The other night, I watched transfixed as a governor wrestled with a matter of conscience. There was family pressure, there was statehouse intrigue. In the end, at high personal cost, the guv decided to stick to principle and do the right thing.
And then, the guv resigned.
And that, my fellow Americans, is why I love the old black-and-white movies.
No, I wasn't watching the continuing telenovela realidad starring in high-def the South Carolina guv telling all - or rather, all too much - about his affair in Argentina and his marriage back home, and his soul and its mate, and the lines he crossed and that thing that went a-sparking.
Nor the Alaska version of I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here, starring that state's governor and her future, ill-defined at this point except that it apparently involves not being a dead fish but a good point guard. Or something.
What I was watching instead was Manhattan Melodrama, a 1934 movie that TCM aired last week, starring William Powell as a New York governor actually facing not a matter of personal angst but of actual governance. Imagine that.
Give me the restrained Powell any day over the babbling brook that is Alaska's Sarah Palin - so many words, so few that make sense! And give me Powell over the self-dramatizing Mark Sanford as South Carolina governor and leading man in, as he called it this past week, "a love story, a forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day."
Is there anything worse than someone writing the copy for his own movie poster?
Maybe it's easier to behave nobly in black and white. Or perhaps it's just that everything wraps up in a crisp 90 minutes or so of reel time, rather than dragging out messily over real time.
Has it really come to this? That the governor in a 75-year-old movie seems infinitely more gubernatorial than his modern-day, real-life counterparts?
And here's the thing: In the movie, Powell's character actually was facing a life-and-death issue, and not, at least in Sanford's case, a Betty-or-Veronica one.
As Manhattan Melodrama's story goes, Powell has to decide whether to commute the sentence of a convicted murderer played by Clark Gable, a close friend since childhood.
The complication: Gable's crime was that he arranged the murder of someone who, unknown to Powell, could have screwed up Powell's political career.
The other complication: Powell's wife, played by Myrna Loy, had been Gable's gal, but she left him to marry the rising pol.
