A Film Canon

 

 

If Capra presents the courtroom as a conversation-space, then Stevens presents it as a sacral space - to be defended against the masses, rather than overtaken by them. Concomitantly, he re-aligns the media with political corruption, and disassociates it from the investigative enterprise, signalling a movement away from classic screwball. For the first time in the genre, it feels as if the pleasures of cacaphony may not necessarily outweigh the costs, the narrative turning on an embodiment of the philosophical letter (Ronald Colman) and pragmatic spirit (Cary Grant) of Lady Liberty (Jean Arthur), whose effective collaboration is contingent on keeping an entire, fast-talking town - policemen, shippers, truckers, reporters, dogs - out of their small house; or, alternatively, in moving beyond the screwball tendency to dichotomise reason and conversation. Hence Stevens' diagnosis of "a certain impulsive, nervous quality" as "a disease of the age", best cured with a healthy dose of silence, and only dangerous when paired with social constriction, in which case it has the potential to transform freedom of speech itself into a kind of prison, and the reportage that invokes it into little more than a nascent lynch mob. Conversely, the few moments of peace transform the trio's house into an extrapolation of eighteenth- century politeness - "the high point of man's intellectual achievement" - in which hierarchies are dissolved, responsibilities are shared, accusations are premised on evidence and a right of reply, and conversation is conserved to the same extent as action.