[You don’t need to pay a monthly fee to have a
security company monitor your home or business
when you’re away. As long as you still have a
landline phone system, all you need is my
Telespy, an ordinary looking phone that calls you whenever an intruder breaks in. Then you can call the cops yourself. You’ll save hundreds of dollars every year,
just like I do.]
You just never know what kind of gems you’ll be treated to
when you catch an old b&w movie on TCM. My favorite are
the earliest talkies of the early 1930’s.
The movie studios then were owned by men who loved
this country, and they never missed a chance to put
pro-American dialogue in their scripts. This was during
the Great Depression, mind you, when the country’s
unemployment rate was in the high teens and early 20’s.
It was a tough time to be an American citizen then, a tough
time to find work, a tough time to keep food on the table.
It was not a time to give up on America, though, and
Hollywood certainly didn’t.
When times are tough, who better to speak of
American greatness than an immigrant?
That’s the story behind “Romance in Manhattan,”
a 1934 effort from RKO, starring Ginger Rogers as an
average American girl who runs into an illegal alien —
I hope you still amember that correct phraseology —
played by Francis Lederer.
Lederer’s character is illegal only because of a bureaucratic
foul up. He had gone through the regular immigration process
and showed up in New York thinking he had $8 more than he
needed, when actually, a higher minimum cash amount left him
$150 short. They put him on a boat to send him back to
Prague, he jumped ship, lost all his cash in the Hudson River,
but ended up in Ginger’s apartment.
All men should be so lucky, right?
So he’s broke, with no job, but he’s got a smile from ear
to ear, because he’s finally made it to America. The contrast
between this immigrant’s attitude and Ginger’s character,
having endured 5 years of the depression, is your classic
American immigrant story. America may be suffering through
a depression, but it was still the best place on earth:
“Here everybody can get ahead and climb to the heights
he dreams of. There is opportunity here,” he tells Ginger.
“Are you out to get rich,” she asks him.
“Of course. I want to be a millionaire. That’s what I came
to America for.” Amember, he’s flat busted broke.
“Well, do you think it’s as easy as all that?”
“I don’t think it will be easy. But that it can be done
at all, that’s grand. Do you know how many people
want to come to this country of yours? For millions, it is the
land of dreams and hopes, of achievement and happiness.”
“Do you really believe that,” she asks him.
“Of course….”
76 years later, and nothing’s changed. But that it can be done
at all, that’s grand. That is the greatness of the United
States. It’s not big, intrusive government that sucks the life
out of an economy, that prolongs recessions and makes them more
difficult to get over.
It’s opportunity that makes America grand, opportunity
for everyone who wants it.
It’s hard to find that message coming out of Hollywood these days,
but in its Golden Age, Hollywood could always be depended on to
tell the story of the greatness of America, and to tell it over and
over and over again.
If it ends up being a backhand across the feckless faces of Barry
and the democrats, then all the better. Feckless, by the bye, means
“useless, worthless, incompetent, inept, good-for-nothing.”
Ooooh, I like how that came out.