FRANK CAPRA WAS RIGHT, IT WAS ALWAYS ABOUT CLASS
Robert Ardrey once wrote that Man was not a fallen angel, but rather, a risen ape. He had a point,
though not the one he intended.
You see, we cannot fully grasp the disdain Europe’s political elites’ have for America without first
understanding that from the very beginning, back to our founding, they have despised the very idea that
the dregs of their own societies, their lowest classes, people who could only dream of rising to the
position of groom, or bootman, or petty tradesman, could instead come to America and sire children
who would build empires.
It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. Like that bloody debacle in France, we were supposed to
collapse into chaos and anarchy.
Frank Capra was right. It has always been about class. But as long as the Left can make it all about
race, we’ll never stop to consider the real enemy here.
Moses Sands used to bend me over with funny observations about America’s constant run-in’s with
class pretension, considering the fact “…we all got off the boat with pretty much the same empty valise.”
Whether the Appalachian hills or Nebraska’s prairie counties, “…you can’t find a holler so remote that it
don’t have a founding royal family, or some prairie flower pretending her toothless grand-daddy was on
his way to Oregon to teach Shakespeare when the mule died.”
though not the one he intended.
You see, we cannot fully grasp the disdain Europe’s political elites’ have for America without first
understanding that from the very beginning, back to our founding, they have despised the very idea that
the dregs of their own societies, their lowest classes, people who could only dream of rising to the
position of groom, or bootman, or petty tradesman, could instead come to America and sire children
who would build empires.
It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. Like that bloody debacle in France, we were supposed to
collapse into chaos and anarchy.
Frank Capra was right. It has always been about class. But as long as the Left can make it all about
race, we’ll never stop to consider the real enemy here.
Moses Sands used to bend me over with funny observations about America’s constant run-in’s with
class pretension, considering the fact “…we all got off the boat with pretty much the same empty valise.”
Whether the Appalachian hills or Nebraska’s prairie counties, “…you can’t find a holler so remote that it
don’t have a founding royal family, or some prairie flower pretending her toothless grand-daddy was on
his way to Oregon to teach Shakespeare when the mule died.”
AMERICA THE RISEN APE
Moses said things come in two’s, sometimes three, and the Law of Generations almost always comes in threes. “It takes
about three generations for a Russian to come here and finally buy into to the idea that being American is built on a totally
different set of rules than how it was back in the Rodina… especially the rules that separated the classes and power. There
will always be power, but liberty totally redefines it.
“But, it also took three generations for a deck-hand to jump ship in New York in 1850, work his way into a small business in
Flatbush, watch his son grow that business into Manhattan, see his grand-daughter go on to Columbia, marry a junior partner
at the Bank of Manhattan by 1900…then finally watch her screech and kick her way through seven poor Irish maids in the first
year in her new house until she finally found one who could iron her damned dresses the way she liked them…before he
rolled over and died.
“You see, it also takes about three generations, give or take, to feel the wet warmth of your grandchildren’s ingratitude
running down off your shoulders.
“That’s America’s curse, you know, trying to lift people up without teaching ‘em to kick down. It’s also Europe’s last glimmer of
hope for our failure, that the kickers will eventually outnumber the lifters.
”What’s always saved us, like a lake that turns over ever onct in a while, the water at the bottom replacing the water at the top,
is that we’ve had that turn-over every three generations or so. The Europeans have never had even one turnover that actually
came from their bottom. Their ‘democracies’ won’t allow it. By my calculation, we’re due one now and it won’t come a minute
too soon. When grandchildren start to piss on the shoulders of the people who made their lives happen, it’s time to re-boot.”
With Moses’ warnings in my mind this summer, I decided my reading project would be to delve deeper into this never
ending struggle with “class” in America, only I’d “read” that class history through the eyes of Hollywood.
I found out that Moses and Frank Capra were right. It does seem that about every three generations, just as America is about
to cement itself into the sort of aristocratic class structure that existed here in 1770, some event would come along that would
set that notion back to where it started 70-80 years earlier. Capra and other directors let ordinary Americans in on the story by
providing pictures and the dialogue to ideas that had been with us from the beginning.
First some history: While our shores were first settled by middle class folks in Massachusetts and Virginia they were a rare
lot. They were followed by entire clans of mostly lower class free farmers from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland who
would find a valley and settle there, places that still bear their name but leave not a glimmer of their bloodlines They were the
ones who kept pushing the frontier westward into the 19th Century, when similar groups would come from mainland Europe.
Being last, they almost never got the choicest land, and their groups were usually swallowed up into the larger culture in about
three generations. It’s amazing how many small churches in America have right at 70-90 year histories.
As Moses always said the notion of “class” arises in the people who got there first, and real class in America comes from
those who got here first in the original thirteen, New England , especially New York and Boston, being the surviving first
families from those times.. (I exclude the Southern ports , James River south, as they were cast down with the Civil War and I
exclude the midwest and west as they are for the most part, minor league clubs for the bigs, although San Francisco can lay
some claim to being a class city of first instance…if you consider reformed whores to be a class.)
Early on into America’s ports there came entrepreneurs with much loftier ambitions than just carving out a nest in the forest.
While farmers settled the north, trading companies arose in New York and Boston and plantations were built from Savannah
to the James River, followed by assorted hosts of laborers from England’s sewers.
Only a few of America’s early colonial builders were born upper class and self-financed (usually the second or third sons of
English gentry). Most were from the lower reaches of England’s middle class, but who had the spunk and ability to put
together stock companies with investors in England. Since there’s little in the way of empathetic fiction about that period, to
get a sense of the quest for fortune that drove these early colonial entrepreneurs, especially in the plantation south, perhaps
the best reading on the subject might be Michenor’s Iberia, in his essays dealing with Extremadura, a desolate and poor
region of western Spain, and the home of so many of the conquistadors who came to America questing for gold and nobility.
They came to America as adventurers and profiteers hoping to return to Spain as lords. Many did.
That’s how it was to have worked in 17th and 18th Century North America, too, especially south of the Potomac, only it didn’t
always work out that way. After all, the Atlantic seaboard was more pleasant than Jamaica or Mexico. Rather than return to
England as little ducks on a big pond, many wealthy men were content to remain big ducks on this relatively small pond. A
peerage in rain soaked England just wasn’t that necessary if it meant leaving this idyllic paradise permanently. Instead, they
brought England here.
We need a starting point to get our three-generation clock ticking. Let’s start with the founding of Harvard in 1636 and work
our way to 1737, when David Hume published Treatise on Human Nature, thus beginning the philosophical trek toward
America’s Founding. Harvard College represented the first steps to bring the best parts of an erudite and educated England to
the colonies, by no means a bad or even class-based idea. Ironically, three generations later, (give or take), Hume would
“begin” the trail to the American Revolution by commenting on the deficiencies he found in the best of the social structure in
the England Harvard hoped to emulate.
Just don’t look for much in the way of early 19th Century fiction romanticizing those days. The more popular New England
writers of the early 19th Century (Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne) were content to tell stories of local squires and villages. Cooper
found romance in the French & Indian war days, but not the revolution. Moreover, New England writers took no particular down-
the-nose notice of our rough hewn exteriors, (which explains the universal appeal of Hawkeye/Natty Bumppo even today.) So,
unlike Jane Austen, they didn’t make class division, as she saw it, a central theme of their stories. Meanwhile, in the South,
literature was drearily mired in the narcissistic style of French class consciousness, an aristocracy involved in self-admiring
poetry and prose paeans to the nobility of the human spirit,… while the rest of the people read the Bible and sang Stephen
Foster tunes out behind the slave quarters.
The South tried to recreate the social scene of Paris while the north aped London. Perhaps a better “read” about what
happens when lower middle class people go abroad and try to create a class-based society mirroring back-home would be
Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet where clerks and tradesmen did exactly that in India…and where, in three generations, from the Great
Mutiny (1857) forward, right on schedule, it all came tumbling down. “The Jewel in the Crown” (PBS 1984) is still a worthwhile
“read”.
Event Number One in American history was of course the American Revolution and all that balderdash Hume (and others)
wrote about and what Washington (and others)risked everything and fought about, ending America’s first three-generation
cycle with class and dashing what Harvard had unwittingly set out to do in 1636. By 1776, the early land barons had all built
their empires, their grandchildren adopting the airs of English nobility, and had become distant, indifferent, indeed oblivious to
what was a’blowin’ in the winds among the free farmers and tradesmen, led by such outlaws (I’m relating these events as
Nancy Pelosi might had she been there) as Franklin, Adams, and Tom Jefferson. After all, New York even had a social
season, just like London. What were they thinking?
Here at the Sands Institute we talk a lot about the sentiments behind the Revolution, for it was a turning point in world history,
not just our own. There was one novel-turned-into-film, The Tree of Liberty by Elizabeth Page (title taken from Jefferson’s
famous quote) that sort of captured the zeitgeist of the days before the Revolution. I recommend the book over a really awful
film adaptation, (1940) “The Howards of Virginia” with Cary Grant. Still, in a Cliff’s Notes sort of way, 90 minutes will suffice if
you want only to know about class division in circa 1760, or that Tom Jefferson had befriended this working class chap (Grant)
he’d gone to school with who moved to southwestern Virginia where there was still land to be cleared so he could built his
own version of a Virginia plantation. His love interest was the sister of one of those third generation villainous aristocrats we
all despise, who just reeked of John Kerry (played reekingly by Sir Cedric Hardwicke) and who chastised Jefferson for
befriending people like this surveyor , who was way beneath his class, then had to gnash his teeth and swear and cuss and
watch his sister go off to Roanoke to marry the guy. Egad!
What followed of course, was a war in which the sides split more or less down those very class lines, the landed gentry all
siding with King George (except the traitorous Jefferson, who apparently read too much)and the free farmers and tradesmen
siding with me and you and every other common Joe who ever breathed. (That’s how I saw it, at least. Maybe director Frank
Lloyd meant it differently.) The rest is history, as they say, and the tree was blooded for the first time.
That was the American lake’s first turnover, the first dodged bullet, turning us away from the path toward a European class
system. But sure enough, just about eighty years later, in 1860, the lake would take another flip, in part to be rid of the remains
of the ancien regime still existing in the South.
Both Mary Johnston’s novels (of Shirley Temple fame) and Margaret Mitchell’s film offers insights into a class
consciousness whose time simply had come. We all know the story of the Civil War so I won’t repeat it here, except to say that
it too was best revealed on the big screen in the 1930s. The tree was blooded once again, the tyranny this time, slavery. The
American lake turned over once again, and despite the loss of some wonderfully poignant traits of civilized behavior they still
haven’t learned in Cleveland, a cancerous tumor was removed…
…only to re-emerge by the 1930s in the remaining bastions of class in America, the winners in the Yankee north and the
new industrial sector. Risen apes. Only by now, thanks to Mark Twain an alert and sensitive literary class had emerged who
had witnessed Europe’s royal classes’ most recent attempt to assassinate themselves (there would be others…and will be
others). Aristocracy didn’t play well in America, even as John D was passing out pennies to waifs in New York. The robber
barons may have been many things, but try as they might, they weren’t royals. American literature wouldn’t allow it.
It’s not for me to get inside the minds and hearts of writers such as Sinclair Lewis or directors such as Frank Capra. They
both lived long enough to tell us what was on their minds without my interpretations. I just know what I see and read. Besides,
Hollywood had its own interpretations of literature. Actually, several, since, by the mid-1930s, Stalin was alive and well in
Hollywood. But so was fascism. It’s impossible for me to know how much of Hollywood’s social renderings on screen were
intentionally or mistakenly laid at the feet of a mean and ugly capitalism (Stalinist) or a capitalism too easy to access
(fascism), this latter based in the notion that some (uneducated) people just can’t handle financial success . They are too
backward, coarse and garish in their use of money and power so should therefore be denied access to it. (Also part of the
Lawyer’s Creed today, this seems to be where the “anti-capitalist” mood is now in America…fascist…and lawyers will
probably be the ones to take us there…before they are shot by the true fascisti. Hey, I didn’t write this script, I’m just reporting
on how facilitators are usually dealt with in the end.)
Regardless of their intentions, Capra and Hollywood connected with the common man and woman about themes that
universally resonate today, which is why those films are still watched today. It is also why Jane Austen and Dickens are still
read today, even by young people. All agree, down-the-nose snobbery is a bad thing, condescension is a bad thing, and
personal merit, ambition and initiative is a good thing.
Whether leaning toward Moscow or some other -ism, Hollywood in the late 30’s saw America culture coming to yet another
of those third generation crucibles. Capra showed it best, as all his films seemed to have a deep-seated love for the average
Joe. Everyone has seen “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) with mean old Mr Potter and the side-by-side views of how a little town
gets on, one with the fingerprints of a (little “l”) liberal (Jimmy Stewart), the other under the thumb of a controlling fasco-banker
(Lionel Barrymore).
I recommend you only see these films from a view point of class, and make up your own mind. See what you come away
with. I suggest “Dodsworth” (1936), “My Man Godfrey” (1936) Capra’s “You Can’t Take It with You” (1938), if you must, “The
Howards of Virginia (1940)” , “Pride and Prejudice” (1940 version) and only lately, “Miss Potter” (Rene Zellwegger, 2006 ) Then
watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” which is a totally different film when seen in the summer. Bedford Falls isn’t as much capitalist as
it is fascist, and remarkably, here’s the rub, pretty much how democrats and modern liberals want America to be today, when
everyone goes back to work on Monday morning hung over, sated and broke, living in slums owned by the bank.
Compare Mary Forbes’ Mrs Kirby (“You Can’t Take it With You) and Barbara Flynn’s Helen Potter (Beatrix’s mother) both of
whom remind us that Lady Disdain is a type that still lives and breathes. We see them daily, or have you forgotten the Clinton
White House? And how about the fact that words mean things? In “You Can’t Take it With You” “ambitious” was used as a
class-based dirty word (social climber), just as “condescension” was a virtuous one in the 1940 Pride and Prejudice film
version, as “oh how happy we should be that Lady Guttersnipe would deign to speak to us.” Ever try to talk to Joe Biden in the
hallway of the Senate Office building?
That trades people were looked down upon by Beatrix Potter’s mother, herself from the same the stock, brings to mind
another notable feature of most of the “class” films of the 1930’s, namely, that at the center of class pretentiousness in
America, was the risen woman. It’s remarkable how often Hollywood in the socialist leaning 1930s portrayed the ugliest
aspects of capitalist-based-class in the visage of disdainful women. “She” was the most pervasive center piece to the class
dramas and comedies of the era. Who can forget Dodsworth’s wastrel wife (Ruth Chatterton) from the Midwest or Alice Brady
in “Godfrey”, always flanked by the hard-working and long-suffering husband who actually made the money, played by the
gruff-voiced Eugene Pallette. The men may change, from rough hewn boobs (Pallette) to robber barons (Edward Arnold in
“You Can’t…) to kindly fathers (Edmund Gwenn in “Pride..”) to the miserably lost (Walter Huston in “Dodsworth”), but the wives
were eternally the engines that drove class consciousness. Even Walt Disney was chastised for having most of the villains in
his films be cast as women.
(Pg 2)
about three generations for a Russian to come here and finally buy into to the idea that being American is built on a totally
different set of rules than how it was back in the Rodina… especially the rules that separated the classes and power. There
will always be power, but liberty totally redefines it.
“But, it also took three generations for a deck-hand to jump ship in New York in 1850, work his way into a small business in
Flatbush, watch his son grow that business into Manhattan, see his grand-daughter go on to Columbia, marry a junior partner
at the Bank of Manhattan by 1900…then finally watch her screech and kick her way through seven poor Irish maids in the first
year in her new house until she finally found one who could iron her damned dresses the way she liked them…before he
rolled over and died.
“You see, it also takes about three generations, give or take, to feel the wet warmth of your grandchildren’s ingratitude
running down off your shoulders.
“That’s America’s curse, you know, trying to lift people up without teaching ‘em to kick down. It’s also Europe’s last glimmer of
hope for our failure, that the kickers will eventually outnumber the lifters.
”What’s always saved us, like a lake that turns over ever onct in a while, the water at the bottom replacing the water at the top,
is that we’ve had that turn-over every three generations or so. The Europeans have never had even one turnover that actually
came from their bottom. Their ‘democracies’ won’t allow it. By my calculation, we’re due one now and it won’t come a minute
too soon. When grandchildren start to piss on the shoulders of the people who made their lives happen, it’s time to re-boot.”
With Moses’ warnings in my mind this summer, I decided my reading project would be to delve deeper into this never
ending struggle with “class” in America, only I’d “read” that class history through the eyes of Hollywood.
I found out that Moses and Frank Capra were right. It does seem that about every three generations, just as America is about
to cement itself into the sort of aristocratic class structure that existed here in 1770, some event would come along that would
set that notion back to where it started 70-80 years earlier. Capra and other directors let ordinary Americans in on the story by
providing pictures and the dialogue to ideas that had been with us from the beginning.
First some history: While our shores were first settled by middle class folks in Massachusetts and Virginia they were a rare
lot. They were followed by entire clans of mostly lower class free farmers from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland who
would find a valley and settle there, places that still bear their name but leave not a glimmer of their bloodlines They were the
ones who kept pushing the frontier westward into the 19th Century, when similar groups would come from mainland Europe.
Being last, they almost never got the choicest land, and their groups were usually swallowed up into the larger culture in about
three generations. It’s amazing how many small churches in America have right at 70-90 year histories.
As Moses always said the notion of “class” arises in the people who got there first, and real class in America comes from
those who got here first in the original thirteen, New England , especially New York and Boston, being the surviving first
families from those times.. (I exclude the Southern ports , James River south, as they were cast down with the Civil War and I
exclude the midwest and west as they are for the most part, minor league clubs for the bigs, although San Francisco can lay
some claim to being a class city of first instance…if you consider reformed whores to be a class.)
Early on into America’s ports there came entrepreneurs with much loftier ambitions than just carving out a nest in the forest.
While farmers settled the north, trading companies arose in New York and Boston and plantations were built from Savannah
to the James River, followed by assorted hosts of laborers from England’s sewers.
Only a few of America’s early colonial builders were born upper class and self-financed (usually the second or third sons of
English gentry). Most were from the lower reaches of England’s middle class, but who had the spunk and ability to put
together stock companies with investors in England. Since there’s little in the way of empathetic fiction about that period, to
get a sense of the quest for fortune that drove these early colonial entrepreneurs, especially in the plantation south, perhaps
the best reading on the subject might be Michenor’s Iberia, in his essays dealing with Extremadura, a desolate and poor
region of western Spain, and the home of so many of the conquistadors who came to America questing for gold and nobility.
They came to America as adventurers and profiteers hoping to return to Spain as lords. Many did.
That’s how it was to have worked in 17th and 18th Century North America, too, especially south of the Potomac, only it didn’t
always work out that way. After all, the Atlantic seaboard was more pleasant than Jamaica or Mexico. Rather than return to
England as little ducks on a big pond, many wealthy men were content to remain big ducks on this relatively small pond. A
peerage in rain soaked England just wasn’t that necessary if it meant leaving this idyllic paradise permanently. Instead, they
brought England here.
We need a starting point to get our three-generation clock ticking. Let’s start with the founding of Harvard in 1636 and work
our way to 1737, when David Hume published Treatise on Human Nature, thus beginning the philosophical trek toward
America’s Founding. Harvard College represented the first steps to bring the best parts of an erudite and educated England to
the colonies, by no means a bad or even class-based idea. Ironically, three generations later, (give or take), Hume would
“begin” the trail to the American Revolution by commenting on the deficiencies he found in the best of the social structure in
the England Harvard hoped to emulate.
Just don’t look for much in the way of early 19th Century fiction romanticizing those days. The more popular New England
writers of the early 19th Century (Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne) were content to tell stories of local squires and villages. Cooper
found romance in the French & Indian war days, but not the revolution. Moreover, New England writers took no particular down-
the-nose notice of our rough hewn exteriors, (which explains the universal appeal of Hawkeye/Natty Bumppo even today.) So,
unlike Jane Austen, they didn’t make class division, as she saw it, a central theme of their stories. Meanwhile, in the South,
literature was drearily mired in the narcissistic style of French class consciousness, an aristocracy involved in self-admiring
poetry and prose paeans to the nobility of the human spirit,… while the rest of the people read the Bible and sang Stephen
Foster tunes out behind the slave quarters.
The South tried to recreate the social scene of Paris while the north aped London. Perhaps a better “read” about what
happens when lower middle class people go abroad and try to create a class-based society mirroring back-home would be
Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet where clerks and tradesmen did exactly that in India…and where, in three generations, from the Great
Mutiny (1857) forward, right on schedule, it all came tumbling down. “The Jewel in the Crown” (PBS 1984) is still a worthwhile
“read”.
Event Number One in American history was of course the American Revolution and all that balderdash Hume (and others)
wrote about and what Washington (and others)risked everything and fought about, ending America’s first three-generation
cycle with class and dashing what Harvard had unwittingly set out to do in 1636. By 1776, the early land barons had all built
their empires, their grandchildren adopting the airs of English nobility, and had become distant, indifferent, indeed oblivious to
what was a’blowin’ in the winds among the free farmers and tradesmen, led by such outlaws (I’m relating these events as
Nancy Pelosi might had she been there) as Franklin, Adams, and Tom Jefferson. After all, New York even had a social
season, just like London. What were they thinking?
Here at the Sands Institute we talk a lot about the sentiments behind the Revolution, for it was a turning point in world history,
not just our own. There was one novel-turned-into-film, The Tree of Liberty by Elizabeth Page (title taken from Jefferson’s
famous quote) that sort of captured the zeitgeist of the days before the Revolution. I recommend the book over a really awful
film adaptation, (1940) “The Howards of Virginia” with Cary Grant. Still, in a Cliff’s Notes sort of way, 90 minutes will suffice if
you want only to know about class division in circa 1760, or that Tom Jefferson had befriended this working class chap (Grant)
he’d gone to school with who moved to southwestern Virginia where there was still land to be cleared so he could built his
own version of a Virginia plantation. His love interest was the sister of one of those third generation villainous aristocrats we
all despise, who just reeked of John Kerry (played reekingly by Sir Cedric Hardwicke) and who chastised Jefferson for
befriending people like this surveyor , who was way beneath his class, then had to gnash his teeth and swear and cuss and
watch his sister go off to Roanoke to marry the guy. Egad!
What followed of course, was a war in which the sides split more or less down those very class lines, the landed gentry all
siding with King George (except the traitorous Jefferson, who apparently read too much)and the free farmers and tradesmen
siding with me and you and every other common Joe who ever breathed. (That’s how I saw it, at least. Maybe director Frank
Lloyd meant it differently.) The rest is history, as they say, and the tree was blooded for the first time.
That was the American lake’s first turnover, the first dodged bullet, turning us away from the path toward a European class
system. But sure enough, just about eighty years later, in 1860, the lake would take another flip, in part to be rid of the remains
of the ancien regime still existing in the South.
Both Mary Johnston’s novels (of Shirley Temple fame) and Margaret Mitchell’s film offers insights into a class
consciousness whose time simply had come. We all know the story of the Civil War so I won’t repeat it here, except to say that
it too was best revealed on the big screen in the 1930s. The tree was blooded once again, the tyranny this time, slavery. The
American lake turned over once again, and despite the loss of some wonderfully poignant traits of civilized behavior they still
haven’t learned in Cleveland, a cancerous tumor was removed…
…only to re-emerge by the 1930s in the remaining bastions of class in America, the winners in the Yankee north and the
new industrial sector. Risen apes. Only by now, thanks to Mark Twain an alert and sensitive literary class had emerged who
had witnessed Europe’s royal classes’ most recent attempt to assassinate themselves (there would be others…and will be
others). Aristocracy didn’t play well in America, even as John D was passing out pennies to waifs in New York. The robber
barons may have been many things, but try as they might, they weren’t royals. American literature wouldn’t allow it.
It’s not for me to get inside the minds and hearts of writers such as Sinclair Lewis or directors such as Frank Capra. They
both lived long enough to tell us what was on their minds without my interpretations. I just know what I see and read. Besides,
Hollywood had its own interpretations of literature. Actually, several, since, by the mid-1930s, Stalin was alive and well in
Hollywood. But so was fascism. It’s impossible for me to know how much of Hollywood’s social renderings on screen were
intentionally or mistakenly laid at the feet of a mean and ugly capitalism (Stalinist) or a capitalism too easy to access
(fascism), this latter based in the notion that some (uneducated) people just can’t handle financial success . They are too
backward, coarse and garish in their use of money and power so should therefore be denied access to it. (Also part of the
Lawyer’s Creed today, this seems to be where the “anti-capitalist” mood is now in America…fascist…and lawyers will
probably be the ones to take us there…before they are shot by the true fascisti. Hey, I didn’t write this script, I’m just reporting
on how facilitators are usually dealt with in the end.)
Regardless of their intentions, Capra and Hollywood connected with the common man and woman about themes that
universally resonate today, which is why those films are still watched today. It is also why Jane Austen and Dickens are still
read today, even by young people. All agree, down-the-nose snobbery is a bad thing, condescension is a bad thing, and
personal merit, ambition and initiative is a good thing.
Whether leaning toward Moscow or some other -ism, Hollywood in the late 30’s saw America culture coming to yet another
of those third generation crucibles. Capra showed it best, as all his films seemed to have a deep-seated love for the average
Joe. Everyone has seen “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) with mean old Mr Potter and the side-by-side views of how a little town
gets on, one with the fingerprints of a (little “l”) liberal (Jimmy Stewart), the other under the thumb of a controlling fasco-banker
(Lionel Barrymore).
I recommend you only see these films from a view point of class, and make up your own mind. See what you come away
with. I suggest “Dodsworth” (1936), “My Man Godfrey” (1936) Capra’s “You Can’t Take It with You” (1938), if you must, “The
Howards of Virginia (1940)” , “Pride and Prejudice” (1940 version) and only lately, “Miss Potter” (Rene Zellwegger, 2006 ) Then
watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” which is a totally different film when seen in the summer. Bedford Falls isn’t as much capitalist as
it is fascist, and remarkably, here’s the rub, pretty much how democrats and modern liberals want America to be today, when
everyone goes back to work on Monday morning hung over, sated and broke, living in slums owned by the bank.
Compare Mary Forbes’ Mrs Kirby (“You Can’t Take it With You) and Barbara Flynn’s Helen Potter (Beatrix’s mother) both of
whom remind us that Lady Disdain is a type that still lives and breathes. We see them daily, or have you forgotten the Clinton
White House? And how about the fact that words mean things? In “You Can’t Take it With You” “ambitious” was used as a
class-based dirty word (social climber), just as “condescension” was a virtuous one in the 1940 Pride and Prejudice film
version, as “oh how happy we should be that Lady Guttersnipe would deign to speak to us.” Ever try to talk to Joe Biden in the
hallway of the Senate Office building?
That trades people were looked down upon by Beatrix Potter’s mother, herself from the same the stock, brings to mind
another notable feature of most of the “class” films of the 1930’s, namely, that at the center of class pretentiousness in
America, was the risen woman. It’s remarkable how often Hollywood in the socialist leaning 1930s portrayed the ugliest
aspects of capitalist-based-class in the visage of disdainful women. “She” was the most pervasive center piece to the class
dramas and comedies of the era. Who can forget Dodsworth’s wastrel wife (Ruth Chatterton) from the Midwest or Alice Brady
in “Godfrey”, always flanked by the hard-working and long-suffering husband who actually made the money, played by the
gruff-voiced Eugene Pallette. The men may change, from rough hewn boobs (Pallette) to robber barons (Edward Arnold in
“You Can’t…) to kindly fathers (Edmund Gwenn in “Pride..”) to the miserably lost (Walter Huston in “Dodsworth”), but the wives
were eternally the engines that drove class consciousness. Even Walt Disney was chastised for having most of the villains in
his films be cast as women.
(Pg 2)
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |