When You Least Expect It, You're Elected

 

Yesterday evening I had turned on the AC, undressed, and started to settle down about 9:30 PM when I went on Amazon to archive my purchases. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Big Jack, The Madwoman of Chaillot, and You’re Not Elected, Charlie Brown DVDs had been delivered to the front porch! I hadn’t expected them for a week at least. I got dressed, left the guest house, and struggled out in the dark (with safety lights on, of course) and retrieved them; after all, we were forecast rain and storms for the next day.

You’re Not Elected, Charlie Brown (1972) was the 10^th Peanuts special to air. It came between Play it Again, Charlie Brown (1971) and There’s No Time for Love, Charlie Brown (1973), in other words, sometime between the Halloween (1966) and Thanksgiving (1973) specials.  This edition is part of Warner Home Video's "Remastered Deluxe Edition" line of Peanuts specials, released on October 7, 2008, along with He’s a Bully, Charlie Brown (2006) as a bonus feature.

The story is pretty straightforward. Sally is discontented with school as she cannot get her locker open. After realizing that Charlie Brown would never stand a chance at being elected, the Peanuts gang decide to run Linus as a candidate for school president, hoping he’ll be able to get things done. Meanwhile Snoopy is hanging around school as ‘Joe Cool’ (along with his own theme song, sung by Vince Guaraldi). It’s going well until Linus mentions the Great Pumpkin at a school rally. He still wins by a slim margin of one vote but finds out to Sally’s disgust that he has no real power. She kicks her locker in frustration, and as she walks away it slowly swings open behind her.

There are 51 Peanuts specials altogether, and while some are great classics, it’s kind of shocking to realize how many are mediocre, if not downright poor, especially after 1980. Elected, however, is early enough to be slightly better than mediocre, if not very memorable. It premiered nine days before the Nixon/McGovern presidential election.

He’s a Bully, Charlie Brown is a feature pitched by Charles Schulz before his death in 2000, and the last to be produced by Bill Melendez (who also did the ‘voices’ of Snoopy and Woodstock), who died in 2008. The Peanuts gang go to camp, where Charlie Brown must save Rerun from having his grandfather’s marbles taken by a bully, Joe Agate. I think I would much rather have had Play It Again, Charlie Brown, which I haven’t seen since 1971. But there it is.

The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969; 2 hrs and 21 min) is the film adaptation of the 1943 play by Jean Giraudoux. The forces of industry and conformity have determined to dig up Paris for the oil they believe lies underneath. The Countess Aurelia, the madwoman of the title (played by Katherine Hepburn in the film), is a benign eccentric who values beauty, romance, and loyalty above money. Although she has no power, she decides to stop the power brokers by holding a trial presided over by her fellow outcasts, oddballs, and dreamers. Once the developers have been condemned, she leads them to their doom by their own greed into a pit that smells of oil.

I remember seeing a goodly chunk of it on TCM (or possibly AMC) and being impressed with it. I’ve not been able to catch it again since. It seems part of that tradition of plays and movies like Heartbreak House or You Can’t Take It with You or They Might Be Giants or even Cyrano de Bergerac or Man of La Mancha, where the forces of humanitarian Romance (in the developed sense) struggle against the iron forces of Utilitarianism and win a sort of victory, no matter Pyrrhic.  

Besides Katherine Hepburn, it also has Paul Henreid, Richard Chamberlain, Yul Brynner, Danny Kay, Donald Pleasence, and Charles Boyer.

I saw Big Jack (1949, MGM) on TCM, of that I’m sure.  It was Wallace Beery’s last film; he died three days after its release. “The picture is a comedy-drama, set on the American frontier in the early 1800s, about outlaws who befriend a young doctor in legal trouble for acquiring corpses for anatomical research.” – Wikipedia. Beery is Big Jack and Marjorie Main is his moll Kate ('Big Jill'), and Richard Conte is the young doctor who they more or less shanghai to tend to their medical needs (what with shoot-outs and so on). When the doctor’s developing skills help him save the mayor’s daughter, it earns him a pardon, though Big Jack dies winning him time for the operation. I seem to remember tucking away a few notes for A Grave on Deacon’s Peak (or The American Fantasy, as it was then) while I was watching. Anyway, Big Jack has proved to be as elusive as its namesake, so I’m glad to have a copy to peruse again at my leisure.