I'll jump ahead and say that Mr. Smith is recognized as culturally and historically significant because the cinematic medium hadn't been used to portray political corruption like this before. It caused a lot of controversy and scorn for being sort of a whistle-blowing type movie, putting senators and congressmen in a negative light and pointing out the degradation of the common man and individual voices of the American people. It showed how the political system had become mob like and run with undeserved power and oppression instead of preserving individual freedom, liberty and democracy and shit. So critics said things like Anti-American and Communist in response.
It really goes to show that political conservatives of the time (and often today) literally have no idea what the definition of communism is and they seemed to have not read the constitution. They forget about the liberty part and think we all ought to adhere to some type of overarching "values", often religious ones.
Go back home to King Henry, then, you redcoat shit.
Sorry I'm sounding so aggressive. I just wanted to throw out what I usually put at or near the end of my blogs: why is it significant? I'm getting it out of the way because I think it's unimportant considering how I truly felt about the film.
It's considered significant for those reasons—for the messages it had and for the reaction it provoked. Some people might try to say it's also a fine example of Capra's work. Don't listen to them. This movie blows.
I don't know where to begin. This movie didn't give me a good place to start.
A rather important thing I'd like to put out there first is that this movie has pretty much the same set up as Capra's earlier film, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. It starts off extremely fast, just throwing exposition at you. Someone dies and their legacy (fortune in Mr. Deeds and Senate seat in Mr. Smith) goes to a soft spoken, simple man. They have trouble fitting into a new, fast-paced environment, but they go onto achieve great victories in the face of great opposition. They also grow on the initially jaded career woman played both times by Jean Arthur and come out on top against the elite trying to sabotage them (slimy businessmen in Deeds and corrupt politicians in Smith). First of all, Mr. Deeds is purely a romantic comedy. It picked a genre and stuck with it. I'll get to that later. Secondly, Capra cast Gary Cooper, who does a perfectly fine job playing a country bumpkin with a kind heart and a few eccentricities.
For some reason, they hired Jimmy Stewart to play the same roll, essentially. Only this time, he's less boyish and interesting. We're supposed to see Jefferson Smith as a scout leader, outdoors-man, and salt of the Earth kind of guy. But the role was miscast and badly performed.
See, when Jimmy Stewart is cast properly, he makes the movie (Vertigo, It's a Wonderful Life). When he's miscast, he ruins it (Spirit of Saint Louis. He's in his 50s and is playing a 27 year old Charles Lindbergh). Not only is this lanky, long haired pre-war Stewart the absolute wrong choice for this role, but he's catatonic during the entire film. He sleepwalks through each scene until the filibuster sequence at the end where he shouts a lot. Too little, too late, Jimmy. We're supposed to get soft-spoken and naive. Instead, we get bland and stoic. It's the worst performance I've seen Stewart give. So there, we don't have a protagonist to get behind. We'll at least get a good, solid tone to stand behind, right? Some satire to make us giggle, some scathing political sequences to take our breath away?
See, one of the big things that separates stage and screen is the variety of perspectives and locations you can use. Most of the first part of Mr. Smith could have happened on a stage, so in order to make it cinematic, Capra shoves bits and pieces of expository scenarios and dialogue into a variety of locations. This rapid-fire chain of events gives the impression that we're in for a screw-ball comedy, and a couple of little moments affirm this prediction. The Governor's coin inexplicably lands on it side when he flips it to choose a new Senator. His children (all the children, in fact) are his advisers and constituents. They convince him to appoint Mr. Smith with the persuasiveness of a politician that knows all the ins and outs of D.C. McGann, a political aid, struggles to get out of a phone booth after making an important call. The scene lingers to the point of absurdity. Sadly, this throwaway moment of comic relief is the highlight of the entire movie. After only a few wacky moments, the film changes its mind about what it wants to be, and it won't be the first time it does so.
It then goes into an unnecessarily long, eye-rollingly patriotic montage of Smith sight-seeing Washington D.C. and being inspired by all the monuments. There were so many lap dissolves and patriotic music medleys that I started to get a mild headache. All this scene inspired me to do was remember the "Freedom isn't Free" song from Team America: World Police.
After this sequence ends, Smith makes several "inspiring" speeches to his secretary, Clarissa Saunders (Jean Arthur), whose love plot is mind-bogglingly haphazard, and her friend (?) played by Thomas Mitchell, who was in every movie made before 1945, apparently.
For a while, it looks as thought we are going to be forced to suffer through this masturbation over monuments and symbols for the rest of the film until it becomes a courtroom drama, kind of. Well, it's more just the constant tearing down of this innocent man who the movie has failed to make us even truly care for.
There are so many sequences in the Congress of corrupt politicians fucking over Jeff Smith that I just gave up taking notes and watched, utterly resigned. I unashamedly didn't pause when I went to take a piss at one point.
The only appealing character in this film is Saunders, but her relationship with this mannequin main character of Jeff Smith is just a head scratcher.
Smith starts off attracted to his corrupt (unbeknownst to him) colleague's daughter. He goes to visit her and is so struck that he keeps dropping his hat! Ha ha ha! Except this "comedy sequence" is shot in all closeups so we can't see the two speaking. We just keep seeing his hands dropping the hat. It's practically radioactive, as if whoever conceived of the scene was someone born without the ability to understand humor and was trying to recreate it based off an exercise in a book. Jimmy Stewart mumbling all his lines in monotone gives the sequence a creepy, voyeuristic vibe as well.
Then, Saunders, for some reason, gets drunk and asks to marry her friend played by Thomas Mitchell in this bizarre and drawn out scene in a bar. But then she goes back to the office to tell Smith that he's just a pawn in the political game and should get out. Thomas Mitchell takes her home after he realizes there will be no marriage. He seems pretty chill with this.
I've never seen such a convoluted and needlessly strenuous buildup of a romantic relationship in a Hollywood film.
So basically, the movie sets up this classic character dynamic of a corrupt or jaded group of people (socialites, politicians, etc.) being affected by a man with a mind that is impenetrably simple and actions that are highly misinterpreted, often leading to comedy. This makes it a (not the) progenitor of movies like The Great Dictator or Being There or Dave. The problem here is, this classic premise is underdone and, furthermore, the filmmakers think it belongs in a political drama, except when it decides to be a comedy. The movie fails in both attempts anyway, being sluggish and unnecessarily grim in its dramatic parts and being just a general failure as a comedy.
Despite all this unevenness, however, the movie stinks mostly because it's boring. Stewart's shockingly wooden performance is in the limelight, yet he's pretty passive. The driving of the plot passes from person to person. Not only that, but the plot is just about a guy trying to get funding for a scout's field and people are assholes about it. Then one of them admits that they are all assholes. That's it, you guys. Nothing to see here. The only things I can say I enjoyed were the telephone booth sequence from before and a moment where vehicular homicide is attempted against children in a spontaneous and comical fashion.
It's too bad we didn't just get a satire here. Smith is so boring and dull and oblivious, he's the butt of a political joke. Instead, the filmmakers made him the face of a nation. And because of that, this movie has a butt for a face.
The next film on the Registry is Modern Times (1936)
