While today Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is considered one of the all-time classic films made in the studio system, it might be surprising to learn that it was met with mixed responses in the year of its release, performing particularly poorly at the Academy Awards. After receiving 11 nominations, just two shy of the record set by that year’s big winner, Gone with the Wind, only the screenwriter of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington took home an award that year. The film’s ten losses stood as an Oscar record for nearly another decade.
Previous to his direction of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Frank Capra, dubbed "Capra-corn" by some critics of his work, had ascended the ranks of Hollywood directors at an unprecedented speed. From 1935 through 1939, Frank Capra won the Oscar for Best Director in every odd-numbered year. Winning three Oscars was rare enough, but to do so within a space of five years was unprecedented.
By the time Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was released, Capra had earned a reputation among some as an artist of the corny, over-the-top sort, a sentimental sap who told stories about underdogs triumphing in the most saccharine terms. Few directors who had been making films in the early 1930s benefited more from the imposition of the Hays Code than Capra, having never been particularly edgy in the first place. Indeed, had he made Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in 1932 instead of 1939, it probably would have looked much the same.
Thus, it is strange to learn that when the film was released, it was greeted so harshly, seen as controversial in its no-holds-barred approach to depicting corruption. The American ambassador to England at the time, Joseph P. Kennedy, begged the studio head not to release it in Europe on the grounds that American prestige would suffer. Capra was forced to come up with a new name for his Boy Scouts-like organization in the film because the actual Boy Scouts refused to allow their organization to be associated with the movie’s content. Newspaper reviews were mixed at best and strongly critical at worst. During the film’s world premiere, an actual sitting Senator from Montana—the unnamed but assumed home state that Mr. Smith represents—walked out halfway through.
And so, the most well-known director in Hollywood, routinely attacked by his harshest critics for sentimentalizing his own personal idealism about American values and ethics, was demonized for making a film that controversially brought the integrity of American politicians into question. Suddenly, Capra-corn had made something so sentimental, so hopeful and idealistic, that it was deemed dangerous.
