Jimmy Stewart is artificially aged and then made young again in this ambitious propaganda film from director Mervyn LeRoy and Warner Bros. studios. The story covers a 35 year period of time, and the FBI action scenes are interspersed with an improbable domestic melodrama involving Vera Miles as the long-suffering wife. Interesting that 2 of Hitchcock's favorite actors show up here, and there are also some intriguing small performances from people like Nick Adams (as a man who blows up a jetliner to collect insurance money on his mother!).
I didn't think there was enough glue to hold all the parts together. Actually it bored me enough that I had to watch it in two sittings, which is unusual for me. At least one of the reviews here says that people are being distracted by their dislike of J. Edgar Hoover (whose voice appears often in the film, and who receives a special "thanks" -- in other words, he had script approval), and that the movie itself is actually pretty good. I disagree. The domestic situations with the daughter's love situation and the son going off to war are predictable and not well developed. Vera Miles' whole decision to leave him at one point comes off as very arbitrary. And there's really no attempt to link up the family story with the FBI story, other than a few scenes with Miles' wife character worrying about her husband getting shot.
So is it "good" propaganda? Yes, in the sense that it makes the FBI look a lot better than it deserves to. For example, there's a whole scene showing the FBI fighting against the KKK, but the film obviously ignores Hoover's tendency to harass civil rights activists just as much as he did the KKK. Then right after the film shows the FBI versus the KKK, it goes into a racist sequence that shows Native Americans, who've suddenly become rich from oil, spending their money and behaving like children. Obviously, they need the FBI to protect them because they can't take care of themselves. Later in the film, there's a sequence that justifies the FBI's role in arresting "criminal" Americans of Japanese and German descent during WWII. And the film's final action sequence involves a communist spy (who, the film points out, "looks normal" like all commie rats! They could be anywhere!), about whom Stewart jokes, "since he was a communist, we knew he wasn't going to church...."
Again, just to use one example from the film which to me was just unaccountably sloppy film-making (as opposed to this supposed maligned "good" film that is being dismissed because of its propaganda) -- there's the scene where Mario sacrifices himself to prevent the fascists from following Stewart and the other American across the bridge. But there's no explanation for why Mario couldn't have remained safe and just exploded the bridge from the other side, where Stewart was watching him get killed. It was just contrived to create a situation where they could show Mario sacrificing himself. Right from the scene earlier when he talks about how the river goes down to the sea, I knew he was gonna die, because in a movie from this era they never let a black or brown character say more than two or three words unless he's going to get killed. Ever notice that?
But hey, it's a good movie. Right?
I didn't think there was enough glue to hold all the parts together. Actually it bored me enough that I had to watch it in two sittings, which is unusual for me. At least one of the reviews here says that people are being distracted by their dislike of J. Edgar Hoover (whose voice appears often in the film, and who receives a special "thanks" -- in other words, he had script approval), and that the movie itself is actually pretty good. I disagree. The domestic situations with the daughter's love situation and the son going off to war are predictable and not well developed. Vera Miles' whole decision to leave him at one point comes off as very arbitrary. And there's really no attempt to link up the family story with the FBI story, other than a few scenes with Miles' wife character worrying about her husband getting shot.
So is it "good" propaganda? Yes, in the sense that it makes the FBI look a lot better than it deserves to. For example, there's a whole scene showing the FBI fighting against the KKK, but the film obviously ignores Hoover's tendency to harass civil rights activists just as much as he did the KKK. Then right after the film shows the FBI versus the KKK, it goes into a racist sequence that shows Native Americans, who've suddenly become rich from oil, spending their money and behaving like children. Obviously, they need the FBI to protect them because they can't take care of themselves. Later in the film, there's a sequence that justifies the FBI's role in arresting "criminal" Americans of Japanese and German descent during WWII. And the film's final action sequence involves a communist spy (who, the film points out, "looks normal" like all commie rats! They could be anywhere!), about whom Stewart jokes, "since he was a communist, we knew he wasn't going to church...."
Again, just to use one example from the film which to me was just unaccountably sloppy film-making (as opposed to this supposed maligned "good" film that is being dismissed because of its propaganda) -- there's the scene where Mario sacrifices himself to prevent the fascists from following Stewart and the other American across the bridge. But there's no explanation for why Mario couldn't have remained safe and just exploded the bridge from the other side, where Stewart was watching him get killed. It was just contrived to create a situation where they could show Mario sacrificing himself. Right from the scene earlier when he talks about how the river goes down to the sea, I knew he was gonna die, because in a movie from this era they never let a black or brown character say more than two or three words unless he's going to get killed. Ever notice that?
But hey, it's a good movie. Right?