Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is fondly revered as the tale of a decent common man who goes to the halls of power and triumphs over corruption through simple honesty and determination.
That's a nice story. But that's not what happens in the movie. Jimmy Stewart's Jefferson Smith is a decent, common man who goes to Washington and is destroyed utterly by corrupt men who control not just the government but also the press.
Frank Capra's film offers a pessimistic assessment of the state of the union. He describes a world in which corrupt men have a stranglehold on power with no checks on their abuse of it other than their own stunted conscience.
As Mr. Smith begins to challenge the corruption he finds in Washington, Boss Taylor (Edward Arnold) mobilizes his media empire to destroy his reputation with lies. Capra presents a montage that cuts between scenes of Taylor's giant printing presses spewing forth lies and scenes of a handful of boy rangers hand-cranking out their amateur newspaper and loading it into wagons to spread the truth.
That montage is the scene people remember from the movie. It embodies everything we've come to mean by the term "Capraesque." But we forget what happens next.
Taylor's thugs assault the boys, destroying their papers and their press. The truth is violently suppressed and Smith's integrity is punished with disgrace.
The corrupt men of Capra's film have the unchecked power to destroy Smith utterly and that is what they do. He collapses, disgraced and exhausted, on the Senate floor. They win.
It's only in the last minute of the film that we are left with any hope at all for the future of the democracy. The ending is abrupt and not wholly convincing. Even Claude Rains was not skilled enough as an actor to make this melodramatic twist entirely believable.
Rains plays Sen. Joseph Paine, the silver-haired and well respected man at the heart of the corruption. At the moment of his triumph — as Smith is literally buried under "public opinion, made to order" — Paine is conscience-stricken. He screeches a confession: "Every word that boy said is the truth! I'm not fit for office! I'm not fit for any place of honor or trust!" He flees to the cloakroom to atone for his crimes by trying to take his own life.
Just that quickly the story pivots 180 degrees. Evil recuses itself and we are given a happy ending. The credits roll.
This is not an uplifting message. Capra leaves us with precious little basis for hope.
The powers that be are corrupt, Capra says, and they hold all the cards. We cannot stop them. Nothing can stop them except themselves. The only hope for America is that some shred of conscience still lives in a forgotten corner of their crooked little hearts and that they will repent, cast away the spoils of their abuse of power and voluntarily forfeit that power back to the people to whom it rightfully belongs.
Rains almost makes us believe that such a thing is possible. He portrays Sen. Paine as a man who started out with good intentions, a man still clinging to a fragment of his tortured soul.
Karl Rove is not Sen. Paine. He is not haunted by conscience. He will never opt for the pistol in the cloakroom that Capra suggests is his only honorable recourse. Our movie is not heading for a happy ending.
I guess this is just another lost cause, Mr. Paine. All you people don't know about lost causes. Mr. Paine does. He said once they were the only causes worth fighting for …
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