Levine on Capra

Throughout the films of the Depression it was the city, as the representative of modernity, that corrupted the traditional dream and fouled the promise of America; the city that spawned the amoral men and fallen women of the gangster films; the city that formed the backdrop for the glittering but empty antics of the glamorous men and women of the decade's screwball comedies.

Hollywood's Washington became a symbol of the forces

and developments that had derailed America from its

destiny and led it astray. Into the nation’s capital, troop

a group of starry-eyed reformers from smalltown America

who quickly become the dupes or victims of the sordid,

cynical urban businessmen, journalists, politicians, and lobbyists.

Babe Bennett and Clarissa Saunders, like their counterpart

Anne Mitchell, in Meet John Doe, are drawn back to the

small-town innocence and unpretentiousness they--and

America--have somewhere lost. They had been, as Babe

puts it, "too busy being smart alecks. Too busy in a crazy competition for nothing.' But with the help of unspoiled individuals like Deeds, Smith, and Doe, whom America presumably still had in abundance, they could redeem themselves. And this is precisely what so many of Capra's--and Hollywood's--Depression films are about: redemption. As Leonard Quart has observed, Capra was not concerned with the politics of social restructuring or revolution but with the politics of conversion and moral regeneration. If the films of the early Depression flirted with the need for social change and authority, Capra's political films dealt with the need for a return to the basics of American tradition.

Capra's difficulties with Meet John Doe were not unique; he had difficulty finding endings for all his political films. The reason was not aesthetic; it was that the logical endings, the effective endings that flowed organically from all of the facts and details that Capra gave his audiences, were not those endings Capra wanted. In life, Tom Dixon would have lost control of his bank, or, at the very least, lost his faith in the people; in life, Longfellow Deeds would have been committed to an insane asylum or, at the very least, lost control of his millions; in life, Jefferson Smith would have been expelled from the Senate, or, at the very least, been beaten into impotent quiescence; in life, John Doe would have jumped to his death or, at the very least, faded into obscurity.

The crisis of the Great Depression challenged the rationality of the American system and Frank Capra responded by reasserting his faith in traditional values and verities. But in spite of his aggressive optimism and his comedic style, his response, like Hollywood's in general, was increasingly ridden through with ambiguities and a brooding pessimism. Hollywood films were far more prone to expose than to prescribe. Many of the films I have been discussing were quite successful in portraying the difficulties and the irrationalities of the American governmental system but they refrained from drawing the logical conclusions from the material they themselves supplied. Instead they tended to impose formulaic endings, which often bordered on the miraculous. Nothing Jefferson Smith did, for example, was sufficient to overcome the machinations of the lobbyists and machine politicians in the U.S. Senate. Victory comes only when the corrupt senior senator from his state has an unlikely bout of conscience and suddenly confesses. There were, as we have seen, other cultural responses to the breakdown of the traditional system: the response of the Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields; of Superman or the Hardboiled Detective; of those Hollywood filmmakers who flirted with authoritarianism and direct vigilante action. But such responses entailed a loss of innocence. Capra, and many of his Hollywood colleagues, insisted upon victory plus innocence - - on traditional ideals and traditional heroes winning on their own terms.

Levine, “Hollywood’s Washington,” 187, 189, 190-91