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no_hypocrisy

(46,104 posts)
2. I still get a big kick out of the fact that Howard da Silva got the last word.
Fri Jul 4, 2014, 08:56 PM
Jul 2014

Playing Founding Father Benjamin Franklin after being unfairly and illegally blacklisted. (He originated the role of Larry Foreman in "The Cradle Will Rock" on Broadway.)

pam4water

(2,916 posts)
11. I'm Irish not English. That is a cheap shot, but that is to be expected from someone who gets
Sun Jul 6, 2014, 12:40 AM
Jul 2014

there history form a video game. Off to block you now.

intheflow

(28,473 posts)
9. Very political movie when it came out! Nixon pressured the director to cut a scene, which he did.
Sat Jul 5, 2014, 01:22 AM
Jul 2014

From Wikipedia, but also on bonus material on the DVD:

The song "Cool, Cool, Considerate Men" depicts Revolutionary War–era conservatives as power-hungry wheedlers focused on maintaining wealth. According to Jack L. Warner, the film's producer and a friend of U.S. President Richard Nixon, Nixon pressured him to cut the song from the 1972 film version of the show, which Warner did. Nixon apparently saw the song as an insult to the conservatives of his time, it suggesting that the conservatives were the ones who were hindering American Independence as they danced a minuet singing the song that included the stanza,

Come ye cool, cool considerate set

We'll dance together to the same minuet

To the right, ever to the right

Never to the left, forever to the right.

To further complicate things as mentioned above, the song is anachronistic, because, the terms "right" and "left" in politics were not coined until the French Revolution. Warner also wanted the original negative of the song shredded, but the film's editor secretly kept it intact. It was only decades later that the song was restored to the film.


I saw the movie on a sixth grade field trip in 1976 and was amazed at that scene - which I hadn't remembered, for good reason - when I watched it again on DVD some 25 or 30 years later. It is one of the most powerful scenes in the movie and one can really see why Nixon was so threatened by it as he was facing a looming impeachment. the conservatives in the movie not only dance a minuet as they sing this, they finish the song by goose-stepping out of Congress.
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