The Man from Springfield: ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ (1939)
You can always tell the story a different way:
So there’s this guy who knows nothing about politics, right? Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart). He’s recruited by the party hacks to come in and fill the seat of a senator recently deceased — basically, because the governor’s bratty kids want him to (“You’re all wet, pop!”), and because he seems both wholesome and pliable.
No sooner does he get to Washington than the foolish bumpkin starts doing his foolish-bumpkin things. He lets some news photographers talk him into posing for some silly photographs — based on his background as a leader of Boy Rangers (Boy Scouts by another name) — that the Washington press corps playfully manipulates at his expense.
Rather than engage the incident with a playful sense of humor and write the whole thing off as a lesson well-learned, he hunts down the photographers and assaults them in the street. As is typical of privileged punks with unearned stature, he is not reprimanded for his felonious behavior.
Rather, he is encouraged by his state’s senior senator, Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), to propose a bill of his own, but, being inept, he needs the help of his secretary, a looker named Clarissa (Jean Arthur) who’s been around Washington for some time and knows how to get things done.
It’s not enough for Smith to rely on his secretary to show him how to do his own damn job; he also gets the hots for her, woos her, and convinces her to participate in an inappropriate subordinate-superior office romance.
And what’s the bill with which Jefferson Smith chooses to make his mark — the very first bill he proposes as a U.S. senator? A bill that will grant federal money for a boys’ camp in his own state. And how does he propose to repay this loan? By asking for donations from the kids of all the states, who are asked to send in their pennies and nickels and dimes.
It turns out that the land Smith has his eye on — Willet Creek — is already spoken for, appearing as it does in an appropriations bill by which Paine and other politicians plan to receive some good old American graft. Paine, who knew Smith’s father when the man was still alive and feels some sympathy from the boy, is morally compelled to remove himself from the profitable scheme, all because of this upstart’s oblivious meddling.
Political boss Jim Taylor, the big man behind it all, won’t let Paine go — he needs Paine’s name on the thing. The whole gang of them do the only thing they can do, and cook up a story that Smith just wants to build the camp there because (they say) he owns the land. Rather than prove that he doesn’t in fact own the land — which should be easy enough to do — Smith behaves like the untempered post-adolescent he is, and flees the problem.
But he has a secretary with the sand and savvy that he sadly lacks. Clarissa finds him pouting at the Lincoln Memorial — yep, she knew just where to find him — and bucks him up with the kind of high-flown rhetoric she knows he’ll go for, as surely as she knew he’d come to the Lincoln Memorial to pout. Apparently unable to deal with his emotions sober, Smith says to Clarissa, “You know where I can get a drink?”
Back at her place, Clarissa instructs Smith like a primary-school student on the procedures of the filibuster, schooling him on how to bring the important work of the Senate to a halt so he can bully his way onto the floor and plead his case there, rather than go through the proper legal channels of appeal in vindicating his name.
With a full Senate prepared to witness the floor show of Smith’s filibuster, a CBS news correspondent reports excitedly to his radio audience, “The galleries are packed. In the diplomatic gallery are the envoys of two dictator powers. They have come to see what they can’t see at home: democracy inaction.”
There’s no reason to continue with this contrarian contrivance. You all know what happens next anyway, as surely as you know that the radio reporter really says “in action,” not “inaction.” But it’s fun to puncture the sanctimonious, even when their ideals and grievances are as well-founded as Mr. Smith’s.
Harmless as it seems now, you’d be surprised how many people were offended by the movie in 1939, when it first came out. It was a sensitive time. America was standing on the edge of the high board, debating with itself on whether to jump all the way into what became World War II. “And here was I,” Capra writes in his memoir, The Name Above the Title,
in the process of making a satire about government officials; a comedy about a callow, hayseed Senator who comes to Washington carrying a crate of homing pigeons — to send messages back to Ma — and disrupts important Senate deliberation with a filibuster. The cancerous tumor of war was growing on the body politic, but our reform-happy hero wanted to call the world’s attention to the pimple of graft on its nose. Wasn’t this the most untimely time for me to make a film about Washington?
Many thought so. Coming as it did the very month after Germany invaded Poland, and Germany and France declared war on Germany, his timing could have certainly been better for releasing a film so snugly domestic in its concerns. But that wasn’t where Capra got himself into the most trouble. Senator Alben Barkley gave an interview to the Christian Science Monitor in which he said the film is “as grotesque as anything I have seen” (conclusively proving that unlike Capra he had never been in war). “Imagine the vice president of the United States,” he said, “winking at a pretty girl in the gallery to encourage a filibuster” (conclusively proving that he had no idea what movies do and what they are for).
The film was also condemned by Joseph Kennedy, who at the time held the immensely consequential British ambassadorship — becoming more consequential all the time, as wartime alliance with Britain irrevocably neared. In a complaint sent directly to Columbia head Harry Cohn, Kennedy went so far as to suggest that “to show this film in foreign countries will do inestimable harm to American prestige all over the world.”
Such censure from high government officials stung Capra more than it should have, precisely because of the high regard in which he held America’s operating ideals. Like many immigrants — Capra had come from Sicily at the age of 5 — he cherished those ideals, refusing to take them for granted. Supreme patriot that he was, he was genuinely vexed to seehis patriotism challenged within Official Washington. When we talk about Capra, we’re talking about a guy who “got a bad case of goose pimples” the first time he ever he gazed down upon the Senate chamber: “There it was, spread out below me, as silent and awe-inspiring as an empty cathedral — the Senate!”
You know that tour of D.C.’s monuments that Jefferson Smith goes on upon arrival in the city? It was modeled closely upon a similar tour undertaken by Capra, who would rhapsodize about the Lincoln Memorial as “the most majestic shrine we have in America,” where sat “the colossal marble figure of our greatest man — rumpled, lanky, homely — his eyes daily filling the hearts of thousands of Americans with the deep, deep compassion that seemed to well out from his own great soul.” Indeed, on his visit Capra even witnessed a young boy reading the Second Inaugural to an old man. “That scene must go into our film, I thought. We must make the film if only to hear a boy read Lincoln to his grandpa.”
We might as well call Smith the Man from Springfield, for all the ways in which he was inspired by Lincoln. (And because his home state — like his political affiliation — remains coyly concealed, just like the home state of Springfield’s own Simpson family.) Capra did not try to disguise his primary inspiration for Smith. “Our Jefferson Smith would be a young Abe Lincoln,” he wrote in retrospect, “tailored to the rail-splitter’s simplicity, compassion, ideals, humor, and unswerving moral courage under pressure.”
Capra was determined to recreate the Senate in all its glorious detail, telling Jim Preston, poached from his role as superintendent of the Senate press gallery, “First thing, I want you to arrange for our crew to come in here and photograph all the details — inkwells, pencils, stationery, everything down to the hole the Union soldier kicked in Jeff Davis’s desk the day Jeff walked out to join the Confederacy. Later on you will come to Hollywood and help me select ninety-six actors to fill those desks — that look like real Senators.”
Meanwhile, art director Lionel Banks consulted old blueprints and thousands of photos, as “his department was asked to conjure up, in one hundred days, what had taken one hundred years to build.” It wasn’t just the Senate chamber that received this treatment. Committee rooms, the press club and gallery, monuments, hotel rooms, cloak rooms, and the governor’s mansion were also given literal renditions.
Because the dimensions of the Senate chamber did not allow for frequent changes of setup, Capra had to film portions of disparate scenes at once. This simply wasn’t done at the time. The mother that necessitated this invention was the “continuous rectangle of gallery seats,” as well as the “four niched walls containing the marble busts of all twenty-six ex-Vice Presidents….How to light, photograph, and record hundreds of scenes on three levels of a deep well, open only at the top, were the logisitic nightmares that faced electricians, cameramen, and soundmen.”
Capra credits his cameraman, electrician, and sound engineer with helping him arrive at the solution (without which, he wrote in 1971, he’d still be shooting the scenes). To better match the audio for shots made out of sequence, he would use “the actual sound track of the master shot [emphasis Capra’s] to feed Jean Arthur,” for instance, “the off-stage lines for her close-up.” This ensured that the actors returned to “the mood of the master shot,” for optimum continuity.
All of which testifies to the kind of fervent focus, the kind of keen alacrity, Capra maintained during the entirety of this endeavor. It was that important to him. “I had a mental picture of the entire film,” he writes in his memoir, “and had conditioned myself to close my switches to all stimuli not directly connected with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Once filming began I never left the set, never took phone calls, never heard or saw anything unless it pertained to the scene we were shooting. I was a tuning fork that vibrated only to the wave length of Mr. Smith.”
The film made Jimmy Stewart a star. “Frank gave me this chance,” Stewart remembered, “this tremendous, wonderful role, which really started me rolling.” Stewart biographer Marc Eliot writes that after Mr. Smith, “Stewart had become a superstar and everyone wanted a piece of him now.” It’s easy to see why. His Jefferson Smith managed to merge boyish innocence with manly authority. This is due in part to Stewart’s height, and in part to his energy, and in part to those impossible-to-define fifth-realm factors that comprise any great performance. His marathon filibuster is as much a feat of dance as it is of dramatic acting. Watch it again and notice the variety of postures and motions in his repertoire.
Then listen to his voice toward the end and recognize that twice a day his throat had been “swabbed with vile mercury solution that swelled and irritated his vocal cords,” according to Capra, who believed that “No amount of acting could possibly simulate Jimmy’s intense pathetic efforts to speak through real swollen cords.”
Stewart’s efforts at comedy receive an assist from Harry Carey as the president of the Senate (i.e., the vice president of the United States), who provided an array of facial expressions in response to Smith’s shenanigans — from Oh, okay, I’ll tolerate it to Just where is this going? to This is so funny, propriety demands I cover my mouth while I laugh — all of which assist in our understanding of how we’re supposed to respond to what’s happening on the floor (and in the gallery). Whether you find these hammy contortions more useful than annoying is between you and your god.
One actor whose performance requires no equivocation is Claude Rains, who Capra knew “had the artistry, power, and depth to play the soul-tortured idealist whose feet had turned to clay,” Senator Joseph Paine. His final act includes a ludicrous bit of theater that continues Capra’s (already well-established) obsession with suicide ideation, as Paine hysterically tries to kill himself with a pistol shot before confessing all. Capra’s Mr. Smith co-writer Sidney Buchman “detest[ed]” this gambit, calling it “an idiotic idea” that he’d fought against. “All of a sudden,” he said, “you’re in a totally unreal situation. Capra wasn’t able to avoid falling into moments of violence. He really liked that scene, but at the same time he lessened the political impact of the film.”
One moment of Paine’s that doesn’t lessen the political impact — that indeed enhances it and shows what a hard, sophisticated film this really is beneath its marshmallow layer of idealism — comes much earlier, when Paine warns the stubborn and naive junior senator to do as he’s advised and forget all about Willet Creek:
“This is a man’s world, Jeff, and you’ve got to check your ideals outside the door like your rubbers. Now, thirty years ago, I had your ideals. I was you. I had to make the same decision you were asked to make today, and I made it. I compromised. Yes — so that all those years I could sit in that Senate and serve the people in a thousand honest ways.”
You can always tell the story a different way, and when you do, this right here becomes the film’s central and sensible soul.
