Film

The Great Man Votes

Name: The Great Man Votes
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Released: 1939
Cast: John Barrymore, Virginia Weidler, Katharine Alexander, Peter Holden, Donald MacBride

Drama

A 1939 comedy-drama about a washed-up scholar and alcoholic whose forgotten voter registration suddenly makes him the most courted man in a key precinct. John Barrymore, playing against his Shakespearean legend, finds unexpected dignity in small moments with his two children. It's tender without sentimentality, funny without cruelty, and remarkably unsentimental about addiction and failed ambition.

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An ordinary man's life unfolds with neither triumph nor total tragedy—just the grinding, quiet disappointment of being ordinary in a system that doesn't care. The spiritual ancestor to Votes' melancholy realism.

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Both use a central character society has dismissed to indict the systems that dismissed them. But where Votes offers salvation through being seen and valued, Stray Dog asks whether salvation is even possible.

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Walter Huston as a retired businessman confronting the hollowness of respectability and success. It understands, as Votes does, that a man can lose everything and still find meaning in the people who see him clearly.

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You Can't Take It with You1938

An unconventional family lives joyfully outside society's rules while the respectable world crumbles around them. Capra at his most earnest about the bankruptcy of respectability and the wealth of human connection.

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City Lights1931

Chaplin's tramp loves a blind woman without hope of return, finding dignity in the attempt itself. Silent, sentimental, and absolutely sincere about love existing outside economic value—the same argument Votes makes.

But Its sentimentality is extreme and unapologetic; modern audiences often find Chaplin's pathos cloying rather than moving.

The Apartment1960

A meek, lonely man discovers that integrity and kindness matter more than advancement. Darker and more sexually frank than Votes, but the same belief that quiet decency is the real measure of a person.

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Penny Serenade1941

Cary Grant in an almost unrecognizable dramatic role, showing how a marriage and family survive financial ruin and loss. It shares Votes' view that parenthood and love are the only victories that matter.

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Come and See1985

Votes believes that love and being seen can survive even destitution. Come and See asks what happens when neither love nor being seen can protect anyone, when the world is indifferent to all human value.

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Tokyo Story1953

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