That prosecutor of the trial in 12 Angry Men could call for a mistrial based on the behavior of the Fonda character. He brings in evidence not brought up in court.
‘Day the Earth Stood Still’ was made with the express purpose of expressing the possibility for the U.S. to surrender sovereignty to the U.N. The producer said as much. The film still holds up despite this.
Interesting footnote about “Earth.”
Two other, earlier fantasy-oriented items, “Things to Come” (1936) and “Lost Horizon” (1937), were movies I first saw when I was about ten or twelve years old. And I liked them quite a bit. I always took to far-out fantasy-themed items. But when I re-saw them as an adult, I started recognizing the collectivist/utopianist mindset of the narratives, and ultimately found them a bit grotesque. Especially the latter, where I was suddenly identifying more with Colman’s brother, who found Shangri-La rather hellish and wanted to escape.
But overall, I still believe that the further you go back in the history of film, the less inclined the material is to be ideologically pointed in a deliberate way. Despite the progressivism of some oddball things like Griffith’s “Grain” film, which goes back to the early beginnings. The wave of Broadway stage people at the silent-to-talkie transition period upped the leftism a bit. Then, the post-war obsession with psychiatry upped it some more. Then, there was another wave of liberal NY stage types when the early days of live-tv dried up, and they too moved to Hollywood. Then, the radicalized hippie crowd.
In other words, I don’t view it all as a constant, but a growing trend that reaches us today, where every word of dialogue, every item of set decoration, every camera movement, seems to be politically/ideologically charged. When I’ve met old-timers from the film industry (and I’ve met a lot), they just didn’t look at things that way.