Jimmy Stewart

by Marc Eliot

  As for Stewart, the film’s failure pushed him deeper into radio. He starred in a two-part production of Up from Darkness opposite Rosalind Russell for CBS’s weekly Silver Theater, which played on two consecutive Sunday afternoons. Fearing his voice was becoming more popular than his face, he was relieved when he was offered a part in an MGM ripoff of its own highly successful Thin Man series, W. S. Van Dyke II’s hastily shot It’s a Wonderful World.

  Even with its pedigreed screenplay by such studio heavyweights as Ben Hecht and Herman J. Mankiewicz (who conceived it as a screwballer at a time when this style of film had all but exhausted itself), nothing about the film worked. Guy Johnson (Stewart) is a detective assigned to safeguard millionaire playboy Willie Heyward (Ernest Truex), who has too much to drink one night and winds up on the wrong end of a murder frame-up, originally intended for Johnson. Heyward is convicted for murder and sentenced to death, while Johnson also faces a year behind bars as his accomplice. En route to prison via train, Johnson escapes, meets poet Edwina Corday (Claudette Colbert), and although she is initially kidnapped by him, eventually falls in love and assists him in finding the real killer, thereby exonerating both him and Heyward. This film, too, quickly disappeared without a trace.

  Stewart’s career remained stuck in the ranks of the unremarkable until Frank Capra, now the highest-priced and most-powerful director in Hollywood as well as the undisputed king of Columbia’s helmers, called him for another film. Dissatisfied with his deal and with Harry Cohn’s stubborn, macho-mannered refusal to renegotiate it, Capra quietly began entertaining separate offers from both Zanuck and Samuel Goldwyn to make films for their respective independent studios. Capra’s struggle to become independent from what he perceived as the necessarily corrupted, or impure, Harry Cohn studio mentality toward talent, including directors, helped shape the thematic foundation of what was to be his next, and arguably greatest, film: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In it, Jimmy Stewart’s incredible performance as Jefferson Smith would not merely redeem his faltering career, but place him alongside Capra at the very top of Hollywood’s elite roster of bankable A-list box-office giants.

  The making of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was fraught with controversy from the beginning, reaching all the way to the highest governmental authority in Hollywood, Joseph L. Breen, then the head of the industry’s self-regulated Production Code Administration. It was one thing for a director like Capra to make a satire about Utopia, as long as it was set in some far-off Shangri-La, or a wacky comedy about a wealthy, out-of-touch family of millionaires living in a Shangri-La–like mansion exempt from the realities of the “real” world. But, as Capra was to discover, it was quite another to attempt a head-on, non-metaphoric feature about the pervasive, ongoing political corruption set within the great, vaunted walls of the United States Congress.

  In 1937, Harry Cohn had optioned a short treatment written by Lewis R. Foster called The Gentleman from Montana, which concerned the gradual disillusionment of an optimistic freshman senator. Foster was an “idea man” who, like Capra, started in silent comedy but had seen his career dissipate in the first decade of talkies until he was reduced to freelancing original treatments he’d written for the studios. Cohn liked the premise of The Gentleman from Montana but initially thought about shelving it after Breen, whose office insisted it be shown all material that any studio considered filming, personally wrote back to Cohn in January 1938 rejecting the treatment because of its “general unflattering portrayal of our system [that is] a covert attack on the democratic form of government.”

  The project then languished from studio to studio. Everyone who read it liked it, but no one in a position to get it made was willing to challenge Breen’s powerful office, until Harry Cohn decided to take a chance on it. He believed he could soften up its rougher, more controversial edges and optioned it as a project for Soviet Georgian émigré director Rouben Mamoulian. Cohn had been searching for something for Mamoulian, hoping he could sign the director to a contingent long-range contract at a bargain rate. Moreover, if a controversial project like Mr. Smith failed, he could always put the blame on what he would describe as Mamoulian’s Soviet-bred anti-Americanism.

  Meanwhile, Capra had gotten bogged down trying to make a movie based on the life of composer Frédéric Chopin. When he got the chance to read the Foster treatment for the first time, he insisted to Cohn he had to have it and suspended his work on the Chopin film. He traded in to Cohn an option he had taken on the Broadway play Golden Boy for the rights to The Gentleman from Montana. Cohn then assigned Mamoulian to direct Golden Boy, with new Columbia contract-player William Holden.

  Capra needed someone to work with him on the script. This was no easy task as he had recently lost his longtime collaborator Robert Riskin to Samuel Goldwyn, who had signed Riskin and boosted his annual $100,000 salary at Columbia to a cool half-million.3

  Capra was furious that Columbia had let Riskin get away, and his departure hastened Capra’s decision to leave Columbia as well. He informed Cohn that this next film, the final one under his present contract, was to be his last for the studio. Capra then turned to contract screenwriter Jo Swerling, only to discover to his dismay that Swerling, too, was jumping ship and joining Goldwyn, so was therefore not eligible to work on the movie. With time running out, Capra next turned to Columbia screenwriter Sidney Buchman, whom he had worked with on the marginal Broadway Bill (1934) and the unsuccessful Lost Horizon (Buchman had worked with Riskin on the script), but who had since written the elegant and successful Holiday (1938), directed by George Cukor and starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.4

  Capra always insisted that the minute he read the original treatment of The Gentleman from Montana the only two people he could see playing the two leads, Jefferson Smith and Saunders, his “hard-boiled” assistant, were James Stewart and his co-star from You Can’t Take It With You, Jean Arthur (who had also co-starred for Capra opposite Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds).

  In truth, Stewart was not Capra’s first choice; Cooper was. So much so that the director saw the film as a sequel to his 1936 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (for which Capra had won his first director Oscar) and for a while even thought of calling the new film Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington. Deeds did not become Smith until January 26, 1939, only a few weeks before Stewart was officially signed, and a few weeks after Goldwyn, who now also had Cooper under contract, refused to loan him to Capra. At that point, the director went to MGM for Stewart, where he knew he would have no trouble getting him from Mayer.

  Principal photography on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington began in April 1939. The interiors were mostly shot on a giant sound stage that Columbia Pictures had converted into an impressively detailed reproduction of the actual Senate chamber. Early into filming, Capra decided to personally escort his principal players to Washington, D.C., to shoot some location scenes while hopefully instilling in his cast a deeper patriotic feel for the material they could use in their performances. Along with Stewart and Arthur, Capra took the always spectacular and profoundly underrated Claude Rains (Senator Joe Paine), the Capra regular and ever-dependable Edward Arnold (state machine boss and corrupt publisher Jim Taylor), Thomas Mitchell (perennially tipsy D.C. beat reporter Diz Moore), and Harry Carey (benevolent vice president and president protem of the Senate).

  It was the first time Jimmy had been to the nation’s capital since he was a boy, when he’d once gone with his mother and sisters to visit Alexander while he was stationed there during World War One just prior to his being shipped out to the front lines of France. This time Stewart fell deeply in awe of the capital, particularly the monuments, and especially the Lincoln Memorial, which was to play such a crucial role in two of the movie’s pivotal scenes. Later on, Jimmy remembered the shooting of those location scenes this way: “Director Frank Capra, who taught me a lot about acting while we were making Mr. Smith, refused to build synthetic Washington street scenes at the Columbia lot or use process shots; he took the cast to Washington and caugh
t scenes at the exact moments when natural settings dovetailed with the story. In order to get a certain light, we made a shot at the Lincoln Memorial at four in the morning. To catch me getting off a streetcar, a camera was hidden in some bushes. I got on a regular car, paid my dime and, to the motorman’s amazement, departed, two blocks later—in front of the bushes. For shots of me going up the Capitol steps, I sat in a car and, at a given secret signal, went trudging up through the swarming lunch-hour crowd. This search for absolute realism, plus the superlative work of the supporting actors, had a great deal to do with ‘making’ the picture. I think especially of the grand performances of Claude Rains, Thomas Mitchell and Jean Arthur, a fine comedienne who proved in Mr. Smith that she could handle dramatic moments with equal skill.”

  The final script had undergone extensive changes and development since the original Foster treatment, aided in part by several improvisational rehearsals that Capra encouraged as a way to develop the spoken language of his leading characters and in part by the rhythm of the gags.5 By the time shooting began, the character of young Jefferson Smith (Stewart) had morphed into a small-town newspaper publisher and supervisor/guidance counselor of the Boy Rangers, a vaguely defined group of preteen clubs that most closely resembled the Boy Scouts (after the film’s release and subsequent controversy, they were said by some who hated the film to have also borne an uncomfortable likeness to the Nazi Youth organizations of Hitler’s Germany, something that particularly infuriated the extremely liberal Capra).

  Jefferson Smith, like his three historical namesakes (Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, Jesus Christ) is a purist and literalist who believes in the clear skies of the great American dream, who never sees any clouds of conflict that might otherwise mar the endless horizon of democracy. As such, he becomes the unwitting, and therefore perfect, stooge for his state’s corrupt political machine.6 The film begins with the great Dimitri Tiomkin’s rousing, patriotic score incorporating dribs and drabs of music from all corners of the Americana songbook, including “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean,” “My Darlin’ Clementine,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “Glory Hallelujah,” “Of Thee I Sing,” and “Found a Peanut.” This colorful cacophony is in direct contrast to the central theme of the opening montage: death (a subject still very much on Capra’s mind with the passing of his son earlier that year). The film flies through its plot-establishing scenes with a series of clip-clop cuts that Capra uses like flash cards to inform the audience that a state senior senator has died and an immediate replacement is needed. This exposition climaxes with a terrific unifying gag as Governor Hubert Hopper (Guy Kibbee), convinced by his children that Smith would make the perfect replacement senator, goes to Smith’s home, rings the front door, and is blown away by the responsive sound of a full brass band. Smith, it turns out, is rehearsing the Boy Rangers’ band, and they’ve kicked in just as Hopper presses the buzzer. Capra’s perfect sense of physical comedy puts a neat cap on the film’s breathtaking opening.

  The state’s surviving and now senior senator, Joseph Paine (Rains), another character name laden with physical, political, and religious symbolism, was a close friend of Smith’s late father, a behind-the-scenes politico never seen but nevertheless an influence in the film. It wasn’t much of a stretch for Jimmy to play Smith as a man who revered the spirit of a powerful, absent father, a man whose shoes of greatness he now must attempt to fill (the actual dialogue between Rains and Jimmy involving the recollection of the senior Smith’s death came out of a series of improvisations between the two actors that served as the basis for the final scripted version).

  The audience quickly learns that Paine and state boss and media giant Jim Taylor (Arnold) are in the midst of an illegal moneymaking land-grab involving the building of a federally funded dam in their home state, the legislation for which is carefully buried inside another, more important bill, and that they have conspired to appoint Smith to the Senate to assure themselves of his needed go-ahead vote on the project.

  During the first of the naïve Smith’s two visits to the Lincoln Memorial, he is inspired by the grand scale of democracy as represented via the Memorial, in which it appears that a giant-sized Lincoln is smiling down directly upon him (and, by extension all the other “little” people there including a former “Negro” slave—this Capraesque moment is somewhat tempered by an earlier scene in which African-Americans are depicted in their much more typical Hollywood studio–era roles as wide-eyed and dopey train porters). Afterward, Jefferson Smith returns to his office determined to contribute something worthwhile to the government in the name of the hometown people he represents. One of the first things Smith does is introduce a bill that would build a free summer camp for boys of all ages, not knowing that the land he wants designated is the very same parcel Paine and Taylor have earmarked for their dam site.

  Meanwhile, to tighten his grasp on Smith, Paine, at Taylor’s directive, instructs his gorgeous, sexy daughter, Susan (Astrid Allwyn), to seduce and therefore distract him. Paine’s daughter is one of the women the film’s male coterie of power euphemistically refers to as “high-heeled,” suggesting she is not only a professional, but also at the social beck and call of her father and other powerful men.

  Enjoying his new celebrity, Smith is stopped dead in his tracks at the prearranged introduction to the gorgeous Susan, swathed in mink, who lets him know she is “available” to him. Standing before her, Smith can’t seem to keep his hat on or even hold it firmly in his hands, another expert Capra comedy bit, illustrating Smith’s sexual intimidation (and possible impotence); at one point, Susan, enjoying his frustration, asks if she can hold it for him.

  A little later, when it becomes clear to Paine and Taylor that Smith is trying to acquire the very same land they want, they decide to convince him to back down, and enlist Susan to help in the “persuasion.” When all else fails, the assignment falls to Paine, whom Smith continues to idolize as a surrogate father, to explain to Smith how things actually work in Washington, D.C. It is a lesson in corruption and cynicism from within, and when Smith still refuses to play ball, he becomes the dupe in a plot to discredit him, instigated by Taylor and enforced by Paine.

  Alone, defeated, and humiliated, Smith makes his second visit to the Lincoln Memorial, accompanied this time by his assistant, Saunders (Jean Arthur), who, when we first meet her, is cold, cynical, and well aware of the so-called politics of reality. Her inability to act against Paine and Taylor, to the point where she works as an informal spy assigned to keep tabs on Smith, further implicates her along with, apparently, everyone else in Washington. Now, though, in the ever-watchful shadow of Lincoln (to Smith a father figure cut in stone), impressed with his honesty, integrity, and, of course, this being Hollywood as much as it is D.C., his good looks, she convinces him to keep on fighting for what he believes in. She has obviously fallen in Capraesque-style love with him. No conventional beauty, and not particularly sexually becoming (like Susan), Saunders’s love is decidedly not skin deep; it is, rather, interior, spiritual, maternal. She emerges because of it transformed, along with Smith, from the shadow of Lincoln, as Smith’s strong, knowing ally. At this point Susan (Mary Magdalene?) is out and Saunders (Mother Mary?) is in.

  Smith then takes his uphill battle directly to the Senate floor, where he expects to be mercilessly ripped to political shreds by Paine, or, as Susan has warned him earlier, “crucified.” In a last desperate attempt to survive false but convincing charges of his own corruption, Smith, guided by Saunders from the public viewing box, attempts a filibuster. Holding the Senate captive and mute for twenty-three hours, he reads aloud the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution (which elicits a groan from the other Senators), and, in case the symbolic crucifixion has not been hammered home enough, passages from the Bible.

  The film builds toward its inevitable climax in which everything miraculously resolves itself in happy democratic justice and contentment but not before what Andrew Sarris once described as the “obligatory Capra sc
ene of the confession of folly in the most public manner possible.” During this sequence, Capra shoots Stewart in ever tighter close-ups, full-face shots with no visible background, his wrists curved downward like swans’ necks under his chin, his eyes darting from side to side, his face awash in sweat and agony.

  As Jimmy later remembered, “It was the filibuster speech that Capra started way back in the gallery with the camera and ended up two feet from my face. Capra said, ‘Jesus, do it right, ’cause this is what we’re going to use. He kept getting closer and closer. By the time he got there I had the thing all worked out.”

  To induce the appropriate level of hoarseness for a twenty-three-hour filibuster, Capra had Stewart consult a doctor, who administered daily doses of deadly mercury dichloride directly onto the actor’s vocal cords.

  According to Jean Arthur, “When Jimmy was working in that picture, he used to get up at five o’clock in the morning and drive five miles an hour to get himself to the studio. He was so terrified that something was going to happen to him, he wouldn’t go any faster.” Eventually, his intensely reverential approach to the role of Jefferson Smith unnerved Arthur, who made no secret of her preference for playing opposite the likes of the sensual Gary Cooper than to the chaste Jimmy Stewart.