Mr. Deeds Goes to Town - 1936

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Jean Arthur, Gary Cooper, 1936 Giclee Print
12 in. x 9 in.

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Capra's populist romantic screwball comedy based on Opera Hat, a Saturday Evening Post story by Clarence Budington Kelland. Mandrake Falls, Vermont greeting-card poetry-writing, tuba-playing rube Longfellow Deeds (Cooper) inherits $20 million from his wealthy NYC uncle, but eccentrically decides to be philanthropic and give it to Depression-Era needy. A hot-shot news reporter Babe Bennett (Arthur) poses as an out-of-work stenographer to get close to him for a story - calling him "The Cinderella Man." She falls in love, defending him when he is declared insane and goes to trial, and is accused of being 'pixilated.' Eventually, he defends himself and is acquitted by the judge: "...you are not only sane but you're the sanest man that ever walked into this courtroom."

High Noon - 1952

High Noon, Gary Cooper, 1952 Giclee Print
9 in. x 12 in.
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High Noon (1952) is probably the best movie of all time ever made in the West - one production well at the box office by Stanley Kramer and director Fred Zinnemann (who also directed From Here to Eternity (1953) and A Man For All Seasons (1966)). The type of the West was busy telling a story unusual social problem on civic responsibility, without much violence typical border, sweeping landscapes, or tribes of marauding Indians.

screenplay by Carl Foreman [this was his last film before Hollywood blacklist exile in London soon after his work on Home of the Brave (1949), Champion (1949) and men (1950)] written in a policy-oppressive atmosphere in the early 1950s when McCarthyism and political persecution multiply, was loosely adapted from a news magazine Collier's The Tin Star (by John W. Cunningham) published in December 1947 . In fact, the film's story has often been interpreted as a moral or parable or a metaphor for the artists threatened the Hollywood blacklist (which was a screenwriter Foreman) who faced persecution policy HUAC during the McCarthy era due to real or imagined connections to the Communist Party, and makes vital decisions to stand their ground and defend moral principles according to their conscience.

It has also been interpreted as an allegory of the Cold War and American foreign policy during the Korean War. This taut, well-scripted, minimalist film tells the story of a loner, stoic marshal honor-bound / hero, past his prime minister and already retired, which was left deserted and abandoned Hadleyville by people he had faithfully protected for many years (symbolically - in the years of the Second World War). Because of the cowardice of the inhabitants of the city (representing cooperative witnesses before HUAC), physical disability, interest, opportunism, and indecision, he was refused help at every turn against a killer quest for revenge and his band. Fearful but duty, he finally defeated the enemy, thereby sparing the civilized (democratic) of the city's encroachment barbaristic frontier justice brought by the deadly four-man group of outlaws (the symbol of aggressive threat the Korean War, or HUAC itself). Embittered by the end of the film, he throws his tin star in the dirt of the border town of dishonor.