Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Ok. How about sieve. The Music Man .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Music_Man_(1962_film) , heh, never realized before
how much Robert Preston there sounded like my old favorite Elmer Gantry. Have used him here a number of times:

al44, Might as well share this with you clowns -- Biden’s Bold Move on Drug Prices Gives the GOP Two Choices: Change the Subject, or Lie

[...]

Trump is offering a simple rehash of an executive order he signed in October 2020, one that was later blocked by courts .. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-drug-pricing-idUSKBN28X2II .. in December 2020.

A 2020 report from the Center for American Progress accurately described .. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/little-late-trumps-prescription-drug-executive-order-not-help-patients/ .. Trump’s executive order as aimed at “tricking the public into believing that his administration will make meaningful changes to prescription drug prices” but only offering “bluster…without delivering for the American people.”

Over the last few years, the Republicans have had some success playing a shell game where Trump offers the public gimmicky faux-populist

[ One other input: Give me one single law anywhere which is not at times selectively applied. Brand is, no doubt at all a
hustler. One who rails about every complaint that exists in a modern society. A modern Elmer Gantry ..

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172752331

Music Man 1962 Elmer Gantry 1960 Maybe Preston liked Elmer as much as i did.

Umm, ok, haha, just now got to this mother lode: By Christopher Sharrett.

My recent viewing of Meredith Willson/Morton da Costa’s film The Music Man, for the first time in decades, forced me to reflect on my initial viewing (in 1962, the year of its release)

[Insert: Also the first year i took out from uni to umm, settle a so-troubled, mixed-up head by hopping on a freighter to Australia, the 1st
time. Middle of the ocean during the Cuban Crisis .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis . Damn. Those were some days.]

[...]

The following, very brief reflection is by no means a reevaluation of the film, since I have serious doubts that we profit from much close study; I am concerned for the moment mainly with the film’s attempt to display precisely what it wants to hide about American bourgeois culture, and the playing-out of its assumptions in the real world of the past half-century.

My contempt for The Music Man prevented me from seeing its important contradictions. Today it strikes me that The Music Man is essentially Elmer Gantry, with some important qualifications (the first being that it never comes close to Elmer Gantry’s level of achievement, an extraordinary film that I doubt could be made in the U.S. today). One film is an over-produced musical that wants to celebrate the goodness at the center of the Midwestern small town; the other an expose not just of the tent-show revivalism of the 1920s but of organized religion itself. Both films are about amoral but big-hearted con men who enjoy bilking gullible Midwestern rubes. Both films suggest that the moral fabric of the nation is flimsy, and that the nation’s leaders are ignorant fools. Both films star larger-than-life actors (Robert Preston in The Music Man, Burt Lancaster in Elmer Gantry). Burt Lancaster’s overripe, full-of-malarkey performance in Gantry is by far the more appealing than Robert Preston’s alternately unctuous and condescending Gregory/Professor Harold Hill, who has the supremely annoying habit, encouraged I suppose by the director, of jabbing his all-knowing forefinger into women’s faces. Lancaster’s presence in Richard Brooks’s adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel necessarily causes the film to elicit far more sympathy for Gantry than Lewis would think of permitting his character.

These correlations are mostly superficial, but in its important features, The Music Man can hardly conceal the assumptions it shares with the “serious” film, especially a profound contempt for bourgeois life. The Music Man even has a Gantry moment, when Robert Preston mounts a town monument of a bygone patriarch, informing the public of the moral hazards of pool-shooting as he breaks into the jokey sermonizing song “Ya Got Trouble.”

https://filmint.nu/the-music-man-in-retrospect/