by Marc Eliot
This was to be the first time American audiences would see Jimmy as an actor of dimension playing a character with both desperation and depth, and one capable of galvanizing a nation sorely in need of a cinematic patriot brave enough and smart enough to stand alone against the rising tide of economic swindle and worldwide Fascist threats to democracy. So popular was the character of Jefferson Smith that Jimmy Stewart himself became an immediate American symbol of intellectual purity, tall, dark, and smart—Clark Gable with a college degree, John Wayne with a driver’s license (no Cary Grant to be sure, but no Claude Rains either).
To modern audiences Mr. Smith Goes to Washington may come off as too oversimplified a fairy tale of right triumphing over wrong, one more in the endless replays Hollywood has given the world of the David-and-Goliath tale, even if this one is staged in the arena of Washingtonian democracy. However, in its day, the film’s defiant view of the reality of American politics was nothing less than populist dynamite. Nothing like it had been seen in an American mainstream movie. No filmmaker had ever before made such massive accusations about the pervasiveness of the corruption inherent in the hitherto untouchable hallowed halls of Congress. Because of it, Mr. Smith deeply resonated with a citizenry that had lived through a decade of the Depression and was now engaged in a battle over whether or not America should enter into the dangerous battlefield of World War Two.
To understand the film’s widespread appeal, despite all the creeping and creepy darkness that pervades its bundle of overly simplified neos (Marxist, Weberian, New Deal, Jeffersonism, fascist, Christian) is to understand just how popular and important the director himself had become. At the time of the making of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Capra was the master of populist American entertainment. He was not only the biggest star director that Columbia Pictures had ever produced, he was the only “name” it had who could more or less “guarantee” a film. For all his Catholic guilt and resurrection complexes, what critic Andrew Sarris once described as a cinematic continuum of “near crucifixion and redemption,” Capra had managed to become a personality of such identifiable force and familiarity to movie-goers that Columbia agreed to title the film in all advertising and in its opening credits as Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
With this film Capra had not only perfected his thematic, if ritualistic, screen style, he found the perfect expression of his own idealized personality in the acting style and physical manner of Jimmy Stewart. “He played [Jefferson Smith] with his whole heart and his whole mind, and that is what made it so real, so true,” Capra later said of this most extraordinary of performances.
The film held a special premiere in October 17, 1939, in Washington’s Constitutional Hall, preceded by a laudatory Press Club luncheon in Capra’s honor. The four thousand invited guests, mostly Washington bigwigs and Hollywood heavy hitters, appeared to have a good time, despite the film’s two stars not being present. Arthur begged off claiming she was shooting her next movie, but the rift that developed during filming between her and Stewart may have been the real reason for her absence. As for Jimmy, he, too, claimed a schedule conflict, but in truth he may have been frightened off by the growing criticism being hurled against Capra in the political as well as the cinematic press.
Indeed, the apparent (and by Capra unexpected) reception of the premiere’s invited audience to the film’s “radical” politics was the start of a mountain slide of criticism, much of it aimed directly at Capra. The very next day, senator after senator and political columnist after political columnist publicly questioned the film’s depiction of the everyday machinations of American politics. Washington columnist Willard Edwards wrote that at the premiere “members of the Senate were writhing in their seats [over their] resentment…the Senate believes itself to have been maligned by the motion picture industry [and] is preparing to strike back at Hollywood.” Frederic William Wile of the Washington Star wrote what was perhaps the most stinging attack on Capra when he insisted that the film “shows up the democratic system and our vaunted free press in exactly the colors Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin are fond of painting them.”
The controversy quickly took on a life of its own, with Capra taking virtually all of the heat, while the film’s stars, especially Jimmy, managed to avoid the fray.7 When things quickly got too hot for Capra, he rather unfortunately suggested that maybe the blame really belonged to the film’s screenwriter, Buchman, who was, Capra reminded everyone, a member of the Communist party, someone who’d “betrayed” everyone (including Capra himself) by inserting certain party “codes” into the movie.8
Much to the relief of Capra and Cohn, the film’s public premiere a week later, at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, brought rave reviews from the general press, and it went on to become a box-office blockbuster. The New York Times approached the film’s growing political controversy by saying, “Capra has gone after the greatest game of all, the Senate…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…Mr. Capra is a believer in democracy as well as a stouthearted humorist…Mr. Smith is one of the best shows of the year. More fun, even, than the Senate itself.” The New York Daily Mirror called it “inspiring grand entertainment.” The New York Herald Tribune praised it as “a moving and memorable motion picture.” The Daily News flatly declared it “Capra’s masterpiece.” The Nation solemnly declared Mr. Smith Goes to Washington “by far the best film of the year,” and said about its star, “Jimmy Stewart as Jefferson Smith takes first place among Hollywood actors…. Now he is mature and gives a difficult part, with many nuances, moments of tragic-comic impact. And he is able to do more than play isolated scenes effectively. He shows the growth of a character through experience…. In the end he is so forceful that his victory is thoroughly credible. One can only hope that after this success Mr. Stewart in Hollywood will remain as uncorrupted as Mr. Smith in Washington.”
Andrew Sarris later described Jimmy’s performance as “lean, gangling, idealistic to the point of being neurotic, thoughtful to the point of being tongue-tied,” by a movie star who was “the most complete actor-personality in the American cinema, particularly gifted in expressing the emotional ambivalence of the action hero.”
At the age of thirty-one, by virtue of his performance as Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jimmy Stewart had become a superstar and everyone wanted a piece of him now. Reporters tripped over themselves trying to get an interview, a comment about the film’s controversy, or maybe even what his favorite color was. The only problem was, no one could find him.
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“She’d slept with him from day one. It was a dream: It had been magical. For him, too. Suddenly, she was able to speak about it. It had all been poetic and romantic, hour by hour. That had held her bound to him, making her happy and unhappy. She never knew from one week to the next. He had never talked about love, but told her he was not in love, couldn’t afford it. It hadn’t bothered him not to be responsible for anybody. She had become pregnant by him the first time they’d slept together…she didn’t want to abort the child, in order to continue sleeping with him. But she gave in to his wishes…”
—FROM THE PUBLISHED DIARIES OF GERMAN NOVELIST ERICH MARIA REMARQUE REGARDING MARLENE DIETRICH’S AFFAIR WITH JIMMY STEWART DURING THE MAKING OF DESTRY RIDES AGAIN
Upon completing Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a muted, increasingly introspective Jimmy Stewart found himself with two months free before having to report to work on his next film and booked passage for himself on the luxury liner Normandie, the preferred celebrity pond-crosser, despite the fact that by now war had been officially declared throughout Europe and Hitler was threatening to devour the entire continent. Shortly after the film opened, Stewart spoke directly to his father by telephone. During the conversation, Alex once again ran the litany, telling his son to forget about all this film nonsense, come home, share in the running of t
he family business, get married, and start a family. That was when Jimmy decided instead to go to Europe.
With a single suitcase and a home movie camera, he wanted to travel alone and incognito, shooting the sites like any tourist. After one day in England, he traveled to France, where he spent nine days roaming the countryside in a hired car. At one point he found himself in Bourges, the same town where Alexander had been assigned during World War One to help rebuild some of the structures that had been blown up, “huge, empty steel buildings hidden away in the woods outside the city,” as Jimmy would later describe them. He wound up in Cannes, along the way shooting dozens of rolls of amateur 16-mm footage.
Having just finished playing a character betrayed by a fictional father figure, Senator Paine, while being directed by a real-life one he truly admired, Frank Capra, and still unable to get the kind of recognition or encouragement from Alexander he so desired, Jimmy had fallen into the first of what would be a recurring series of isolating, dispiriting depressions. Now, as if to make the mixing of his emotions even finer, his amateur movie-making enabled him at once to act out the parts of the father, the son, and the directorial Holy Ghost.
He began his return trip to the States just as the Nazi army invaded Poland, bringing Britain and France into the war. The Normandie was forced to sail at night without lights, the passengers not allowed to illuminate their rooms as they crossed the increasingly treacherous waters of the Atlantic.
Upon his return in late summer of 1939, he remained out of sight in Los Angeles, reemerging just in time to begin work on his next film. While he was away, Leland Hayward had arranged yet another loan-out, this time to Universal, where Jimmy was cast as a cowboy in his first Western, opposite the sexually voracious Marlene Dietrich. Mayer’s thinking was, If Mr. Smith proved too controversial and ultimately bombed, it was better to have the fall-out land at another studio. On the other hand, if the film proved a legitimate hit, MGM still had him under contract. The way Mayer saw it, it was a no-lose situation. For him.
Dietrich made no secret of the fact that she intended to make a full-course meal out of the handsome, if overly ripe, young actor who, everyone now agreed, had an absolute lock on winning Best Actor for his unforgettable portrayal of Jefferson Smith.
Miss Dietrich, of course, had a different role in mind for him.
The film, the fifth and final one he would make in 1939, was George Marshall’s Destry Rides Again, more a spoof of than an actual Western, with the lead role tailored to fit him as perfectly as a thousand-dollar custom-cut cowboy suit.
Marlene Dietrich had made a spectacular entrance into the American filmgoing consciousness via her star turn in Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel). Intended as a vehicle for German expatriate Emil Jannings (who had become a sensation for his performance in Sternberg’s The Last Command [1929] and for which Jannings won the first Best Actor Academy Award, after The Blue Angel hit theaters in America), the film also made Dietrich a star.1 Paramount eagerly signed her to a long-term contract and made Sternberg, who had fallen by now helplessly in love with her, Dietrich’s “official,” i.e., exclusive, director.
They would go on to make seven films together, during which time their tempestuous love affair, scandalized by the fact that both were married, rocked the gossip columns and helped sell tickets to their increasingly tempestuous, sexually provocative films.2 Eventually, however, their pairing wore itself out, and by the time the last one they made together, The Devil Is a Woman, was released, their pairing had run its course. Dietrich, who had, for a while, become the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, was unceremoniously released by Paramount, and, unable to return to a war-torn Germany whose Nazi leadership she bitterly opposed (Hitler put a price on her head), turned freelance in the hopes of reviving her stalled career in American movies.
She was not the only star to descend from the heavens of Hollywood. By the end of the thirties, many of the biggest film actresses had lost their allure, as audiences seemed to tire of them en masse. Whatever the reasons, in the wake of a coming war the handful of women who had once personified on-screen the decade of Art Deco, of unreal wealth for Depression audiences, of endless beauty, and suggestive costumes and glamorous sets, began to appear as aging, unsentimental throwbacks to the past. Along with Dietrich, such Hollywood mainstays as Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Kay Francis, and others were having a difficult time landing either the roles they sought or the salaries they demanded.
The one director who remained interested in Dietrich was Frank Capra, who wanted her to play Georg Sand in his stalled movie biography of Chopin that he still hoped to make. (Sternberg wanted to continue to work with her too, but on top of Paramount’s reluctance, the entanglements he was facing with his troubled production of I, Claudius that kept him in England, and the studio’s abject refusal to resurrect the once-golden team, made that wish all but impossible.) An opportunity for her to play Dallas in John Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach also fell through.3
In June of that year, Dietrich’s agent arranged a meeting for her with German-Jewish writer Erich Maria Remarque, who had gained international fame for his antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which had been made into a successful Hollywood movie in 1930 directed by Lewis Milestone and later forced Remarque into exile when the Nazis took over Germany. Although he was married (twice to the same woman, once in Germany, the second time in the States for American citizenship requirements), Remarque was immediately attracted to Lady Marlene, and an intense romance erupted. Dietrich had gained an off-screen reputation as a ruthless European temptress that far exceeded her on-screen one as a sinful goddess with a warm if devilish soul. She had earned it by her highly publicized affairs with a roster of willing-and-ables that included, besides von Sternberg, Gary Cooper, Robert Donat, Charles Boyer, William S. Paley, Douglas Fairbanks, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Gabin, and others, including several of Hollywood’s most attractive American actresses (“Women are better [than men], but you can’t live with them” became one of her most often-quoted comments).
Late in 1939, while vacationing in France at the famous Hôtel du Cap, she received a phone call from Universal producer Joe Pasternak. Pasternak was interested in Dietrich for a saucy Western he wanted to make, in a part that the studio had once earmarked for Paulette Goddard. Pasternak offered Dietrich $75,000, a huge cut in her normal fee but money she now desperately needed. She accepted, Goddard was out, Dietrich was in.4
The film was to be a light-hearted, loosely based musical remake of a 1932 oater entitled Destry Rides Again (aka Justice Rides Again), directed by Benjamin Stoloff. In the original version (based on a Max Brand novel, the title character played by Hollywood cowboy hero Tom Mix), Destry was a gunslinger framed for a murder he didn’t commit and sent to jail. Upon his release, he finds the real killers and shoots them dead. There is no character called Frenchy, a “saloon singer” (named that to justify Dietrich’s thick accent).
The new movie perfectly reflected the mood of the country as it shifted reluctantly, if inevitably, into the role of the savior of freedom in a war-torn Europe. The major contextual difference between Jimmy’s previous picture, Mr. Smith, and Destry is the acknowledgment in the latter of an evil from beyond the shores of America, a recognition of the gathering European and Asian storms, so to speak, while in Mr. Smith America seems to be the entire world, with all its troubles internal ones. In Destry the hero arrives in peace, unarmed, not wanting any trouble and certainly not looking for any. The town of Bottleneck has, like Europe had been by an earlier generation, “cleaned up” by Destry’s unseen father, only to have once more fallen to the forces of evil. Dietrich’s presence further cements the Germanic link, giving the saloon she works in a decidedly exotic, foreign flavor. America’s struggle with isolationism versus entering World War Two on the side of the Allies hovers all over this movie.
Destry, the son of the original, is brought in by the townsfolk to clean up Bottleneck as hi
s father had done before him. However, where the old man was rough and tough, Destry Jr. is a dedicated pacifist. He doesn’t even carry a gun and quickly becomes a laughingstock when he arrives in town, until near the end of the picture when circumstances force him to take up arms and he becomes a legitimate six-gun–toting hero. He cleans up the town, but pays an enormous price. Frenchy, the favorite town whore (who sings), has gradually come to love and respect Destry, to the point that, during the film’s climactic shoot-out, she throws herself in the path of a bullet meant to kill him, and dies nobly in his arms (and conveniently for the sake of the censors who could not allow a prostitute, no matter how great her singing voice, to live happily ever after). A few songs round out the screenplay, most notably one that would become a Dietrich signature, “The Boys in the Back Room.”
There are nevertheless filmmaking echoes of Mr. Smith throughout Destry—although the lack of Mr. Smith’s script, stellar supporting cast, and the direction of Frank Capra, or the absence of it, make all the difference in the world. To begin with, the character’s name—Thomas Jefferson Destry—suggests that other Jefferson, Jefferson Smith. Like Smith, Destry was the new boy in town, and the old West, particularly the corrupt local politics that take place within the saloon, easily recall the shenanigans that took place in Capra’s halls of Congress. And, like Smith, Destry first tries reason to deal with the corruption he sees. In the end, the difference between the directorial visions of Frank Capra and George Marshall is the use of guns as the crutches of cowards, such as Senator Paine, versus being the instruments of the heroic, as in Destry. Finally, there is the fundamental difference between the two films’ leading ladies. Although in both films Jimmy’s characters appear oblivious to the allure of the women who befriend them, teach them the ways of the real world, and, ultimately, fall in love with them, the sexualization of Frenchy reduced this film’s level of “spiritual” love, and by doing so doomed her for being the sinner that she truly was. In Mr. Smith, Saunders has her hard heart softened by the love she finds in the virginal purity of her Jefferson; in Destry, it is the hooker who already has a heart of gold that ultimately causes her demise. In the former, Jefferson and Saunders presumably live happily ever after. In the latter, Frenchy dies, also happily and forever, the after left ambiguous in the spiritless context of the film.
