Magic Town Blu-ray Review
Mr. Smith Goes to Grandview.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, April 22, 2013
One of the most amazing phenomena that cropped up during the 2012 Presidential election was the pooh-poohing of
polls by a number of analysts, mostly, if not entirely, limited to those on the right side of the political spectrum. While
most national polls showed things amazingly close in the closing days of the Obama-Romney competition, a lot of right
leaning analysts outright dismissed
any poll which put Obama even slightly ahead. That phenomenon became
almost surreal on election night when none other than Karl Rove, the so-called "architect" who had designed George
Bush's victories, refused to believe the
ultimate poll—actual election returns. Rove's mini-meltdown on Fox
News became an overnight internet meme as well as fodder for expected comedy routines by the likes of Jon Stewart
and Stephen Colbert. Polls of course can often be wrong, to the point where the iconic picture of President Truman
holding up the newspaper proclaiming his defeat at the hands of Thomas Dewey has become indelibly imprinted on
even those who couldn't care less about American history in general. The science of polling has become considerably
more scientific over the past couple of decades, and "poll averaging" sites like Nate Silver's famous
FiveThirtyEight Blog have taken the analysis to heretofore unimagined heights of insight (it's fascinating to realize that
Silver's background was in baseball statistics analysis). Back in the "Dark Ages" of the 1940s, however, pollsters were
a more "up close and personal" lot, often going door to door to interview subjects and compiling their data in similarly
old fashioned ways.
Magic Town is a charming comedy that could have come from the hand of Frank Capra
which deals with a pollster who discovers an amazing little bellwether town which doesn't just predict elections
accurately but seemingly is almost like a fractal image of America at large, a microcosmic recreation of our nation's
opinions on just about
everything. Could greed and the nefarious influences of rampant Capitalism be far
behind?
The Capraesque connection becomes quite clear when one realizes that Robert Riskin wrote the screenplay for
Magic
Town. Riskin wrote several of Capra's most well remembered films, including
It Happened One Night,
Lady
for a Day,
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,
Lost Horizon and
Meet John Doe (Riskin also adapted the
Kaufman and Hart comedy
You Can't Take It With You for the screen for Capra). Riskin evidently divorced
himself
from his professional collaboration with the famous director because he felt Capra was hogging the limelight to himself
when Riskin perhaps understandably felt that
his contributions were at least as important, but
Magic
Town
is a pointed example that even the best intentions can sometimes go at least slightly by the wayside. For all of its
Capraesque demeanor,
Magic Town misses something of that—well, magic spark that often infused Capra's best
films. The film is perfectly enjoyable and even affecting, but it's also strangely meandering and all over the map, as if
Riskin had a checklist of society's peccadilloes he wanted to address and needed to make sure all of them got covered
in
one film.
James Stewart portrays hapless pollster Lawrence "Rip" Smith, who as the film begins is watching his tony Manhattan
office close up shop after having lost a sizable polling contract. Smith is a dreamer, a perfectly Capraesque hero who
fantasizes over finding a "mathematically perfect" aggregation of people who will make polling an easy prospect. And
just like that, a cursory perusal of a newspaper offered to him by a competing firm that wants to hire him makes Smith
aware that such a town exists, a little out of the way place called Grandview. In something akin to the Heisenberg
Principle, Smith wants to make sure that the people he's polling don't become aware of what's going on (thereby
ruining the "purity" of their responses), and so decides to ingratiate himself, along with two of his co-workers, as
insurance salesmen looking to make Grandview their new place of business.
Almost immediately upon arriving in town, Smith raises the hackles and suspicions of comely young newspaper editor
Mary Peterman (Jane Wyman). Mary is convinced Smith is up to something, and not just because every insurance agent
in Grandview is basically starving. She's also put off by Smith's insistence that the town not change one iota (thereby
ruining his chances of polling their "mathematical perfection"), especially when Mary is all about progress and change,
having been a longtime booster of a new Civic Center project which she is sure will revitalize her little burg. Mary sets
out to find out who exactly Smith is, writing some fairly derogatory stories about him in the local paper. Can true love
be far behind?
Quite a bit of
Magic Town works beautifully, albeit in an admittedly old fashioned, fairly corny, style. But about
two thirds of the way through the film, right at the point where everything falls apart for Smith after Mary discovers his
true intentions, the film goes off on a wild tangent where Grandview's sudden celebrity (due to being "mathematically
perfect") makes it a flash in the pan, a town full of real estate speculators, people out to make a quick buck and
thousands of new residents wanting to live in such a modern Shangri-La. This final act of the film is really peculiar, all
the more so because Grandview goes completely bust, seemingly simply because both Smith and Mary were too proud
to admit their personal agendas, leaving the idyllic little village to suffer.
That leaves Riskin and director William Wellman a lot to mop up in relatively short amount of time, and despite the ever
popular montage sequence, things come to their expected happy ending in a bit too rote of a manner to work up much
emotion. The final shot—of Mary and Smith just
barely being able to touch each other through a celebratory
throng—is perhaps indicative of the film's impact as well.
Magic Town does pretty well for most of its running
time, but it never completely reaches the audience in that fundamental way that the best Capra films typically do.
Magic Town Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation
If Riskin had simply revisited his third act in
Magic Town, he may have had another blockbuster on his hands. A lot
of
Magic Town is hugely enjoyable. The basic set up is brisk and innovative, and the interplay between Stewart and
Wyman follows in the grand tradition of hate at first sight, true love to inevitably follow quickly behind. The supporting cast
here is full of stellar bits by the likes of Donald Meek (as the wonderfully named Mr. Twiddle), Kent Smith as a war buddy of
Rip's who helps him infiltrate Grandview, and a hilarious Ned Sparks as Smith's main aide, a cigar chomping cynic who sees
right through Rip's greed. But there's something missing here, some indelible spark of energy that keeps the film from ever
completely igniting. Still, with expectations perhaps lowered appropriately, there's quite a bit about
Magic Town to
enjoy, if not to love. This Blu-ray features excellent video and very good audio and comes
Recommended.
