Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Frank Capra's film now reads as a monument to American idealism. In 1939 Washington nearly treated it as a scandal. At the premiere on 17 October, Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley called it silly and stupid and said it made the Senate look like a bunch of crooks. A Washington Star critic wrote that it painted democracy in exactly the colours Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin liked to paint it. Joseph P. Kennedy, then ambassador to Britain, pushed for the film to be pulled from European release on the grounds that it would damage America's prestige there. It was banned in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Franco's Spain. The irony arrived in 1942. Just before the German occupation banned American films in France, some Paris cinemas ran it continuously, one of them reportedly for thirty days without stopping. It received eleven Academy Award nominations and won a single one, for Best Original Story. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1989. Who it is for: viewers who still want a film that believes political conviction is possible. Who it is not for: anyone whose modern cynicism will find the ending too easy. That objection is fair.