MovieChat Forums > Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) Discussion > The Wikipedia article is interesting

The Wikipedia article is interesting

posted 14 years ago by schappe1
1 reply | jump to latest

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Smith_Goes_to_Washington

- Early critics complained that the film was "anti-American and pro-Communist" but it was banned by the Nazis, the Communists and Franco's Spanish dictatorship. It was the last American film shown in France before the Nazi occupiers banned American films and then was shown in defiance of the ban.

- It was supposed to be a sequel to Mr Deeds goes to Town and was to star Gary Cooper but Cooper was unavailable so they re-tooled it for Jimmy Stewart as Jefferson Smith. I'm glad we have both Cooper's Mr. Deeds and Stewart's Mr. Smith. If both had been the same, we'd have been poorer for it.

- The political backlash from the film may have led to the break-up of the linear monopoly represented by the studios and the threater owners who created them a decade later. There might have been a "revenge" motive there.

[–] Hammerfanatic46 14 years ago

The Pro-Communist accusation of the time is very hard to understand.The movie could hardly be more clear that Smith is standing up for democracy,not advocating some form of dictatorship.
It seems that the problem was that some people were unable to accept the suggestion that the American democracy was less than perfect ( this in the Era of Segregation !), and that it might have had some embedded curruption.this was an absurd position to take,as surely,the most important thing about democracy is that citizens are free to expose faults within the political system.

Gordon P. Clarkson