When you are in the actual time of a movie: when it is made, you cannot see what you can later perceive as important historical sweeps. I imagine that is true of everything, But movies — most of them — are made for a very specific purpose. They are designed to make money by tapping some part of our psyche to tickle money our of our pockets.
Films are made for a specific era. That was absolutely true when this was made. No one imagined that it would have any life at all after spending a couple weeks in theaters. Jimmy Stewart, especially, could not have been aware what was in store. We know that what was coming within the decade was two of the most powerful and important films ever made: "Rear Window" and the much more elaborate "Vertigo." These are deep films that pulled a great many tricks, and one of the tricks was using Stewart.
He was selected because the audiences of that time would have known him from films like this one. Sure, he did some war and cowboy movies, but the public knew him and registered him against just exactly this sort of thing. Lovable, somewhat dim, earnest. A family man with a family that — as much through TeeVee — would leave fiction and become a sort of idealistic touchstone for a world. This has been termed an everyman, but it is more than that, much more in my opinion.
Film was inventing a pattern some called noir, where the viewers' needs entered the world of the characters and grabbed some hapless guy in a barrage of coincidence. Undetected at the time because of a lack of characteristic visual style was a parallel, the complement. The noir guy was tough, treated girls roughly and was able to master some important element of the situation. The dual was, well... Stewart's template: family man, and so on, but befalling the same sort of viewer-directed caprice.
What we have here is what I consider the peak of that. The peak would have to be a film so insignificant that it does not register on any list.
If you do not know it, he has a family. Two cute kids (including Natalie Wood). Barbara Hale as wife. She would later become Perry Mason's love interest. He has what would then be seen as a middle class job. A bomb lands on him not in the form of a disaster, but in the form of hundreds of prizes from a contest, dropped on him in a crude folding technique: the mystery husband contest over the radio. Radio at the time would have worked as a surrogate for the film within. Hilarity ensues.
We needed this and all the ones like it he did, for us to have "Rear Window" and "vertigo" which in a real sense fold these in.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
Films are made for a specific era. That was absolutely true when this was made. No one imagined that it would have any life at all after spending a couple weeks in theaters. Jimmy Stewart, especially, could not have been aware what was in store. We know that what was coming within the decade was two of the most powerful and important films ever made: "Rear Window" and the much more elaborate "Vertigo." These are deep films that pulled a great many tricks, and one of the tricks was using Stewart.
He was selected because the audiences of that time would have known him from films like this one. Sure, he did some war and cowboy movies, but the public knew him and registered him against just exactly this sort of thing. Lovable, somewhat dim, earnest. A family man with a family that — as much through TeeVee — would leave fiction and become a sort of idealistic touchstone for a world. This has been termed an everyman, but it is more than that, much more in my opinion.
Film was inventing a pattern some called noir, where the viewers' needs entered the world of the characters and grabbed some hapless guy in a barrage of coincidence. Undetected at the time because of a lack of characteristic visual style was a parallel, the complement. The noir guy was tough, treated girls roughly and was able to master some important element of the situation. The dual was, well... Stewart's template: family man, and so on, but befalling the same sort of viewer-directed caprice.
What we have here is what I consider the peak of that. The peak would have to be a film so insignificant that it does not register on any list.
If you do not know it, he has a family. Two cute kids (including Natalie Wood). Barbara Hale as wife. She would later become Perry Mason's love interest. He has what would then be seen as a middle class job. A bomb lands on him not in the form of a disaster, but in the form of hundreds of prizes from a contest, dropped on him in a crude folding technique: the mystery husband contest over the radio. Radio at the time would have worked as a surrogate for the film within. Hilarity ensues.
We needed this and all the ones like it he did, for us to have "Rear Window" and "vertigo" which in a real sense fold these in.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.