As I do every July 4th, I spent part of the afternoon, 129 minutes to be exact, watching Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It strikes me as the perfect patriotic note to strike. And it includes the whole scale in its confrontation of back home idealism with big city cynicism. You can believe in Mr. Smith while laughing along with the wised up reporters and political operatives who use or observe him. Director Frank Capra pushes the buttons so well that I never fail to cry,especially at the parts that are the most treacly, such as when Smith first visits the Lincoln Memorial and watches a little kid read the Gerrysburg Address as an elderly African-American (old enough to remember the Civil War?) comes up and takes off his hat.

Every year I forget how perfectly Capra and his associates cast Mr. Smith. From Jack Carson on up, each role, no matter how big or small, is vivid and engaging. Claude Raines moves like a dancer. Jean Arthur’s voice is entrancing and has a wider range than I recall. And Edward Arnold, as the Penderast-style boss of the political machine, may have been the best actor in Hollywood, ever.

This time I read the script, credited to Sidney Buchman, after seeing the film, and was struck by how much was cut out of the (already long) movie. The script doesn’t appear to be on line anywhere but is available in a cleaned up reader’s version in the book 20 Best Film Plays, edited by John Gassner and Dudley Nichols. There are at least three major sequences deleted from the film and lots of little bits of the script are excised (as an example, look at the scene where Susan Paine calls up Saunders, very obviously edited down in the finished version). I get the impression that screenwriters wrote fuller texts back in the old days, and that in the editing room the films were trimmed down dramatically, the editors cognizant that the viewer could accept shorthand and make leaps. Riskin’s script to It Happened One Night kicks off the book and it actually reads better than it plays. Anyway, the script’s first introduction of Smith is elided, and at the end there is a whole sequence that takes place back in Jackson City, where Smith is feted and he introduces Saunders to his … pets. It’s a fuller text and makes me as misty eyed as the finished version does.

At the end of the 4th this year I had occasion to see the wealth of fireworks that were going off around the city (and they are illegal in this town). Wealth in both senses. There must have been hundreds of thousands of dollars going up in smoke that night. It was like Bagdad on a bad night. I love fireworks (invented by the Chinese) and they are fun to watch and hear but in the caustic circumstances of a typical 4th they lose connection with the holiday they announce loudly, one that established the birth of a nation and a flag that survived, as the song says, the rocket’s red glare. In a time of trouble the bread and circuses are attended for their own sake. Next year take a tip from me and start the day with a shameless reminder of what the 4th stands for and revel in the exquisite beauty of Buchman and Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

 

Comments: 1 Comment