Magic Town (1947, William A. Wellman) (Patreon)

52/100

If we must have remakes (and must we, really?), mediocre films that squandered strong potential are obviously the ideal candidates—if it's broke, fix it! Curtis Hanson's The Bedroom Window, in which a primo Hitchcockian thriller plot gets ruined by Steve Guttenberg's retroactively inexplicable presence as the male lead (playing Isabelle Huppert's torrid love interest, no less), has long been my go-to example, but maybe I'll now alternately cite Magic Town, a postwar obscurity that might have made a first-rate romcom had screenwriter Robert Riskin (taking a break from his longtime collaboration with Capra) emphasized a different aspect of his intriguing idea. Polling guru Jimmy Stewart locates a small town, Grandview, that serves as a perfect microcosm of the United States, in every possible demographic respect; this allows him to produce incredibly accurate data from a very small sample, thereby undercutting the competition. (Note that Gallup was only a dozen years old at the time.) Unfortunately, roving reporter and all-around do-gooder Jane Wyman has plans to improve Grandview by spearheading a new civic center. So there's your romantic impediment: Stewart falls for Wyman (and she for him), but his professional fortune and reputation require him to oppose her every effort at changing so much as a single street sign or bus route, lest that somehow upset the delicate fractal balance that makes Grandview a gold mine for him. There's one quite funny scene to this effect early on, with Stewart barging in on a city council meeting and waxing rhapsodic about the town's many splendors, insisting that he, as a new arrival, appreciates them in a way that jaded lifelong residents no longer can. And of course the lovers' conflict is quite literally progressive vs. conservative, so any political subtext pretty much takes care of itself. 

Unfortunately, Riskin didn't write a goofy comedy about a lovestruck pollster desperately trying to maintain an entire town's continuity of behavior. Instead, he wrote a fairly serious but not terribly convincing drama in which Wyman discovers the truth (Stewart had been posing as an insurance salesman), exposes him in her newspaper, and transforms Grandview into an analytics "mecca" virtually overnight, swarmed by rival pollsters paying residents top dollar for their now-meaningless opinions. The central relationship never quite catches fire, though director William A. Wellman does nice work with a scene in which Stewart and Wyman, exploring her childhood classroom, simultaneously and competitively recite their respective favorite rotely-memorized poems—Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" for him, Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha" for her. (I also loved a shot of the two stars relaxing on a hillside, with leaves from a tree overhead casting a perfect patterned shadow on Wyman's dress and only her dress.) And the notion that being identified as representative would instantly turn Bedford Falls into Pottersville (or modern-day Detroit, anyway) is over the top without being particularly trenchant or amusing. Anyone wanna hire me to turn this concept into something more Preston Sturges-esque? I promise there won't be a Nate Silver cameo.