silver nitrate notes

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and the Filibuster

23 jun 2018

Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) was made the year after It Happened One Night had won everything in sight. By 1939 Capra was operating with the budget and the freedom of an A-list director who could choose his own projects. The cinematographer was again Joseph Walker. The screenplay was by Sidney Buchman, working from a story by Lewis R. Foster.

The premise is direct. Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), a naive young Boy Scout leader, is appointed to fill a US Senate vacancy by a corrupt state political machine that expects him to be malleable. Smith arrives in Washington, discovers that the state's senior senator is implicated in a corrupt land deal, and decides to expose it. The machine attempts to discredit him. Smith launches a one-man filibuster on the Senate floor, speaking continuously for over twenty hours, until he collapses.

The filibuster sequence is the film's set piece and Walker's most demanding photography of the period. The Senate chamber set was built full-scale on a Columbia soundstage. Capra wanted the lighting to register Smith's progressive exhaustion across the night. Walker rigged the chamber lights so that they could be dimmed in continuous gradations across the long shooting day, simulating the natural shift of natural light through the windows from afternoon into evening into night. Stewart's face, photographed across the sequence, registers exhaustion that is partly performance and partly the actual fatigue of the long shoot.

What is unusual about the film, then and now, is its political content. The machine is portrayed as openly corrupt. The press is shown as collaborating with the machine. The Senate itself is portrayed as a body that protects its own. The film's release was protested by senators, who saw it at a private screening and walked out. Joseph Kennedy, then ambassador to Britain, asked Columbia not to distribute it in Europe on the grounds that it would undermine American prestige. Columbia distributed it.

The final sequence, in which Smith collapses on the Senate floor and the corrupt senator publicly confesses, is melodrama in the precise Capra mode. It is also the only resolution that makes sense for the kind of film the previous two hours have set up. Stewart's career as a serious actor begins here.

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sources
[1] Capra, Frank. The Name Above the Title. Macmillan, 1971.
[2] McBride, Joseph. Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. Simon & Schuster, 1992.
[3] Eliot, Marc. Jimmy Stewart: A Biography. Harmony, 2006.
[4] Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed. Harvard UP, enlarged ed. 1979.