Word: smith
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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America is the New World. What it has to offer the jaded Old World is its fresh eye and unspoiled candor. When Stewart goes to Washington as Mr. Smith, a band of amused journalists ask him what he knows about governmental procedure or the passing of bills. His answer: "I don't pretend to know." And that too is a guarantee of virtue. Mr. Smith's first name is Jefferson, after the man who said that a plowman is wiser than a professor when it comes to essential things...
...frontier myth, in one of its aspects, denied original sin. Sin is not original but cumulative. The origins are pure. Nature is sinless, before an overlay of mounting compromises and concessions induces a weary cynicism. Even Mr. Smith's fallen idol, the worldly Senator Paine (Claude Rains), was unsullied before he breathed in the big-city corruptions of Washington...
Nothing could be more American in its innocence than Mr. Smith Goes to Washington--though many called it un-American when it came out. Colonel McCormick's Chicago Tribune launched a crusade against it. Joseph P. Kennedy, writing to the studio from his diplomatic post at the Court of St. James's, said releasing it abroad would do "inestimable harm to American prestige." Senate majority leader Alben Barkley called it a disgraceful attack on the U.S. Senate. Imagine the furor if any of them had known that a man still active in the Communist Party, Sidney Buchman, had written...
...movie's only problem is that it is too American, too comfortably nested in our native illusions. The glorification of the amateur and contempt for the professional are as old as Jefferson and as new as the push for term limits. Jefferson Smith, with his army of Boy Rangers, must be Ross Perot's favorite daydream. Militiamen and others who suspect the government and all "elites" of conspiracy or collusion will find confirmation of their views here. A whole race of phonies can be undone by one "genuine" American. "And a little child shall lead them...
...bells, like lepers, to warn others they are coming. He had in mind the Americans who thought we could succeed in Vietnam where the French, despite many years of knowledge about Indochinese culture, language and religion, had failed. That knowledge was Old World knowledge, compromising and corrupt. Like Jefferson Smith, we "did not pretend to know." But we brought clean hands. We were not like other nations. We free, we do not colonize. We give, we do not take. We are the original sinless. But the clean hands were those of Lieut. William Calley...