BY JOHN M. WHALEN
“The Last Hurrah,†a limited edition Blu-ray release from
Twilight Time, opens just as Mayor Frank Skeffington (Spencer Tracy) announces
he’s going to run for a fifth term. As played by Tracy, Skeffington is an
admittedly corrupt Irish politician who believes you can’t run a city without a
little grease on the wheels. But it’s okay because Skeffington is a man with a
good heart. He’s for the working man and the poor, and his enemies are the
Yankee Blue Blood elites who hate the Catholic Irish immigrants who have taken
over the city.
The city, incidentally, is described only as “A New
England City,†But the film is based on Edwin O’Connor’s novel of the same
title, which was based on the life and career of James Michael Curley, the four-term
mayor of Boston between 1920 and 1950. Director John Ford (with the help of screenwriter
Frank Nugent, who worked with Ford on “The Searchers,†“The Quiet Man†and
other films), took O’Connor’s book, knocked some of the rougher edges off the
character and turned it into a sentimental look at a time in American politics
so different from today that it might as well have happened on a different
planet. “The Last Hurrah†shows us America before the media took it over.
Adam Caulfield (Jeffrey Hunter), the mayor’s nephew, is a
sports writer working for the newspaper owned by Amos Force (John Carradine),
one of Skeffington’s bitterest enemies. The mayor invites Caulfield to cover
his campaign for the paper, telling him it’ll be one of the last chances to see
how an urban election campaign is run before radio and television change
everything. Skeffington knows his kind of politics has had its day, and
politicians like him are on their way out.
Skeffington believes in going out to meet people in
person, shaking hands and talking to the voters. He invites Caulfield to join
him at the wake of a former associate by the name of Knocko, who died nearly
friendless and whose widow is now broke and can barely afford funeral expenses.
He orders food and flowers and gets a crowd to show up. Caulfield becomes incensed
when he realizes that his uncle has basically turned his dead friend’s wake
into a political rally. But Skeffington’s closest aide John Gorman (Pat
O’Brien) tells him that his uncle gave the widow $1,000, and talked the funeral
director into cutting his bill to practically nothing. He also made the widow
believe that her unpopular husband actually had a lot of friends. You can’t
hold something like that against a guy.
The main conflict in the film is between the mayor, Force,
the newspaper publisher, and banker Norman Cass, Sr. (Basil Rathbone). When
Cass informs the mayor by letter that his bank will not provide the funds
needed for a public housing project for the poor, the mayor marches into the
private Plymouth Club, where all the blue bloods hang out, and threatens to go
to the newspapers with every dirty little thing he knows about the banker. When
that produces little reaction, the mayor cons Cass’s less-than-bright son to
accept an appointment as fire commissioner. He takes a ludicrous picture of him
dressed in a raincoat and fireman’s hat and calls Cass, Sr. into his office and
threating to make his son’s humiliation public unless he comes up with the
money for housing. Cass is forced to agree but before he leaves Skeffington’s
office he picks up the phone on the mayor’s desk, calls his bank and tells his
assistant to deposit $400,000 into a rival campaign.
“The Last Hurrah,†is also a farewell to a world of
civility and fair play. Even in 1959 Ford must have sensed the world that was
coming. Prejudice and hatred play a large part of the background of the story,
with Protestant elites and Irish immigrants at war with each other. Powerful
men like Force and Cass still exist today. Substitute Mexicans for Irishmen and
you could be talking about the election of 2016.
Finally, “The Last Hurrah,†is a farewell to the way
movies used to be made. The cast is made up almost totally of actors who had
been part of Ford’s “stock company in the films he made over 50 years. In addition
to Pat O’Brien, John Carradine, and others already named, you’ll find Edward
Brophy, James Gleason, Jane Darwell, Wallace Ford, and Frank McHugh. Even
Ricardo Cortez appears, dropping his Latin Lover façade, playing Jewish lawyer
Sam Weinberg. Ken Curtis and Edmund Lowe show up as well.
Twilight Time has given “The Last Hurrah†an excellent
1080p High Definition transfer to a region-free Blu-ray that presents Charles Lawton’s black
and white cinematography in rich, highly textured detail. Twilight Time’s Nick
Redman, and Julie Kirgo, and screenwriter Lem Dobbs (“The Limeyâ€) provide an
informative and interesting commentary on the audio track. Special features
include a separate audio track for the soundtrack and the theatrical trailer.
As for the film itself, it’s not one of Ford’s greatest
movies. Nugent’s screenplay oversimplifies the story, and seems to
intentionally avoid some of the dramatic conflict. Tracy glides through the
scenario so lightly you’d hardly know he’s in the political fight of his life.
Some of the characters come off as ridiculous caricatures, especially the idiot
sons of both Skeffington and Cass. How dumb can grown men be? We’ve seen all
the background characters before in Ford’s other movies, but that gathering of
so many of them, all crammed into scenes in the funeral parlor and campaign
headquarters on election night, makes it special in its own way. After all,
it’s a John Ford film, and he never made a bad one.
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John M. Whalen is the author of "Tragon of Ramura". Click here to order from Amazon.