Celebrate Independence Day with 1776

Two years ago this week, I rediscovered 1776 on Turner Classic Movies. On Saturday, you, too, can re-evaluate (or see for the very first time) on TCM a movie -- one of the last of the Old Hollywood adaptations of a hit Broadway musical -- that was substantially improved by the restoration of scenes and songs that had been deleted by producer Jack Warner (at the insistence, according to Hollywood legend, of no less a notable than Richard Nixon) before its ’72 release.

As I noted in 2007: "1776 still is something less than an unadulterated masterwork. (Although director Peter H. Hunt manages some impressive wide-screen compositions, he’s a tad too literal-minded in some aspects of his stage-to-screen translation.) Taken as a whole, however, the movie is wonderfully entertaining – and, better still, undeniably inspiring -- as it offers an intelligently yet playfully romanticized account of events leading to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But wait, there’s more: The cast includes most of the major players from the original 1969 Broadway ensemble – including William Daniels (John Adams), Howard Da Silva (Benjamin Franklin) and Ken Howard (Thomas Jefferson), all at their finest – along with an absolutely luminescent Blythe Danner (who was pregnant with Gwyneth Paltrow during filming) as Martha Jefferson. And the heated debates over individual rights and tyrannical rulers is, alas, every bit as relevant today as in 1776 or 1972." Or 2009.