Still relevant at age 70, 'Mr. Smith' reflects our view of politics

held over for weeks at downtown theaters. Around the country, its box office receipts were second only to "Gone With the Wind," which — along with "The Wizard of Oz," "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" and "Stagecoach" — was one of a number of classic movies released that year.

And despite initial concerns expressed by the State Department that it would be seen abroad as an indictment of democracy — a dangerous thing during wartime — the opposite was true. It was widely interpreted abroad as a potent endorsement of the democratic values of liberty and free speech.

"When the film opens generally, it's universally hailed as a great film, even by the people who recognize that it's kind of hokey and corny," says Eric Smoodin, professor of American studies and film studies at the University of California, Davis. "The response that (Capra) gets from everyday viewers is just astonishing. All of them say this is a great film that makes us proud to be American, but also this is the kind of film we want to see more of. ... At the time, it's understood as really exposing this incredible gulf between the government and the governed. The government has completely lost touch with the people they govern. Based on the reception of the film, there's a fair amount of people in the country who feel that."

Which is a little odd. As David Kennedy, a Stanford University historian and expert on the Great Depression, says, the 1930s were not a time when Americans tended to be skeptical of government. Back then, he points out, the federal government was regarded as a savior to Americans suffering from joblessness and poverty; the Works Progress Administration and the Farm Security Administration were bulwarks against disaster.

What "Mr. Smith" did express was a New Deal grudge against financiers and elite men of business, the view that the common man, not the powerful one, is the true keeper of American democratic values.

"My impression is that what most people would take away from the film is" not the view of Washington as corrupt, but the view of the government as fixable, Kennedy says. "The ultimate triumph of Mr. Smith is that he represents the irrepressible momentum of good government."

In other words, Mr. Smith is a liberal progressive New Dealer, proving that a good guy can change what's gone wrong with Washington.

No. Wait. Mr. Smith is a conservative individualist, proving that the crushing forces of big government cannot hold up against the strength and power of the human spirit.

No. Wait. Mr. Smith expresses the American myth of frontier innocence, the bipartisan idea that our character derives from our connection to the wilderness and our distance from the cosmopolitan strongholds of old Europe. It embodies the agrarian ideal, the notion that the farther away a man is from the wicked city, the more virtuous he is bound to be.

No. Wait. What does Mr. Smith capture?

At the time, says Gary Gerstle, a history professor at Vanderbilt University, the film's populism would have been seen as expressing the liberal values of Roosevelt. But there is also a good case to be made for Smith as a conservative protagonist. In an analysis of the film's wobbly political message, scholars Kathleen Moran and Michael Rogin noted in the journal Representations, "Standing against deficit spending, big government, the welfare state, and that quintessential New Deal project, the federal dam, Senator Smith sounds more like Reagan than Roosevelt."

In short, as Gerstle says, "Part of the huge success of Capra's films is that different people can read different things in them."