In March 1940, Thomas Burke, the chief of the Division of International Communications, composed a memo that discussed the problems facing the film industry and the federal government, and the contradictions that emerged from them. He wrote that motion picture markets overseas had dried up considerably, largely because of the war and foreign censorship restrictions. He went on to say that “censorship is one of the main threats that confronts the motion picture industry on the western hemisphere” and that the industry had “called upon the [State] Department for assistance perhaps more frequently than ever before in its history.” He added that

it seems reasonable to say that our ability to ride successfully through the morass of censorship is in no small measure based upon the respect and confidence which we have instilled in the minds of both governments and governed in the Latin American area . . . [where] democracy is ridiculed as an impractical device by certain of the totalitarian governments.

Then the memo cautioned that “it seems incredibly inconsistent for any American commercial enterprise which thrives on United States prestige to abet the hostile propagandists by ridiculing democratic systems.”

Thus the State Department’s perception of Latin America created a puzzle. Censorship was an evil that threatened the film industry. But in places where democracy was ridiculed, why allow US-made, arguably antidemocratic artifacts to flourish? And this was where Capra’s film came to the department’s attention and where different kinds of reception practice would be acknowledged. The author of the memo and his associates saw the film as “a bit of buffoonery.” But they were not convinced that the film would be received in this manner in Latin America. In fact, the memo pointed out “the serious damage that might result from showing such a film outside the United States and particularly below the Rio Grande.”

The same sentiments turned up in a number of memos. In September, for instance, the chargé d’affaires in Bangkok wrote that, while Mr. Smith constituted excellent entertainment “for home consumption . . . [it] should never be permitted to be shown outside of the borders of the United States.” Even when officials decided to oppose censoring the film, they viewed Mr. Smith as a dangerous movie, and their language shows how the film spoke quite directly to nationalist, masculinist concerns. A few days after he wrote his first memo about Mr. Smith (and subsequently having a department official question his call for banning the film), Burke reversed his resistance to Capra’s movie. Nevertheless, he added that “in order to establish our national virility,” the United States need not go out of its way “to establish our susceptibility to sin,” as Mr. Smith seemed to do. For Burke, the film demonstrated to “our neighbors the fact that we are ‘muy hombre,’ ” but did so in the worst possible way, by implying that the United States was “basically corrupt.”

What I find especially interesting here is not so much a concern with how “natives” might receive the film but with how the United States itself would be “received” in Latin America; the entire southern hemisphere seemed to mobilize northern fears of being feminized among the Latinos, of not being quite “virile” enough. In this instance, the discourse of at least some government officials created a kind of homosocial sphere of influence, where “our” men must be shown to be more manly than “theirs.” If this were true, this might give us a better understanding of the discomfort with Capra’s film, which takes the shape of an Oedipal drama about sons slaying fathers and which ends with the male hero having passed out, and then, a few moments later, Clarissa Saunders—the woman who acts as Senator Smith’s political mentor—screaming “yippee.”

Eric Smoodin, “’Compulsory viewing for every citizen’: Mr. Smith and the rhetoric of reception,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 35:2 (1996): 3-23