Movie veteran Menjou is perfection itself as a smooth political operator who knows how to throw the bull—and when to talk turkey.
Then there’s Lansbury, who as usual was cast as a woman older than her years—and nailed the part decisively. She was twenty-two years old when she took on the role of a cold-blooded newspaper publisher and kingmaker who decides that her lover (self-made—and very much married—industrialist Tracy) should be the next president of the United States. It’s one of her all-time juiciest parts and one of her best performances. Early in the film we see how she inherits not only the job but the power that comes with it from her father, played by Lewis Stone. (This foreshadows the fabled career of Katherine Graham, who later inherited ownership of the all-powerful Washington Post from her husband.)
Ironically, critics in 1948 decried the movie’s casting, declaring that both Lansbury and Johnson were too young to be credible in their roles. Here’s at least one instance in which time has been kind to a film. Lansbury and Johnson don’t seem young at all by today’s standards of eternal youth.
The most relevant aspect of State of the Union to modern viewers is the key dramatic conflict of the story: Tracy is an honest man who genuinely wants to do good for his country, but