Give 'em Hell, Harry!

As a twenty two year old enjoying a blissful summer in 1982, I came home from a day at Zuma Beach and this is what channel 5 was showing. Back then, my hobby was to audio tape(VCRs will rare then)stuff on TV. I recorded about the last twenty minutes of it. His story about McCarthy and his reading of the Tennyson poem were parts I've committed to memory. since my mom had a stroke, I recently began driving her car and it has a cassette player in it. I looked in my dusty old tape box and there it was. I have been playing it over and over again, like I did 26 years ago. Whitemore is priceless as Truman.

A side note: After the Truman show ends on my tape, the next thing you hear is Dan Akroyd as Richard Nixon on a SNL sketch where he turns off the TV in disgust at how Rip Torn is portraying him in a TV movie: Akroyd blurts out on my tape: "Well that was a piece of crap"

This was a great filmed stage presentation of James Whitmore's one-man show about Harry Truman, written by Samuel Gallu. He becomes President Truman right from the beginning. This show, along with the Will Rogers USA and the not-as-well-known Bully or Bully Boy (Theodore Roosevelt) is the complete list of one-man shows this fine actor has done.

I lived through this time. James Whitmore did such a good job he even made you think he looked like old Harry.

With today being Presidents Day, I've been watching some movies about presidents. Previously, I saw Wilson about Woodrow Wilson-the 28th President of the United States. This one is about Harry S. Truman-the 33rd President of the United States. As portrayed by James Whitmore, he appears on stage as the only performer on it having "conversations" with various people that come into his office like former President Herbert Hoover. He recounts his fight with General Douglas MacArthur, his taking on the Ku Klux Klan and Senator Joseph McCarthy, a critic saying something not-flattering about daughter Margaret concerning a concert performance, and, near the end, what he thinks about eventual president, Richard Nixon. (It's not good!) After years of only knowing about this, I'm glad to finally have seen this on YouTube just now. So on that note, I highly recommend Give 'em Hell, Harry!

A filmed version of a one-man stage play (filmed before a live audience), James Whitmore's Oscar-nominated performance is a rare treasure. As Truman, Whitmore gives rapid-fire comments on the highlights of an exceptional politician's career. Truman explains his justification for dropping the atomic bomb at the end of World War II, and his reasons for firing General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War. He talks of his wife, Bess (whom he refers to as "the Boss"), his home in Missouri, and his early days as a soldier in World War I, and a county commissioner in Kansas City. He offers us his views of Truman's contemporaries, both good (Winston Churchill, George C. Marshall) and bad (Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon). Whitmore is a joy to watch. If you can find this rare film it is well worth seeing.