Change Your Image
mjkaswan
Reviews
Northern Lights (1978)
Yes, a fantastic film
Yes, this is a fantastic film, an excellent piece of historical narrative (by the way, it is set in the early 20th century, not 19th as chadport put it). I saw it when it first came out and I've been looking for this ever since I got a DVD player but to no avail. This is a forgotten piece of history about what amounted to a popular take-over of government in the northern plains. This movie explains, for example, why North (or maybe it's South) Dakota is the only state with a state bank, and the Democratic Party in Minnesota is the Democratic-Farm-Labor Party. If ever there was a time when European-style social democratic ideas were put in practice in America, this was it. Another way of putting it: if we wonder what would happen if government were truly controlled by the people, this movie shows it well. There are lots of reasons why powerful people would not want this to be a popular movie -- which is precisely why it needs to be in wide distribution!