But still, the theatricality of a filibuster — amplified in an age when we can all watch it on whatever device is handy — gives the idiosyncratic maneuver some extra oomph. It’s a demonstration of something remarkable about the American system of government. In the film, the CBS newsman notes that among the observers in the packed gallery are representatives from two “dictator powers,” as he puts it, though they remain unnamed. (It is 1939, after all, a time to be circumspect about your politics in Hollywood.) “They have come here to see what they can’t see at home: democracy in action,” he intones.
That throwaway line indicates a bit of the film’s history. During production, the Hays Code was in full effect. That censorship mechanism was designed to bar movies that might degrade the morals of the youths — by, for instance, casting aspersions on law enforcement or American government officials. Initially the screenplay was rejected by the code’s enforcers, though eventually it was approved. When “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” finally reached theaters, critics and audiences tended to like it. The Times named it one of the best films of 1939, with the critic Frank Nugent noting that Capra was “operating, of course, under the protection of that unwritten clause in the Bill of Rights entitling every voting citizen to at least one free swing at the Senate.”
But not everyone agreed. Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley, a Democrat, said that it “made the Senate look like a bunch of crooks.” Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, father of John and Robert, wired Will B. Hays, the keeper of the censorship code, that “to permit this film to be shown in foreign countries and to give people the impression that anything like this could happen in the United States Senate is to me nothing short of criminal.”
Yet it’s become a patriotic classic, for good reason. If “Mr. Smith” takes a particularly romantic view of the filibuster, it’s also sneakily realistic. Yes, it has a kind of Hollywood ending, but not an entirely optimistic one: Smith collapses on the floor, surrounded by 50,000 telegrams from constituents who’ve been manipulated by Taylor into demanding an end to his starry-eyed quest. That’s dark.
But filibustering is just good, the movie suggests, to do for its own sake. That’s part of a refrain in much of Capra’s most patriotic work: The point of a democratic system isn’t to line one person’s pockets, but to bolster the good of all. “I wouldn’t give you two cents for all your fancy rules if behind them they didn’t have a little bit of plain ordinary everyday kindness, and a little looking out for the other fella, too,” Smith says. Up in the gallery are a cadre of men in uniforms that indicate they’re Union veterans of the Civil War as well as World War I — and they applaud thunderously.
Near the end, Smith once again invokes those “lost causes,” which he learned from his father were the only causes worth fighting for because of the rule to love they neighbor. “In this world today full of hatred,” he croaks, glaring at Senator Paine, “the man who knows that one rule has a great trust.”