'THE FBI STORY'.........HAPPY 60TH, FROM AMERICAN HEROES TO TRUMP'S 'SCUM'........

The FBI Story (1959)    When Golden Age composer Max Steiner lets rip with his rousing main title march, you know exactly where this movie's going........

                 Befitting the end of the 1950's, it's a stand-up-and-cheer Americana epic, endorsed and carefully overseen by the much respected and feared FBI potentate, J. Edgar Hoover.....(who even pops in for a cameo and provides an offscreen speech to the country's first batch of FBI agents.....(among them, who else but Americana Icon James Stewart....)

                   The film's sprawling, docu-drama narrative sends Stewart into action against the Ku Klux Klan, tommy gun toting gangsters.........and finally, that epitome of evil, the shifty Communist Spy, posing as a normal American guy.......

                  And now look where we've arrived in the space of 60 years since the film's release.........to a rogue, criminal President who demeans and insults the FBI, calling its agents 'scum... who coddles and praises the Russians who helped elect him pushes the delusion that the FBI's spying on him........

                    Obviously the film's a sanitized glowing tribute to the Bureau........(no mention of Hoover's collecting dirt on all his perceived enemies, and the rounding up and shameful imprisonment of innocent Japanese-American citizens during World War 2)........

                    But despite all its corniness and smoothed-over Hollywood gloss, the film honestly depicts Stewart and his fellow agents as courageous patriots who put their lives on the line in their mission to keep their country safe........(no wonder Stewart, with his plain, straight ahead mixture of sentiment and determined purpose, was Hoover's first choice to represent his agents on film...)

                     In 1959, Hoover and Warner Brothers couldn't have possibly envisioned the 2019 FBI.....misruled and attacked by Trump, his mob lawyer posing as Attorney General and his sorry collection of GOP toadies.........all of them peddling ridiculous, blatantly false garbage about the FBI conspiring against them........

                     Given the horrors and outrages of today, it was strangely comforting and refreshing to revisit "The FBI Story".......the product of a kinder, gentler American society........when everyone still revered the FBI as part of the good guys watching over us.........

                     We're aware the film's glorified propaganda of a different age.........but we'd much rather watch James Stewart chase after Russian spies, then watch Donald Trump grovel before Vladimir Putin and swoon over the monstrous Kim Jung Un like a lovesick schoolboy......

                   We'll take the nostalgic decency of "The FBI Story" in 1959 over the today's sad spectacle of seeing the dedicated men and women of the Bureau struggling in the cesspool of Trump......2 & 1/2 stars...
(** 1/2)