Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Columbia, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, March 31) my husband Charles and I had a nice dinner “out” at Gnarly Girl Pizza, and as we were wrapping up and preparing to head home, he asked me if I had a movie I wanted to watch. Given that we’d just watched footage of U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) starting his real-life filibuster to protest the Trump administration in general and Elon Musk’s firings of hundreds of thousands of federal workers and unilaterally shutting down entire federal agencies, I said, “I think I’m going to let Cory Booker pick our movie tonight.” Of course I was referring to Frank Capra’s classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), written by Sidney Buchman (so the director was a Republican and the writer a Communist – and not just an unfairly scapegoated liberal or Leftist but the real hammer-and-sickle McCoy) and starring James Stewart as Jefferson Smith. Smith is the leader of a Boy Scouts knockoff called the “Boy Rangers” when he’s suddenly catapulted into the limelight when Governor Hubert “Happy” Hopper (Guy Kibbee) appoints him to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate following the sudden death of an incumbent. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was based on The Gentleman from Montana by Lewis R. Foster, which depending on your source was either an original screen story (the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gave Foster the only Oscar this film won), an out-of-print novel (Capra’s autobiography), or a novel never published at all (Wikipedia). Though Foster’s title makes clear what state Jefferson Smith is from, and at the gala premiere in Washington, D.C. Capra and his wife Lucille shared a box with U.S. Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D-Montana) and his wife Lulu, the film never quite comes out and says what state Smith is from. Capra gravitated to Foster’s book when his plan to make a biopic of Chopin failed because of his insistence that Marlene Dietrich at the height of her “box-office poison” infamy play George Sand – Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn vetoed her (though he revived the Chopin project in 1945 as A Song to Remember with Charles Vidor directing, Buchman as screenwriter, Cornel Wilde as Chopin and Merle Oberon as Sand).

He got a story that was a “natural” follow-up to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and featured a large cast of characters: 24 credited roles and 189 uncredited ones, according to imdb.com. When Governor Hooper is undecided as to whether to fill the vacant Senate seat with party hack Horace Miller, the man machine boss Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold) orders him to pick, or a crusading journalist named Hill (the choice of the voters who flock to his office and lobby him about the appointment in a scene that, like much of this film, looks all too current today), he decides to toss a coin. When the coin lands on its side, propped up by a folded newspaper on the floor, Hopper decides to appoint neither but instead take his children’s suggestion and pick Jefferson Smith. Taylor and his protégé, senior U.S. Senator Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), nicknamed the “Silver Knight” by Taylor’s publicity apparatus, are horrified because they plan to have a dam built on Willitt Creek in the northern region of their state. They’ve been secretly buying up the property around Willitt Creek for two years under phony names so they can make a killing when the dam project is finally authorized by Congress, which is a virtual certainty because they’ve sneaked it into a must-pass piece of legislation called the “Deficiency Bill.” (Today I think it would be called “budget reconciliation.”) They’re convinced that Smith is so naïve they’ll be able to sneak the project through because Smith is in awe of Paine and will vote however he tells him to – a relationship that goes back to Smith’s father, Clayton Smith, a newspaper editor and former friend of Paine’s until he was shot in the back by a mining company goon squad for supporting a miners’ strike. What they don’t realize is that Smith has an idea for a national boys’ camp in his state, and he’s picked Willitt Creek for its site. With the help of Saunders (Jean Arthur, top-billed – which amused Charles), a holdover from the late previous Senator whom Smith is replacing and who appears to be his only staff person, Smith drafts a bill for his national boys’ camp at Willitt Creek. The next day he’s called away from the Senate by Paine’s daughter Susan (Astrid Allwyn), who takes him to a reception for a princess so Smith won’t be on the Senate floor when the Deficiency Bill, including the provision for the Willitt Creek Dam, is read.

When Smith hears about the dam he’s outraged, but he’s sandbagged on the floor by Senator Paine. Assigned by the Taylor political machine that essentially owns him to destroy Smith by any means necessary, Paine presents forged documents that make it appear that Smith himself owns the land on either side of Willitt Creek and would profit personally by the government’s purchase of it. Paine demands that the Senate expel Smith, and the case is referred to the Committee on Privileges and Elections (today it’s called the Ethics Committee). Smith is so hurt by the nasty things that are being said about him in the Committee, including by people back home he thought were his friends, that rather than mount a defense he storms out of the hearing room and disappears. Saunders, who by now is in love with him, guesses he’s at the Lincoln Memorial and tells him to fight back. Whatever she tells him we don’t hear, but the next day on the Senate floor Smith starts a one-person filibuster, egged on by Saunders, two reporters in the press gallery – Saunders’s non-serious sort-of boyfriend Diz Moore (Thomas Mitchell, who had a busy 1939 since he was also in Gone With the Wind and Stagecoach) and Sweeney Farrell (an uncredited but easily recognizable Jack Carson) – and ultimately the vice-president (Harry Carey, whose homespun eloquence makes him unforgettable in the role), he holds the floor for nearly 24 hours, taking up time by reading the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution (well, it’s better than Green Eggs and Ham, the children’s book Ted Cruz read on his filibuster to hold up a government-funding bill that included money for the Affordable Care Act; Cruz explained that he read Green Eggs and Ham because his kids would get a kick out of hearing dad read it on C-SPAN, but it was an ironic choice given that Dr. Seuss wrote a fable denouncing closed-mindedness and Cruz’s filibuster was closed-mindedness personified) and ultimately ending up hoarse from speaking and staying on his feet for nearly 24 hours. (In his autobiography Capra said he helped Stewart with this part of his performance by calling in a throat specialist to give him a preparation that would make him more hoarse. The doctor was amused because usually his job was to make people less hoarse.)

Smith is hoping that word of what he’s saying will be reported back home and people will come to his defense, but Taylor has such total control of the mainstream media in his state that he’s able to fill it with anti-Smith propaganda and thousands of people write letters urging Smith to stop the filibuster and resign. Members of the Boys’ Rangers try to answer the charges in their own hand-typeset, letterpress-printed paper Boys’ Stuff, but Taylor’s goons literally seize their papers and run their wagons off the road – something that especially struck me when I first saw this film in the early 1970’s; its scenes of authority figures violently suppressing peaceful protests rang all too true after the massacres at Kent and Jackson State. Paine, who all through the movie has been having crises of conscience but has gone along with Taylor at every turn after Taylor promised him his support for a Presidential run, brings in huge baskets of anti-Smith letters, and Smith reads a few of them and becomes so demoralized he faints and collapses on the Senate floor. Then Paine’s will breaks; he loses it completely, admits on the floor that Smith was right all along: the Willitt Creek Dam was nothing but a piece of graft to fatten the pockets of Taylor and his gang, and says if anybody should be expelled from the Senate it should be he, not Smith. Then Paine bursts into the Senate hallway and fires two shots in an attempt at suicide – one of the bullets breaks a lamp cover in the hallway and when I first saw the scene (at a 1970 San Francisco Film Festival Capra retrospective at which the man spoke himself) I had thought Paine was attempting suicide either by slashing his arms with the lamp glass or by smashing a fixture and inhaling lighting gas. (Did they still have gaslights in the U.S. Senate in 1939?) Ultimately Smith is vindicated and he and Saunders – whose first name, “Clarissa,” he’s wormed out of her in an earlier scene – get together for a final clinch.

One scene of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington so impressed me I even had a chance to re-create it; it’s the scene in which a boy, visiting the Lincoln Memorial with his grandfather, reads him Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural from the carvings at the Memorial. I got to reproduce this scene in 1987, when I was in D.C. for the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. I traveled there with a Gay couple from San Diego, one of whom was blind, and when we visited the Lincoln Memorial I got to read him Lincoln’s words from the monument’s carvings just as the boy did in Capra’s film. Though Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was widely criticized in 1939 for allegedly making democracy look ridiculous and giving Fascists and Communists ammunition for their propaganda against it, Capra was particularly proud that in 1942, when the Nazis ordered their puppet French government at Vichy to stop showing American films, many theatre owners picked Mr. Smith Goes to Washington as the last U.S. film they would show before the ban went into effect. Today, as the U.S. is once again threatened by Right-wingers both at home and abroad, the message of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington couldn’t be more timely – and watching it as Cory Booker was essentially duplicating the fictional Jefferson Smith’s heroism on the real Senate floor just gave it that much more punch. Oddly, Charles told me after it ended that he’d never seen it start to finish before – which I find a bit hard to believe; I’m pretty sure I’d shown it to him in the 1990’s in the days in which I was making VHS tapes off TCM literally by the yard – but it’s clear the film made the same impact on him that it always has on me.

One thing that’s long struck me about Capra is that as his career progressed, it was harder and harder for him to find happy endings for his films. He made a succession of movies with Edward Arnold as his principal villain – You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941) – and, as one critic pointed out, Arnold’s characters became more powerful and more unscrupulous with each new film. In You Can’t Take It With You Capra and writer Robert Riskin, adapting a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, ended it with Arnold’s character regaining his humanity by playing harmonica duets with Lionel Barrymore. In Mr. Smith there’s that preposterous scene of Claude Rains literally having his breakdown on the Senate floor. In Meet John Doe, Arnold’s character is a press baron – in the film’s opening scene, he’s shown having the façade of the building housing The Bulletin, the newspaper he’s just bought as a vehicle for his political ambitions, jackhammered to remove its stated commitment to truth and a free press and instead proclaiming itself “A Streamlined Paper for a Streamlined Era” (an eerie anticipation of what Elon Musk would do with his various enterprises, first Twitter and now agencies of the U.S. government) – who seeks to use his media holdings to become dictator of the entire U.S. Like his younger contemporary, Orson Welles, Capra was clearly fearful of the power of the media not only to report the news but to shape people’s perceptions of it and the reality in which they live. In Meet John Doe Capra actually shot five different endings, looking in vain for one that would work; and in his first post-war film, It’s a Wonderful Life, to get his happy ending Capra literally had to resort to divine intervention. And there’s an interesting connection between this film and the Bible: two of the actors in it worked on Biblical projects. The Senate Majority Leader is played by H. B. Warner, Jesus Christ in the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille biopic The King of Kings (1927), while Edward Arnold narrated the fascinating 1945 multi-composer recording Genesis Suite.