Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Frank Capra. 1939.
This wasn’t the movie I was going to watch representing week 42 1939 (mid-October, that is). But the DVD I’d gotten of At The Circus refused to play, so I had to choose something else:
And Mr. Smith was available from der torrentses, so here we are.
*gasp* Pure communism! I like it!
I’m not a Capra fan. That is, I like his movies just fine, but I’ve never… er… actively sought them out? Instead they just seem to happen to me?
I vaguely remember watching this movie when I was… I’m gonna guess at… like… twelve? And I was really into it. It’s got that elegiac thing going that’s quite appealing.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was attacked by the Washington press, and politicians in the U.S. Congress, as anti-American and pro-Communist for its portrayal of corruption in the American government.
[…]
It is known that Alben W. Barkley, a Democrat and the Senate Majority Leader, called the film “silly and stupid”, and said it “makes the Senate look like a bunch of crooks”.
No, it makes the Senate look like a bunch of mean girls.
Oh, I remember this sequence! Boy Scouts (yeah yeah) have printed up a newspaper and are being shut down by the mobster (yeah yeah). It’s a great sequence, but the rest of the movie doesn’t quite live up to that bit.
This blog post is part of the 1939
series.