A Film Canon

 

 

In the third of Capra's American Gospels, his democratic conversation-space finds its logical conclusion as the American Senate; or, rather, as idealistic newcomer Jefferson Smith's (James Stewart) rediscovery of what the Senate could be, as evinced in his transformation of it into an opportunity for "plain, decent, everyday, common rightness", as well as for the corresponding demotic rhetoric, in the form of a twenty-four hour use of the filibuster, "the right to talk your head off...free speech in its most dramatic form". Smith's vision stems from a familiarity with American history that is not so much an indication of erudition as of genealogy, leading his secretary (Jean Arthur) to envisage him as a descendent of Lincoln. Filtered through his eyes, Washington D.C. takes on the majesty of Ancient Greece, with the Lincoln Memorial as its Acropolis, producing a political sublime that elevates every constitutional pronouncement to a marble incision. This beatification of language completes You Can't Take It With You's transference of culpability from the media to the 'business machine'. Not only do journalists pronounce some of the most bitter indictments against corruption, but Smith's genealogy is equally media-inflected, his small- scale publication ("Boys Stuff") having been inspired by his father Clayton Smith, "Champion of Lost Causes", who pitted a four-page paper against a mining syndicate for the sake of a single miner - and was murdered for it. However, this doesn't militate against Capra's distrust of urbanism; or, alternatively, against his vision of Washington D.C. as a semi-pastoral polis. In fact, Smith's single bill consists of replacing plans to dam a valley with plans to open it up as a holiday camp for city boys, both to provide them with a break from city life, and introduce them to the individualistic know-how of his political ancestors.