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"

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!

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.

This movie was made the year I was born, and I only saw it because it happened to be on at midnight on some non-affiliated channel back around 1990. I taped this movie off television, and just about wore the tape out watching it. I did not know much about Truman prior to seeing this movie, but after having watched it at least 100 times, Whitmore makes me feel like I knew the man. Even as a teenager in the early '90s, this was one of my favorite movies. Truman clearly had a quick wit, and it comes through clearly in this masterpiece biopic. If this movie is not released on DVD or some other digital medium, I fear that it will not be seen by future generations. I have never seen it on television since that night almost twenty years ago. I saw the Shawshank Redemption (which was also an excellent movie), and I thought that Whitmore was even better in "Give 'Em Hell Harry".

I have always loved history especially history regarding US Presidents. I think that next to Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman was our greatest president. This man is the only President of the 20th century who never went to college and yet this common man touched greatness. James Whitmore truly does him justice, I read that Margaret Truman saw his performance and said "my God that is my dad!". I think that Hal Holbrook was the actor who started the great tradition of "one man shows" with his great portrayal of Mark Twain, many have done it since but Whitmore is the best. You get a great history lesson here as Truman talks about his life on the farm, his experiences in WWII, his rise in Missouri politics, his vice presidency and finally becoming President. You think you really are listening to Harry when he talks about dropping the bomb, the 1948 election against Dewey and his firing of MacArthur. This film is a delight from start to finish and I think it should be shown to every child to show him about what a great man Truman was!