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Same Story Was Told in "The FBI Story" (1959)

posted a year ago by roger1 (2784)
9 replies | jump to latest

Formerly ecarle.

There's an old "square" movie from 1959 called The FBI Story, made when there were more conservatives in Hollywood and J. Edgar Hoover himself could demand veto power over the casting and the movie's plot.

James Stewart narrated and played the film's lead, a fictionalized "everyman" FBI agent who took time off from marriage and kids to be THE FBI agent involved in pretty much every plot foiled by the FBI and every criminal killed or captured. These were divided into short "episodes" told across the length of the movie.

James Stewart personally got Dillinger. He got Baby Face Nelson and Machine Gun Kelly.

And in two separate sequences, he got involved in two stories which -- decades later, have been made into separate major movies by separate major directors.

The first was in 2015 from Steven Spielberg -- "Bridge of Spies." The tale was about a Russian Communist spy in NYC passing information in hollowed out coins. In The FBI Story, that Commie was a no-good creepy ape-like guy, and Stewart caught him. In the Spielberg film, he became mild-mannered and sympathetic...and Mark Rylance won an Oscar for playing him.

But also in The FBI Story, Stewart "dressed Western" and went undercover to investigate the mysterious deaths of members of the Osage tribe. It took Jimmy about 20 minutes, start to finish, to tell THAT version.

The new movie will take three and a half hours, almost?

Anyway, interesting to me. Two major movies of the 21st Century can find their roots in a 1959 movie starring James Stewart.

It is worth seeing all three movies, I'd say.

[–] ecarle (14979) 8 months ago

Bump.

[–] GenoWashingline (823) 8 months ago

Very Interesting,.will look that up

[–] PrimeMinisterX (8449) 8 months ago

I've liked Jimmy Stewart ever since I first gave It's a Wonderful Life a serious look as an adult and have since watched several of his films that don't like I've disliked a one of them. (Though I do think Philadelphia Story is a little overrated.)

This sounds like an interesting concept so I'll try to track it down.

[–] TimeTunnel (4769) 8 months ago

[–] roger1 (2784) 8 months ago

"But also in The FBI Story, Stewart "dressed Western" and went undercover to investigate the mysterious deaths of members of the Osage tribe. It took Jimmy about 20 minutes, start to finish, to tell THAT version."

That's interesting and I'll certainly watch that movie.
Thought the plot in the The FBI Story (1959) sounds to me quite different than the happenings in the current Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).

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Yes. First of all, The FBI Story manages to tell about 10 episodic stories from different FBI cases, using Stewart's fictional character to lead us from one story to the other. (Indeed, I think this movie inspired the eventual WEEKLY TV series The FBI with Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

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He is moved around until he is sent to Ute City, Wade County, Oklahoma to investigate a series of murders of Native Americans who had oil-rich mineral land and rights. The FBI was compelled to investigate after one of the murders was committed on federal government land. The FBI forensics laboratory ties the doctored wills and life insurance policies of the murder victims to a local banker, Dwight McCutcheon (Fay Roope) with the typewriter that he used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_FBI_Story#Plot

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Yes, that is a synopsis of the story as it is told in The FBI Story. I bought a copy of the DVD and watched it. It is a very simplified version of what we get for three and a half hours in Killers of the Flower Moon. It plays almost at a "Dick and Jane" level of drama, maybe more around "sixth grade comprehension" level(the movie is sweetly "square") BUT it is interesting to note that (1) many of the real-life Osage victims are identified by their real names here( Anna and Rita and Mollie) BUT (2) William King Hale(played by DeNiro in Flower Moon) is here indeed called "Dwight McCutcheon" and the nephew played by Leo DiCaprio is given another name, too.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2784) 8 months ago

Its as if the public record circa 1959 allowed for all the Osage real names to be used, but not the villains, except that the real-life Henry Roan of Killers of the Flower Moon is here named "Henry Roanhorse."

Its very interesting, really. This 20-minute 1959 movie segment was filmed much closer back in time to the actually Osage murders, and makes a few of the same points of the new movie: how the Osage got incredible wealth; what they spent it on, the nature of the murders(particularly the blowing up of a house). Where The FBI Story "cheats" is to simplify way down to the FBI busting their versions of DeNiro and DeCaprio over a simple gimmick with a typewriter: The DeNiro character types wills/deeds dated 1919 on a typewriter that wasn't made until 1921. Its a simple way of conceptualizing the story.

I still think it is worth watching The FBI Story version of the Osage murders to get a "then versus now" comparison of how Hollywood treated it, and as a bonus, later in the movie, you can see the "Communist spy" story that launched Spielberg's movie "Bridge of Spies"(2015) as well. Plus you get re-enactments of the killing of John Dillinger outside a movie theater(recreated countless times since 1959, including Johnny Depp's version) and shootouts with other outlaws of the 20s and 30s. It is nifty time capsule of stories told very...square.

[–] TimeTunnel (4769) 8 months ago

Wow, thank you for that deep insight! ♥

Yep, I've said in the other thread that there are already so much crime movies that the different approach in Killers of the Flower Moon is a nice variation.
But I still love true crime.
And yes, it's amazing how different the same case(s) can be depicted.
And yes, yes, yes...I'll certainly watch The FBI Story (1959).

Hmmm, changing perspectives is good and right in many areas.
Unfortunately betimes beautiful things get lost by these changes.
Recently someone else here came up with the censorship of Fantasia (1940).
One of my all time favourite movies!
Mistakenly thought that I got the original old version, no, it's censored too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Jga1n_pnuQ
Only the white 'slave' centaurs are left and the cute litte black centaurs are gone. 💔

[–] roger1 (2784) 8 months ago

Thank you.

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Yep, I've said in the other thread that there are already so much crime movies that the different approach in Killers of the Flower Moon is a nice variation.
But I still love true crime.
And yes, it's amazing how different the same case(s) can be depicted.
And yes, yes, yes...I'll certainly watch The FBI Story (1959).

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Well, I suppose we can turn this around a bit and note: for decades now, evidently the ONLY version of the Osage murder story we have is "The FBI Story" version and ...its not really good enough, but its all we had, so we had to accept it.

(I may be wrong here, maybe the Osage story was told in some other filmed medium -- TV movie maybe?)

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Hmmm, changing perspectives is good and right in many areas.
Unfortunately betimes beautiful things get lost by these changes.
Recently someone else here came up with the censorship of Fantasia (1940).
One of my all time favourite movies!
Mistakenly thought that I got the original old version, no, it's censored too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Jga1n_pnuQ
Only the white 'slave' centaurs are left and the cute litte black centaurs are gone

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We live in an era where history -- including movie history -- is being erased. Not totally, not massively, but enough to be concerned.

Hard to say anyone can do anything about it, though...

[–] mikethemartian (6283) 8 months ago

I’ll have to watch out for that film on TCM.