Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Maltin, Leonard [92]
Frank Capra took a drubbing from critics for watering down Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s Broadway play, and injecting it with Hollywood tropes and comedy shtick. Yet those ingredients, corny as they may seem at times, still work today. I screened this film for my USC students, who aren’t accustomed to watching “old movies.” Before we began I tried to set the film into historic context, explaining that it came out during a volatile presidential campaign year when Harry Truman (a piano-playing haberdasher from Missouri) was in the White House, radio was the dominant communication medium but television was making its way into American homes, most people traveled by train, and the worst insult one could hurl at someone was that he was a Communist. I also explained that Van Johnson wasn’t just a wiseguy but what they used to call a “wolf.” And I noted that while this film might seem dated in some respects, in other ways it was surprisingly progressive: its depiction of a man having a mistress, and even Tracy citing the name of Crispus Attucks in a list of great Americans (not a common occurrence in 1940s America).
It took my twenty-somethings time to get into the rhythm of the film—so different from modern movies in every way—but by the homestretch they were so in tune with the movie that they laughed at every cutaway Capra built in for laugh reaction in the climactic scene (with character actor Irving Bacon tending bar—and doing broad “takes”). Capra’s sense of an audience still held up after sixty years.
There’s also a pearly moment when Tracy, about to deliver his ultimate campaign speech via a television hookup in his home, makes eye contact with two workmen nearby. One of them just stares at Tracy and chews gum. The guy is clearly thinking, “What makes you think you’re better than anyone else?” Capra holds the shot for a long, long time because it conveys more than any dialogue possibly could, and though this same workman later voices his feelings in a speech, it’s that cinematic moment—something you couldn’t achieve on a stage without the benefit of close-ups—that does the job.
State of the Union may not be a perfect movie but it is wonderfully entertaining, and most certainly a time capsule worth exploring.
127. THE STEEL HELMET
(1951)
Directed by Samuel Fuller
Screenplay by Samuel Fuller
Actors:
GENE EVANS
ROBERT HUTTON
STEVE BRODIE
JAMES EDWARDS
RICHARD LOO
SID MELTON
In spite of such vivid, realistic, and revisionist films as Saving Private Ryan and Flags of Our Fathers, which depict scenes of violence that Hollywood muted in the 1940s and ’50s, the war movies made by the late, great Sam Fuller still stand out today. His autobiographical infantry saga of World War II, The Big Red One, is perhaps the most famous, but he was one of the few Hollywood filmmakers to address the Korean War, and The Steel Helmet is still one of the best of its kind. His own experiences in combat informed all of Fuller’s work, and perhaps that’s why this film still holds up so well.
Gene Evans, a virile character actor who became Fuller’s alter ego on-screen, gives a gritty performance as Sergeant Zack, a no-nonsense infantryman who survives a massacre with the help of a boy he nicknames Short Round. Eventually the two of them hook up with a medic and fall in with a patrol that digs in at a Buddhist temple.
The Steel Helmet was ahead of its time in so many ways. It offers an utterly unsentimental look at war and features a multiracial cast, including James Edwards (one of Hollywood’s first black actors to be cast in serious roles) and Richard Loo (who spent many years playing Japanese stereotypes) as a Japanese-American soldier. There’s also a character who was a conscientious objector during World War II. These were highly unconventional concepts for a Hollywood movie of this time, but Fuller was nothing if not gutsy, and he found in theater-owner-turned-producer Robert Lippert an ally who