Capra on the Washington Press Corps

And sitting in the back of one of the Press Club's restaurant-bar booths with my good wife next to me, I took the worst shellacking of my professional life. Shifts of hopping-mad Washington press correspondents belittled, berated, scorned, vilified, and ripped me open from stem to stern as a villainous traducer. For--much to my surprise--I was accused of double-sinning in Mr. Smith. Sin number one was just a mortal sin: showing that graft could raise its ugly head in the august Senate chamber. But sin number two: depicting one of their own Press Club members as being too fond of the juice of the grape--Well! That was heresy; punishable by being burned at the stake in the fires of their wrath.

It didn't make sense. The average reporter I knew would have laughed at himself

under the circumstances. But these gentlemen were not average reporters. They

were demi-gods, "byliners," opinion makers. What they wrote was instantly printed

in hundreds of newspapers at home and abroad. They not only influenced government

policy; at times, they made it. They were the real "power" of the press before whom

Senators--even Presidents--quailed. Their irrational attack on Mr. Smith was not an

attack against entertainment. or against me personally. It was an attack against a new,

perhaps superior, power invading their empire-"film power."

They could make or break Senators, they could influence elections, they could expose

graft in high places. But let Hollywood dare to suggest that one. Senator was a trained seal for

a political machine, or dare to publicly depict one of their own Washington press corps as

something less than a paragon of virtue and wisdom, and Hollywood would suffer the full fury of their majestic rancor.

Clearly, the National Press Club envied and feared film as a rival opinion maker. Clearly, they detested Mr. Smith Goes to Washington because it was the first important film to muscle in on their private Washington preserves. Clearly, their own officials had been tricked into sponsoring a Trojan horse. So resentful were those Olympian cuff-shooters that they could take this hypocritical stance: Holding a Martini in angry fingers, they looked me right in the eye and said, "There isn't one Washington correspondent in this room that drinks on duty, or off duty!"

From Frank Capra, The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography (1971), 283

Compare:

If Taylor's exploitation of American folk culture for private profit and political gain is debunked within the fiction, the opening moment of this filmic text, in which the logo of Columbia Pictures is underscored with a musical phrase from "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," aligns patriotic folk culture with corporate self-promotion, seemingly without irony. The cinema of Hollywood emerges as an ideal medium for the revivification, authentication, and dissemination of political and cultural ideals; it is a guarantor of a compelling experience (a Capra film) yet itself is not subject to the critique of machination and mediation the fiction otherwise provides.

Charles Wolfe, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: Democratic Forums and Representational Forms," 190-221 in Frank Capra: Authorship and the Studio System, ed. Robert Sklar and Vito Zagarrio (Temple U.P., 1998), 190-221 [212]

Underneath the apparent war between contemporary politicians and founding fathers, politics and morality, urban sophistication and small-town innocence, the corrupt present and the virtuous past, lies the triumph not of traditional morality (as happens within Capra's film) but the triumph of the modern mass media apparently targeted by the movie. Capra knew what he was doing. The senators and Washington correspondents who savaged Mr. Smith, he later wrote, were leveling "an attack against a new, perhaps superior, power invading their empire-'film power.'" Although Capra, like Wheeler, may seem to choose community over modernity and the little people over institutional centralization, Mr. Smith actually resolves those antinomies as Wheeler could not. In spite (or rather, as we shall see, because) of its apotheosis of the people, the medium of Capra's film was also its political message.

Michael P. Rogin and Kathleen Moran, “Mr. Capra Goes to Washington,” Representations 84, In Memory of Michael Rogin (2003): 213-248 [218]