Jimmy Stewart like Jefferson Smith Mr. Smith goes to WashingtonDirected by Frank Capra, 1939.
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When New Jersey Senator Cory Booker finally said “I give the floor” Tuesday evening at the end of the Senate’s longest speech, he had spoken for just over 25 hours.
This almost perfectly corresponds to the time that the character of Jimmy Stewart is supposed to have spoken in the classic of Frank Capra in 1939 Mr. Smith goes to Washington.
Booker’s speech ended with him quoting his former mentor, the late representing John Lewis, to put himself in “good troubles” and the Senate Chamber which bursts into applause.
Stewart ends with him quoting his mentor, the fictitious senator Joseph Payne, but ends less happily – his tatter voice, neglected hair, light eyes, while he collapses on the ground in a light light.
Stewart, as a new senator Jefferson Smith, has argued anything less than decency and the American way – arguing against “a man who controls a political machine, and controls everything else who deserves to be controlled in my state. A man still powerful enough to control the members of the Congress”.
Asked by one of these members of the Congress to give in the podium, he shouts: “I will not give in.”
And he doesn’t do it. He continues to speak until he can barely give the floor to the feelings which were then attractive, and which remain today.
“There is no room there for the transplant, greed, or lies, nor compromises with human freedoms,” he met. “The main principles are not lost once they have been revealed. They are here. Just see them again.”
The Senate did not see them. Didn’t really listen to. And in the film, the public did not even have the chance to listen to because the corrupt politicians had the press in their pocket, so the newspapers would not report on Mr. Smith, or if they did it, they distorted what they said.
And he has always continued.
“I guess it’s just another lost cause,” he said to his online mentor, Senator Payne. Then he turns to other senators. “Everything you don’t know about lost causes,” he said. “Mr. Payne does it. He said once they were the only causes that deserve to be fought. And he fought for them once, for the sole reason for which a man never fights for them. Because of a single simple rule: love your neighbor.”
I remember learning in my seventh year civic class on the work of the congress, but I did not really understand the concept of an obstacle until I see Mr. Smith goes to Washington.
The film played on television when I was a child, and it was clear to me, even when the filmmaker Capra had made his title character at the same time and naive. The film M. Smith is right on corruption, but when the Avess du Méchant, Smith’s passed out on the Senate soil. And the film ends, not with glory For its idealistic title, but with chaos, and the president of the Senate smiling with sufficient himself.
Capra was not an idiot. He knew that a man standing against the system is only one man. The system will survive.
But the standing position – this is what the public has taken to heart.
Jennifer Vanasco has published audio and digital stories. Vincent Acovino mixed the audio.
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