Previous reviewers of this movie are all over the map. Some really liked it, others were disappointed that Frank Morgan did not reprise his role in the Wizard of Oz. Most don't seem to appreciate the movie for what it had to offer movie goers in 1943. And that's a shame.
This movie was made during the early part of World War II. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor in Dec 1941. We started to strike back in the Pacific, and in Nov 1942 we managed to invade and take control of North Africa (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia). That would allow us to prepare for an invasion of what Churchill called *the soft underbelly of Europe*, Italy and eventually southern France. By April of 1943, things were starting to look better for us, but D-Day, and our success there, were still a year and a half away. There were still many isolationists in the U. S. who felt we should not have gone to war in Europe. Others wondered if we would succeed against Germany. But FDR said that we had to defend *the four freedoms* around the world. American values, if you will, but FDR was not so close-minded as to depict them as just American.
That's what this movie is all about, encapsulated in Frank Morgan's speech before the court near the end of the movie. It is every American's duty to defend democratic (with a small d) values. That means fighting locally the sort of small-town corruption and dictatorship that tries to take self-government away from the people. (The romantic lead, who starts off as a weakling, will learn that in the course of the movie, as all Americans, especially isolationists, needed to do.) What the corrupt mayor of that small town was doing was just a smaller version of what dictators around the world were trying to do on a much larger scale. Americans needed to fight such dictators on the home front, just as we needed to fight them on a much greater level.
There are problems with this movie, sure.
The actor who plays the small-town lawyer who must learn to defend democracy, Richard Carlson, isn't up to the task of showing why he is weak to begin with and how he learns to fight with something in addition to - not other than - his fists to win the small-town war against fascism.
The depiction of small-town corruption, presented as unexceptional, suggests that there are worms gnawing away at our great democracy from inside. In the context of this movie, that is disquieting. It might have been more powerful if there had been some effort to link the small-town despots to their equivalent on the world stage.
This movie is never as bone-chilling as masterpieces of the genre like *Mr. Smith Goes to Washington* and *Mr. Deeds Goes to Town*, both of which deal with how corruption in our institutions threaten our democratic way of life. The corrupt small-town powers here hurt two men, but we are not made to feel their pain, or to imagine that their pain could one day be ours. That makes this movie less powerful.
But it's still a lot more than just another romantic comedy. It is another entry in the *Why we fight* series of movies that Hollywood put out during World War II, a series that produced some of the greatest movies ever made.
