My new puppy has kennel cough...so I stayed up with her in our casita (read garage converted into studio) so my wife and other dog could sleep undisturbed through the night... The point is: my resulting insomnia led to an all-night-into-early-morning sojurn through old movies on TCM...pre-war comedies, wartime musicals...all great stuff...leading to this morning's showing of the Preston Sturges film CHRISTMAS IN JULY...made in 1940, when this country was still struggling to remove itself from the Great Depression...
In one of the opening scenes, Dick Powell (playing a guy with big dreams but a dead-end, low paying accountancy job) is daydreaming at his desk, and his supervisor (played by wonderful character actor Harry Hayden) calls him into his office. Hayden's character gives Powell a pep talk. The gist of it is that Powell has to think of himself as a success, or he never will be one. The gem of this speech is as follows (with apologies to Sturges, who says it a little differently and a lot better):
"No system can succeed if only one-half of 1% of the parts are a success, while the rest of the parts are failures! All parts must be successful for the system to succeed!"
I sat there dumbstruck.
Here, coming off the screen in a film made 72 years ago, reflective of a time where economic struggle and the fear which accompanies it were spread across all classes in this country, was a razor-sharp and cogent message for our time.
If ever there was a message for the Democrats and Progressives to adopt in this fight against the Right-Wing, class-warfare mongers who want to see more wealth distributed to the wealthiest while the rest of us are left to scramble for the crumbs, this is it!
Please, Lord, let somebody on the DNC have been watching TNC this morning, and take this message to President Obama, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and all the other warriors in this battle, and let their speechwriters and ad campaign managers get the soundbite of Harry Hayden's speech from this film, and play that 10-15 seconds over and over and over again on every station in this country.
Then, it would turn out that the title CHRISTMAS IN JULY would be particularly meaningful, if it turned out that Preston Sturges' words gave a great gift to the Progressive cause in the defeat of the Republicans in the upcoming election.
