by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After watching a
spectacular dance sequence from the feature The Seven Little Foys — a 1955 biopic with Bob Hope as Eddie Foy, Sr.
and, in this one clip, James Cagney reprising his role as George M. Cohan from Yankee
Doodle Dandy and doing an incredible
dance duet (Cagney said in his autobiography that his one regret about his
career was that he hadn’t got to do more musicals, and here he dances up a
storm and Hope keeps right up with him; it’s easy to forget that Hope began as
a dancer as well as a comic, and he was good enough on his feet that his
star-making role in the 1933 stage musical Roberta was played by Fred Astaire in the 1935 film
version) — Charles and I ran a quite remarkable political commercial from 1944
called Hell Bent for Election, produced by the United Auto Workers (who then had a much longer and
more complicated name — “United Automobile, Aircraft and Agricultural Implement
Workers of America”) as what appears to have been an independent campaign for
the re-election of Franklin D. Roosevelt for President and for the Democrats
generally.
It’s a fascinating film for two reasons: first, it’s done in a
beautiful state-of-the-art cartoon style — the director is Charles M. Jones,
better known to cartoon buffs as Chuck Jones, who didn’t create the character
of Bugs Bunny for Warner Bros. but did make many of the best cartoons with Bugs and the other characters in
the Warners stable; the songs (including the Roosevelt campaign anthem “Gotta
Get Out and Vote,” which I’ve heard elsewhere in a stunning broadcast recording
by lifelong Democrat Judy Garland — who campaigned for Roosevelt in 1944 and
Kennedy in 1960 and got savaged by the Right-wing journalists and columnists of
her time!) are by Ballad for Americans and “The House I Live In” composer Earl Robinson with lyrics by E. Y.
Harburg from The Wizard of Oz; and some of the people who later became stalwarts at the United
Productions of America (U.P.A.) animation studio, including designer and
storyboard artist John Hubley, were involved in the project. Actress Karen
Morley was credited with “assistance,” and later quite a few people involved in
this movie, including her, Harburg and Hubley, would be blacklisted. (That’s
why Ira Gershwin, not Harburg, got to write the lyrics for Harold Arlen’s songs
in the 1954 A Star Is Born.)
The cartoon’s premise is that there are two trains running and heading
for Track 44, a state-of-the-art diesel streamliner with Franklin Roosevelt’s
face and a sorry-looking toonerville trolley with the face of his Republican
opponent, Thomas E. Dewey. Only one train can take the track, and it’s up to
union worker Joe (a tall, strapping blond with muscles to die for) to resist
the attempts of a caricatured capitalist (who looks something like the little
man on the Monopoly cards)
to lull him to sleep so that Dewey’s train, not Roosevelt’s, gets on the track
that will carry him to the White House. The situations and their staging rival
anything Chuck Jones did for his commercial employers, and the other
fascinating thing about this cartoon is to note just how little, at least on
the Republican side, the arguments have changed. When the caricatured
capitalist was cavorting on screen and a narrator was expressing his and the
Republicans’ point of view — lower taxes, less regulation, dismantling the
social safety net, and a freeze on workers’ wages while big business makes more
money — the sentiments are those of any Tea Party meeting or Right-wing talk
show today.
The sad part of watching this 1944 film in 2011 is how far the Democrats have fallen, from forthright advocacy of
retirement security, unemployment compensation, education and health care for
all, and responsible regulation of the business sector in the public interest
to nibbling away at all those things and essentially accepting the Republican
point of view that we have to coddle the business sector, deregulate it, give
it tons of money via tax cuts and expect working people to pay for it, only
doing all this not quite so quickly and brutally as the Republicans want to do
it. Charles pointed out that if Obama and his people were to use the arguments
in this film in his
re-election campaign, he’d score an easy victory — but of course he won’t — and
I wondered what the kids in the Occupy encampments would make of this film and
the evidence in it that once upon a time one of the two major parties in the
U.S. was publicly identified with an agenda so radical it’s considered totally
beyond the pale of mainstream politics today.
