Idly channel-surfing the other day, I stumbled on a Turner Classic
Movies screening of Let Freedom Ring,
a 1939 Nelson Eddy vehicle. Eddy plays a
Harvard man who returns to his native Montana mining town where reliably wicked
Edward Arnold is trying to push through a railroad that will deprive the
workers of their jobs and take away the homestead of Eddy's father, crippled
Lionel Barrymore. Victor McLaglen plays
a bully with a heart of gold. Eddy does
a Scarlet Pimpernel, pretending to go along with Arnold while secretly writing
exposés for a
crusading little newspaper, The Wasp.
While rallying the workers and foiling Arnold's plots, Eddy takes time
to sing several operatic numbers, as the movie audience of those days had come
to expect.
The movie is hopelessly corny, despite having been written
by Ben Hecht, but it brought tears to my eyes at the end as the heroine turned
the workers around by starting to sing "My Country, 'Tis Of Thee." Now, I admit that I am, as Jude Law says to
Cameron Diaz in Holiday, "a
weeper." But as I slouch along to
my eighties, my heart yearns for the days when a movie would unabashedly appeal
to workers and the college educated alike against barracuda capitalism. Young people must find it hard to believe
that there really was such a time in this country.
Don't get me wrong.
There is plenty to dislike about the old days -- for starters, no Black
faces, and women consigned to supporting roles in any serious political
story. But at least everyone understood
that the enemy was the capitalists, and that the secret to overcoming them was
solidarity. That is not s subtle
message, nor is it at all original, but it is true, damn it, and that ought to
count for something!
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