MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (88)

Directed by: Frank Capra (1939)

Starring: James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Claude Rains, Edward Arnold

The Pitch: An idealistic young Senator, chosen by the powers-that-be for his naivety, turns out to be more resourceful than they had imagined - and is determined to expose corruption, even at the cost of his own career..

Theo Sez: To quote Pauline Kael : "No-one else can balance the ups and downs of wistful sentiment and corny humour the way Capra can ; but if anyone else should learn to, kill him"! I don't think I've ever been so moved and exhilarated by such a priggish, zealot-minded hero - not even Stewart's languid charm can make palatable the extended sequence where he gawps at the various Washington monuments, shot and edited for maximum Inspirational value. Languid charm is, of course, one of the reasons why the thing ultimately works as brilliantly as it does, though a more important factor may be that (unlike in the inferior MR. DEEDS) the city slickers he's up against are a lot more than men of straw - we see how the whole system works, and we see it's a solid one, run by professionals rather than dyed-in-the-wool villains. More to the point, Stewart can't in the end destroy it (something else has to intervene), and is unable to understand it either - the film explicitly links him with a child's-eye view of the world, pure but unsophisticated - making it not so much a triumph of the Little Man as a reminder of innocence lost and an ode to the special, romantic valour that consists in fighting for lost causes : what he opens the heroine's eyes to isn't idealism but irrationality, the joy of doing the wrong thing (in a weird way, she helps him not because she knows he'll succeed but because she suspects he won't). Performances dynamic or luminous, as appropriate (Rains and Arthur manage to be both), pacing breathless, direction - choice of shot at any given moment - superlative ; one of the cinema's miracle-films, really.