TMC
12-20-2022, 10:25 PM
http://comforttv.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-prose-and-poetry-of-father-knows.html
In the film National Treasure, Nicolas Cage plays historian Benjamin Franklin Gates, who reads with admiration a quote from the Declaration of Independence, just before he steals it to keep it out of enemy hands:
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
“People don’t talk that way anymore,” he says, and you hear in his voice a longing for a time when that was not the case.
That is often my reaction after watching an episode of Father Knows Best. Out of all the 1950s situation comedies, this is the series that most often celebrated the eloquence of language, not only by quoting its masters from decades and centuries past, but also through the stirring and articulate scripts from writers like Roswell Rogers and Paul West.
In the film National Treasure, Nicolas Cage plays historian Benjamin Franklin Gates, who reads with admiration a quote from the Declaration of Independence, just before he steals it to keep it out of enemy hands:
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
“People don’t talk that way anymore,” he says, and you hear in his voice a longing for a time when that was not the case.
That is often my reaction after watching an episode of Father Knows Best. Out of all the 1950s situation comedies, this is the series that most often celebrated the eloquence of language, not only by quoting its masters from decades and centuries past, but also through the stirring and articulate scripts from writers like Roswell Rogers and Paul West.