Flowers For Socrates

By ann summers

While on the campaign trail, Trump said he didn’t want to act presidential “quite yet,” but promised at that he would become “so presidential that you people will be so bored.”

“At some point, I’m going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored and I will come back as a presidential person,” he told supporters at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in February 2016.

“Modern Day” is such an anachronistic expression, much like people who because they have nothing better to say, utter or write “In today’s world” as if one wonders who imagines other worlds when talking about reality in the present.

It Happened to Jane (1959) may have been a coming of age movie for Trump since this is when presumably Agent Orange reached puberty during the first decade of Playboy, as much as he might now regret allowing them into the WH press corps. Trump’s early postwar world, with its junk food and burnt steaks with catsup remains anchored in core principles shared still by many who wish that world to somehow return, where everyone knew their place and “stayed in their lane”.

It is his 1950s version of an American dream, considering the stars, more specifically Harry Foster Malone embodying the myth of the billionaire capitalist serviced by minions and ultimately charmed by a starlet miscast as a slow food entrepreneur reliant on overnight rail transport, but still dependent on a determined lawyer.

It is Trump’s nouveau fantasy, to get respect by being a tough CEO Like Kovacs’s character and enabled by armies of lawyers, fighting the media, plus intervening in public conflict by using a helicopter. And of course diversity is nowhere to be seen. That’s Trump’s America, the small town that in reality has deeper problems and biases but because it appears homogeneous, its seems to be in consensus. The pre-civil rights era was oh so peaceful.

Trump has probably never seen this movie, but it does capture that childhood image of subliminal conflict and social control, even if it really isn’t ever the plot of any Doris Day movie. It’s the image he plays to his followers in his rallies. Like it could be constructed in the “Great Again” like in films like Pleasantville or Peggy Sue Got Married. After all, hasn’t he said he’s the same as when he was in 3rd grade.

Jane Osgood is trying to support her two young children by running a lobster business. After one of her shipments is ruined by inattention at the railroad station, Jane decides to take on Harry Foster Malone, director of the line and the “meanest man in the world”. With the help of her lifelong friend – and lawyer – George Denham, Jane sues Malone for the price of her lobsters & her lost business.It Happened to Jane is a 1959 Eastmancolorromantic comedy film starring Doris Day, Jack Lemmon, and Ernie Kovacs directed by Richard Quine and written by Norman Katkov and Max Wilk. The film was co-produced by Quine and Day’s husband at the time, Martin Melcher.

The movie was mostly filmed in Chester, Connecticut. The final scene filmed at downtown Chester Connecticut was about 1 mile from the train station used in the movie. The locomotive in the final scene was a wooden prop built near where the final scene was filmed. People from all over Connecticut were invited to be extras in the movie.

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