State of the Union Isn't About Today. It Just Feels That Way!

 

 

 

 

State of the Union (1948)

Directed by Frank Capra

MGM, 124 minutes, Not-rated.

★★★ ½

 

State of the Union feels strangely contemporary. More’s the pity. This Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn vehicle is about a populist Republican presidential candidate who becomes a tool for a tawdry cabal bent upon self-enrichment. Relax, no one was anticipating the events of 2020s. First of all, this is a Frank Capra-directed film. Capra was a conservative and, for a time, sympathetic to both Franco and Mussolini. Most of his films champion the proverbial “little guy,” but what’s on the screen is more about fair play than partisanship. Within film history, Capra is the quintessential master of the screwball comedy (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, It Happened One Night, It’s a Wonderful Life, etc.)

 

As if often the case, the bloodiest politics took place off the screen. It wasn’t supposed to be a Tracy/Hepburn movie. Capra originally wanted Claudine Colbert (It Happened One Night) as his female lead, but the two quarreled and Colbert walked away from the project. Hepburn, an ultra-liberal, took her place and couldn’t stomach Adolph Menjou, a right-winger who outed radicals during the post-World War II Red Scare assault on Hollywood. Hepburn was upper-crust Connecticut civil to Menjou, frosty but proper. Ultimately, the film was a satirical take on the politics of its day, not ours.

 

Capra’s film was based on a 1945 Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name written by Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay. In 1945, Franklin Roosevelt began his fourth term as president–a subsequent Constitutional amendment limited presidents to two terms–but Roosevelt died in April 1945, with Vice President Harry Truman assuming the White House. By the time the movie was released, World War II had been won and smart money said Republican candidate Thomas Dewey would defeat Truman in the 1948 presidential release. It was such a given that several newspapers announced that Dewey won; Truman actually took the popular vote by 4% and the electoral vote by a 303 to 189 margin.

 

State of the Union begins with publisher Sam Thorndyke–modeled after William Randolph Hearst or Frank Gannett–about to die. His daughter Kay (Angela Lansbury) vows to take revenge on liberals (read Democrats) per her father’s wishes. She doesn’t bother to tell him that she’s having an affair with married aircraft manufacturer Grant Matthews (Tracy). Grant has folksy opinions galore. He utters nostrums with such conviction that they sound convincing even when they are short (or devoid) of detail. At times even his estranged wife Mary (Hepburn) is semi-convinced, though she doesn’t take it seriously when he considers running for president. Mary does not yet know that Kay Thorndyke is putting those ideas in his head. One wonders if Grant knows he’s being set up to become Kay’s puppet.

 

Grant comes off as for forgotten Americans and borrows other Roosevelt tactics such as fireside chats and appearing with his son Georgie, perhaps a substitute for FDR’s dog Fala. Kay uses her newspaper empire to sandbag GOP frontrunners such as Dewey, Robert Taft, Douglas MacArthur, and others. She also uses secret threats to align business interests with Grant’s burgeoning campaign.

 

The problem with the Matthews bandwagon is that Grant believes his own speeches about taking on both Big Labor and Big Business, bipartisanship, and his various promises to the proverbial “average” Americans (waiters, bellhops, his barber, and blue-collar workers). Kay’s next step is to manipulate Grant with campaign strategists such as Spike McManus (Van Johnson) and Jim Conover (Menjou). Kay even convinces Grant to go back to Mary and put their affair on hold until after the election. But when Mary gets wise, all strategy and counter-strategy passes to the women.

 

This being a Capra film in the era of the Hollywood Code, you can anticipate a “cat fight,” to use the sexist parlance of the day. Nor was Capra bashful about pouring on the schmaltz, and he simply didn’t do bleak endings. In other words, there’s little reason to think of State of the Union as serious political commentary. If there is a weightier moral to the film, it is that American politics have been an act of performed theatrics for a long time (as in, from the founding through 2025).

 

A final note, if one of the minor characters looks fainty “witchy,” it’s because she is Margaret Hamilton from The Wizard of Oz.

 

Rob Weir