Late in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Frank Capra’s 1939 ode to democracy, free speech and the filibuster, a CBS newsman is trilling into his microphone near the Senate chamber. Inside that august room, he tells his listeners, is a man engaging in “the American privilege of free speech in its most dramatic form.”
“The rrrrright,” he calls it, rolling that r, “to talk your head off!”
He is referring to Jefferson Smith (played by a 30-ish Jimmy Stewart, all big eyes and gee-willikers wonder), the fish-out-of-water junior senator from some unnamed Western state and political party, who’s held the Senate floor all night and is still at it. He’s filibustering an appropriations bill to protest graft and injustice, specifically injustice against himself and more generally against the people of his state, his country and heck, why not, the whole world.
I thought of Smith and his idealism while watching Senator Cory Booker on Tuesday, 24 hours into his own record-setting speech to protest the actions of the Trump administration. (Technically it wasn’t a filibuster because it did not come during a debate over a specific bill or nominee.) Stewart’s performance is calibrated to heightened Hollywood standards, to be sure, but by the end of the movie’s daylong filibuster, Smith looks as if he’s got the flu: sweaty, haggard, staggering around, voice reduced to a painful rasp. By contrast Booker, who’s about 25 years older than that character, remained coherent and composed and also audible, even when he concluded at the 25-hour mark.
In truth, I always think of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (for rent on Apple TV+) when this kind of speech comes up. I saw it dozens of times as a teenager, as it was a favorite in the home-school community to which my family belonged. It’s both very funny and profoundly idealistic, with its underlying belief that anybody who tries a feat this athletic and grueling — as the CBS newsman reminds the crowd, sitting down ends the filibuster — must be in the right. “Either I’m dead right or I’m crazy!” Smith hollers at one point.
“You wouldn’t care to put that to a vote, would you, senator?” one of his irritated colleagues replies. We know the movie’s answer.
Smith is no politician: He’s the grown-up leader of the Boy Rangers, a pseudo Boy Scout organization devoted to instilling love for America and the great outdoors in its young charges. But he accidentally lands a political appointment to the upper chamber of Congress against the will of the political machine of his state, run by the cigar-chewing fat cat Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold), who has everyone in his pocket from the news media and minor politicians to the eminent Senator Joseph Paine (Claude Rains).
After some hemming and hawing, Taylor realizes Smith might just be the guy they want there. He’s honest, he’s patriotic, he’s unknown. In memory of his late journalist father — who was, in younger days, best friends with Senator Paine — he is devoted to what he calls “lost causes.” And most of all, he’s unlikely to stumble on their plans to line Taylor’s pockets with some scheme involving a creek and a dam. Oops.
Of course, not every filibuster is righteous. The record for the longest Senate speech was previously set by Strom Thurmond, the ardent segregationist who filibustered the Senate for 24 hours and 18 minutes to stall the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
But still, the theatricality of a filibuster — amplified in an age when we can all watch it on whatever device is handy — gives the idiosyncratic maneuver some extra oomph. It’s a demonstration of something remarkable about the American system of government. In the film, the CBS newsman notes that among the observers in the packed gallery are representatives from two “dictator powers,” as he puts it, though they remain unnamed. (It is 1939, after all, a time to be circumspect about your politics in Hollywood.) “They have come here to see what they can’t see at home: democracy in action,” he intones.
That throwaway line indicates a bit of the film’s history. During production, the Hays Code was in full effect. That censorship mechanism was designed to bar movies that might degrade the morals of the youths — by, for instance, casting aspersions on law enforcement or American government officials. Initially the screenplay was rejected by the code’s enforcers, though eventually it was approved. When “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” finally reached theaters, critics and audiences tended to like it. The Times named it one of the best films of 1939, with the critic Frank Nugent noting that Capra was “operating, of course, under the protection of that unwritten clause in the Bill of Rights entitling every voting citizen to at least one free swing at the Senate.”
But not everyone agreed. Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley, a Democrat, said that it “made the Senate look like a bunch of crooks.” Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, father of John and Robert, wired Will B. Hays, the keeper of the censorship code, that “to permit this film to be shown in foreign countries and to give people the impression that anything like this could happen in the United States Senate is to me nothing short of criminal.”
Yet it’s become a patriotic classic, for good reason. If “Mr. Smith” takes a particularly romantic view of the filibuster, it’s also sneakily realistic. Yes, it has a kind of Hollywood ending, but not an entirely optimistic one: Smith collapses on the floor, surrounded by 50,000 telegrams from constituents who’ve been manipulated by Taylor into demanding an end to his starry-eyed quest. That’s dark.
But filibustering is just good, the movie suggests, to do for its own sake. That’s part of a refrain in much of Capra’s most patriotic work: The point of a democratic system isn’t to line one person’s pockets, but to bolster the good of all. “I wouldn’t give you two cents for all your fancy rules if behind them they didn’t have a little bit of plain ordinary everyday kindness, and a little looking out for the other fella, too,” Smith says. Up in the gallery are a cadre of men in uniforms that indicate they’re Union veterans of the Civil War as well as World War I — and they applaud thunderously.
Near the end, Smith once again invokes those “lost causes,” which he learned from his father were the only causes worth fighting for because of the rule to love they neighbor. “In this world today full of hatred,” he croaks, glaring at Senator Paine, “the man who knows that one rule has a great trust.”
I suppose that’s why “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” still holds up, and why I found myself once again thinking about it this week. Booker’s invocation of John Lewis’s “good trouble” sounds like an echo of this screenplay. At the same time, anyone who talks around the clock, whether it’s Jefferson Smith or Cory Booker, knows they’ll have to stop sometime, and that business will continue as usual, and the world will move on. It’s an act at once bold and quixotic.
To fill time on the floor in the wee hours, Smith reads from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, occasionally editorializing. Addressing his colleagues, who are assiduously ignoring him, he tells them that the rules won’t work “if you haven’t got men that have learned to tell human rights from a punch in the nose!”
The gallery bursts into applause, but one jaded journalist smiles wryly. “That’s good for a headline,” he says.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson
The post The Movie That Can Help You Understand Cory Booker’s Senate Speech appeared first on New York Times.
