Gingrich's remarks to a crowd of about 150 supporters at the screening - and additional taped remarks broadcast during intermissions of the film - illustrated quite clearly why he's in the speaker/author/family-values- champion business instead of movie reviewing.
"I don't think you can see this movie without tears if you have any kind of heart at all," Gingrich told the audience.
The Georgia Republican had already taped an introduction to the film, and commercial-break comments, for Atlanta-based Turner Network Television (TNT), which broadcast the movie last night.
The film, based on a true story, starred Spencer Tracy as Father Edward Flanagan, the founder of Boys Town, and Mickey Rooney as Whitey, a tough little street urchin torn between competing loyalties: to Flanagan and to Whitey's mobster brother.
"This is a fun movie," Gingrich said in his taped comments. "The whole thing is designed to carry you along. It has some funny scenes, it has some human scenes, it has some action scenes."
Moviegoers forked over $10 each for the privilege of watching the movie with Gingrich at the gleaming new Smyrna Community Center - in the Atlanta suburb of Cobb County inside Gingrich's Sixth Congressional District.
Several attendees said they were grappling for answers to seemingly intractable social problems and were willing to give orphanages a try.
"I think we just need change, really," said Chris Dunn, 83, a Philadelphia native who settled here just after World War II.
For Dunn, a retired mail carrier who was Smyrna's only rural postman when he began the job in 1948, that might well include a return to what once worked.
"I go back to the old school," he said of orphanages. "It was going on back then. It could be tried, I believe. Whether it would be successful or not, I don't know."
