User Reviews

A worthwhile film directed by Garson Kanin about a Harvard educated man, played by John Barrymore, who teaches his children (Peter Holden and Virginia Weidler) at home yet still sends them to school.

Barrymore's character used to be a "great man", a writer in fact, who lost all interest when his inspirational wife died. Now he lives in a somewhat ignorant urban community doing enough work to get by. His kids, taught by him to suffer no fools, innocently cause their father to lose his latest pathetic job by disrespecting the bully son of the local "demagogue" Iron Hat McCarthy, a party man played to perfection by Donald MacBride).

When the incumbent party discovers that however (Barrymore) votes, so goes the election, they make the Iron Hat responsible for getting (Barrymore) to help get their figurehead Mayor reelected. Iron Hat makes promises (to Barrymore) he can't keep, but (Barrymore) with help from his bright kids, outsmarts them all ... though you can see the last gag coming from a million miles away.

It is no secret that John Barrymore was wildly out of control the last few years of his life due to excessive drinking. In fact, he had become so volatile, that despite his immeasurable acting talent, several studios and producers refused to hire him.

Carole Lombard was a tried-and-true friend who had worked alongside Barrymore to great effect in the raucous screwball comedy TWENTIETH CENTURY. A few years later, she had considerably more power at Paramount and had what's called 'casting approval' over her films. For TRUE CONFESSION, she picked favorite leading man Fred MacMurray and for a key comic relief part, she insisted the studio hire John Barrymore. It was a tough sell, but Lombard did get Barrymore for the role, and while he was third-billed, it was a much-needed boost in his then faltering career. Appropriately, he plays a mostly intoxicated scoundrel, but it's a good performance and the film fires on all cylinders.

About two years later, director Garson Kanin was working at RKO and was casting a comedy called THE GREAT MAN VOTES. Producer Pandro S. Berman did not think Kanin should hire John Barrymore for the lead. The fear was that if Barrymore became erratic and the production had to be shut down, it would put them behind schedule and cost plenty. But Kanin really felt Barrymore should play the lead in this film, and Berman reluctantly consented.

Production seemed to be going fine, and Kanin was getting exactly the right performance from Barrymore and the young actors that had been hired for the supporting roles. Again, Barrymore was playing a broken man (for laughs) and this time he had considerable scenes with child star Virginia Weidler who had actually done smaller parts in two other productions with him. Barrymore and Weidler were striking the right father-daughter notes, until one fateful day when Barrymore blew up and allegedly threw Weidler across the set.

Barrymore's reason for body-slamming Weidler was because, in a paranoid rage, he felt that she was upstaging him. He pulled her off his lap in the middle of a take and hurled her at one of the technicians, all because she had been doing some hammy business with a necktie he was wearing while he was delivering a monologue. Obviously, there were stage hands that tended to Weidler at once, while Kanin had to take Barrymore outside to cool down. The film was shut down for the rest of the afternoon, and when production resumed the next day, Barrymore was more relaxed and able to redo the scene. This time, Weidler was instructed not to touch his tie.

THE GREAT MAN VOTES was released by RKO in 1939, and it was a hit. Barrymore would continue to do occasional lead roles as a freelancer until 1941. Weidler would go on to give what is probably her most memorable screen performance as the kid sister of Katharine Hepburn in MGM's THE PHILADELPHIA STORY. Barrymore and Weidler never worked together again.

A delightful comedy-drama with some most amusing twists, "The Great Man Votes" comes across with style and panache. Barrymore is perfectly cast in the title role, though he encounters plenty of competition from Donald MacBride, Luis Alberni, and the kids: Peter Holden and Virginia Weidler.

"Never act with kids" is sage advice, but Barrymore usually manages nonetheless to hold center stage throughout. In fact, he's never less than fascinating, although Elisabeth Risdon and Brandon Tynan bring off a moving and most charming scene with the children while he's off-stage.

Katharine Alexander's role is small, but she makes an excellent foil for the Great Profile.

The script rates as quite unusual by the normal Hollywood standard. Occasionally caustic (if maybe a bit simplistic), it introduces the sort of political morality tale that the big studios almost always shunned. Of course, it is set in 1923, but this also allows the movie a nice sense of period conveyed by sets, props and costumes.

Kanin's direction seems somewhat clumsy in spots (awkward jump cuts, over-use of close-ups), happily inventive in others (the extended tracking shot of the kids kicking a tin can along the sidewalk). But it all comes to a grand climax with an all-stops-out street parade, followed by Barrymore's final fling of a sting as the curtain falls.

The Great Man Votes is a humble little picture which packs a lot into it; offering a slice of Americana, taking place in "An American City, 1923" (well the film tells us it isn't Boston at least). The movie has a similar set up to 1931's The Champ about a man and a single father who has fallen from grace, a loser to the rest of the world but is adored by his children who know him for what he is and help take care of him. Gregory Vance (John Barrymore) sums up this relationship he has with his children with an elegance that John Barrymore does best; "I believe the devil took you two squirts up on a mountain and offered you the whole world before your eyes, you'd come running back to your old man". Like Barrymore's Oscar Jaffe from Twentieth Century, Vance is a man who is who is always making references to history and literature in his speech.

The character of Gregory Vance is a representation of Barrymore at the time with his declining career brought on (at least in part) from his dependence on alcohol. Vance's alcoholism is prophetic on Barrymore's demise as the man would die just a few years later from the bottle. However one thing was still for sure, he was still a great actor. One interesting side note is that Luis Alberni who played a drug addict alongside Barrymore in The Mad Genius in which Barrymore's character sold him drugs, in The Great Man Votes Alberni plays the reverse as a milkman who deals alcohol to Vance during prohibition.

The two children in The Great Man Votes played by Virginia Wielder and Peter Holden manage to hold their own against Barrymore which is no easy task. They are two mature, intelligent kids who even know how the political machine works but when they have to fend for their own and look after their drunk father, they have no choice but to be this way. Virginia Wielder is the movie's real scene stealer. Like in The Philadelphia Story, she robs any scene she inhabits and is even the victim to a punch in the face in one of the film's more shocking moments.

Gregory Vance is the only registered voter in his key precinct during the mayor's re-election. It's not explained how this manages to be the case but it's a charming political fantasy in which a corrupt politician is at the mercy of a single John Doe to be elected to office; a case in which one person's vote truly matters. There is no identification of who the parties are in the film but I do appreciate the scene in which a speaker talks about how voters are slaves to tradition, voting for the traditional party choice over and over again; how true. The Great Man Votes also notably showcases America as the melting pot of cultures as seen during the multi-ethnic pledge of allegiance given in the children's school.

The movie has a number of nice filmmaking touches to it such as the shot of the two kids walking to school in which we only see their feet as they talk, to an innovative, ahead of its time edit in which the teacher (Katharine Alexander) asks Vance in regard to the wellbeing of his missing children, "But what about Joan and Donald?", instantly cutting to Donald in another house saying "we're doing pretty well".

The villain of The Great Man Votes is the politician Iron Hat McCarthy; not a guy who appears to be in politics to spread any virtue nor does it help he shares the same last name as one of the most vilified figures in 20th-century politics. He is introduced giving candy to children because "they'll all be voting the straight ticket one fine day", he says in an unsavory tone; indoctrinate them while they're young. These traits are carried over to his douche bag son which is visualised in an early example of an ass gag in which he falls into wet cement and creates an imprint of his rear end, a constructing worker looks down at it and utters "spitting image of his old man" and the camera cuts to the ass imprint in the cement.

Let me recommend this to you. But first, some history.

This was toward the end of the "the great shakeout" in movies. The first one was in the first decades of the form and was a battle of the arts to determine just what movies would be. There were a surprising number of evolutionary paths that could have been followed. What won was the notion of a theatrical play, but mimed and made larger. I mark "Birth of the Nation" as the turning point there.

Later with talkies the whole bag of possibilities was revisited. A huge number -- much larger than before -- of possibilities emerged this second time, but with less variety. Most of them were extensions of existing theatrical and literary traditions. Again, there was a rough and tumble competition that resulted in the genres we have today.

This was the end of one of those possibilities, and seeing it makes us a bit sad because it was rich in its own way. And deeply self-referential.

Watching the movie in its day was casting a certain type of vote for it, and the story is about a vote. This might be the very last of this type of movie, and the story features a voting precinct in which there is only one voter left.

Oh, I guess I should tell you the plot. Barrymore plays a former Harvard professor with two kids. His wife has died and he is now a drunk. He is in danger of losing his kids. For amazingly artificial plot means, the entire country will vote the way a certain region will, and that region in turn will vote the way a certain precinct will. And this, my friends, is the precinct in which our hero is the only registered voter.

As he votes, the future of the world may change. There's some bumph about the ward boss and his bratty kid and all. But the whole construction was written just for Barrymore and for him to be a drunk version of a prior giant. That giant in the story is a professor, but he is played as a special kind of character that only exists in a now defunct theatrical world. He's in fact, an actor, a grand speechifier in the Booth Shakespearian tradition of 19th century elocution. It seems a bit comic today, but this was a noble characterization in its time.

It was, in fact, the offscreen persona of Barrymore. And offscreen he really was a drunk. And this really was his last major role -- and it was played with him actually fallingdown drunk, doing his bit as automatically as breathing. Everyone else in the drama is designated audience: his kids, their schoolmarm, his in-laws, the gawking townspeople (ready to follow his vote), even the newspapers.

It used to be that you could go to a movie and in some of them expect this posturing, this extremely dramatic pedagogical exaggeration, something that goes all the way back to Shakespeare's Holofernes. It used to be enough to just swim in the excess. We still have some echo of that in Pacino and other Italian-influenced frenzies, but the excuse there is intensity rather than the flow of the thing.

If you watch this, there's an amazing speech at the end. Our man has cast his vote (which we discover was against the machine -- and we know that after the movie ends he will be killed or the equivalent). He is speaking to the whole world, and gives a speech that has the form of an old-style Shakespearean one. It goes up and down. It has inverted constructions and leaps of metaphor. His has Barrymore being more.

And it makes no sense at all. It really doesn't and I'm sure that no viewer at the time knew this (it takes careful parsing to discover), nor cared. It was the show of the thing. Only the show.

This could make it onto my "must watch" list.

There's some good movie-making in the background too. Look at one scene where the kids are going to school and see how nicely we watch their feet performing in a simple echo of their Dad.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.