ORIGINALLY AIRED

SEPTEMBER 7TH AT 8 PM ET

ICONS SPECIAL PRESENTATION

POLITICS ON FILM

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SPECIAL PRESENTATION -- POLITICS ON FILM

“Wherever there is greatness, great government or power, even great feeling or compassion, error also is great.  We progress and mature by fault.”

– Ben-Hur (1959)

From the earliest days of film, politics was infused in the medium. Major works like D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane addressed some of the most contentious social and political issues of their day. During the Great Depression, Warner Brothers released a string of musicals that were full-on endorsements of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. William Randolph Hearst’s Gabriel Over The White House featured the angel Gabriel guiding the President of the United States as he dismisses his Cabinet and cures the nation of unemployment and poverty.

Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939) and Meet John Doe (1941), both directed by Frank Capra, dealt with government corruption and home-grown fascism.

Several pre-WW II films from WB took aim at the dangers of isolationism and Nazis in America, including Sergeant York and Confessions Of A Nazi Spy. World War II heralded a whole library of films produced with the politics of war in mind. In the film Sands of Iwo Jima, for example, John Wayne portrays Sgt. John Stryker, a gallant soldier heroically carrying forth the flag of American democracy (the film’s unsubtle patriotism was sliced-and-diced by two Clint Eastwood-directed films from 2006: Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima). And even seemingly unserious films such as Shirley Temple’s Bright Eyes and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ Flying Down to Rio presented a clear response by Hollywood to the social malaise of the early 1930s.

Politics, it seems, is not new to Hollywood. Harvard Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies John D. Connor has argued that, “It’s only the conservative critics of the 1960’s who think that movies were once placid entertainment that got ‘politicized’ by radicals of various kinds.” The cinema may allow its audience to travel to worlds of fancy, but those worlds have always responded to issues in contemporary society.

The intense political polarization and radicalization brought on by the Vietnam War brought with it a new breed of explicitly political cinema. Characterized by a more serious questioning of the government itself, this new era saw films that undermined particular leaders (All the President’s Men) and asked questions about the nature of war itself (Apocalypse Now).

In this year 2008, amid the Presidential race between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain, politics in film is timely, indeed.