You won't be disappointed!

Sadly Over-hyped

One of my all time favorites.

The acting in this movie is really good.

***SPOILERS**** The world of changing politics is confronted by the four time elect mayor of an unmanned New England state, that's also unmanned, city the honorable Frank Skeffington played by a snow white as a sheet looking Spencer Tracey who's a bit to old, looking as if he's in his late 80's, for the job at hand. At first Skeffington has to deal with a very unfriendly press who supports his young ands untested opponent upright family man & war hero Kevin McCluskey, Charles Fitzsimmons, who seems to have no chance of winning. The editor of one of the state's major papers Amos Force, John Carradine, has had it in for Skeffington since his mother was caught stealing two overripe bananas and an apple from the Force household some 60 years ago when she was working for .25 an hour as a maid there. It's when Skeffington age that really starts to show, in him living in the past not the present, as at first his poll numbers start to fall and the public soon realize that his health is a major issue in the long and grueling campaign. Skeffington also oversteps his bounds by taking on the political powers of the state & city using blackmail tactics, in getting low income housing built, against the big real estate interests represented by Norman Cass Sr, Basil Rathbone,that later comes back to haunt him.***SPOILERS*** As election night shows Skeffington attempt at a fifth term as mayor goes up in flames despite the polls by then showing him well ahead in double digits. The shock of his delete leaves both Skeffington and his supports for the first time in the campaign completely speechless! Putting aside his defeat to the unknown Kevin McCluskey Steffington after getting a long rest then plans to run for governor of the state despite his friends as well as doctors pleading against it! As fate would have it Skeffington never made it out of his sick bed and peacefully, off camera, passed away before he could put his future plans into motion. It was a good try on Skeffington's part to get himself elected for an un-precedented fifth time as mayor but his gas tank as well as heart came up empty in the end. It was also the new technology, T.V in particular, that did the old guy in by him not quite knowing how to handle it correctly.P.S The movie is a lot like two years later in real life in 1960 with Richard Nixon screwing up his live on T.V debate for president with John F. Kennedy by refusing to ware make-up and not looking presidential like not getting a real close shave, looking like a bum under the T.V lights, and wearing a dull gray not colorful suite in order for him to show the T.V viewers that he's up for the job.

John Ford produced and directed this well-cast but overlong, cumbersome and set-bound political melodrama, adapted from Edwin O'Connor's novel by Frank Nugent. Spencer Tracy is the over-confident New England mayor who resorts to dirty tricks in order to get re-elected, while his competitors come off like rubes with little experience. Some of the intentional humors--such as a banker with a pronounced lisp or a politician's wife caught off-guard for a television interview--are awfully broad for such a stately film, and many of the supporting bits are curiously over-played (as if Ford wasn't sure what tone to aim for). Tracy's innate professionalism and sincerity as a performer makes the picture worth-watching for his admirers, yet the Columbia studio-sets look artificial and the suburban surroundings (more California than New England) are barely exploited for their satirical possibilities. Remade as a TV-movie in 1977. ** from ****

Spencer Tracy is of course superb but that is not what this review is about. Unfortunately, the truth is only hinted at in this movie but it nevertheless shows some of the impossible struggle that goodness has to fight in a capitalist system and probably any other power-system. In comparison, the Swiss system of Direct Democracy is far less manageable by power and far more penetrable for goodness.Capitalism and goodness are simply each others opposites and the result is always a compromise in which goodness always looses the more capitalism is allowed to win. The evil rich man's heaven and the good rich man's way to poverty, that's capitalism. You could also say that it is theft that is coming and theft that is going and theft that stays the same in the hands of Rothschild's, Rockefeller's and the like.This film is about that impossible balance in trying to create something good in what is bad. The film offers no solution to that problem and that is its strength, since there is no solution and only an endless struggle as long as capitalism or any other power-system is allowed to exist.

I believe that I have watched "The Last Hurrah" six or eight times. It is not history. It is John Ford. Well, ... there's a bit of political, social and cultural history in this film and in the novel by Edwin O'Connor. It is a commentary, from Ford's point of view and with the customary Ford schmaltz, on big city politics in the first half of the 20th Century. Although the film never mentions the locale, it is Boston. The novelist, O'Connor, a New Englander from Rhode Island, admitted that the Frank Skeffington character was based roughly on James Michael Curley, who served as mayor of Boston four different times and as governor or Massachusetts and as a Congressman from Massachusetts. Curley wrote his autobiography in 1957, a year after O'Connor published his novel. Ford uses many of the stock company actors which he regularly used in the 1950s and '60s. But Spencer Tracy is splendid as Skeffington. When I later read the novel, I thought of Tracy as Skeffington and I constantly heard the harp music theme used in the film in my mind. "Ditto, Ditto, Ditto. How do you thank a man for a million laughs?"