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Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) More at IMDbPro »

Five classic films from Frank Capra's tenure at Columbia Pictures in the 1930s. The snappy depression-era drama American Madness (1932), about a dedicated and driven bank president (Walter Huston) trying to stop a run on his institution, is a film with energy to spare without ever leaving the interior of the building and it established his credentials as a populist filmmaker. Street smarts meets society graces in Capra’s quintessential road movie romance It Happened One Night (1934), starring Clark Gable as the charming rogue newspaperman and Claudette Colbert as the sexy runaway heiress. It swept the Oscars and swept Capra into the big leagues. Gary Cooper stars in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) as an eccentric small town poet and tuba player who inherits $20 million and Jean Arthur is the big city reporter who exploits the rube for her paper. Capra’s adaptation of You Can't Take It With You (1938), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, has a delightful romantic couple in Jean Arthur and James Stewart and a wonderfully eccentric patriarch in Lionel Barrymore. Stewart returns to Capra-corn as the boy scout master turned temporary Senator in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), a political fable co-starring Jean Arthur as jaded political aide won over by his pluck and Claude Rains as a corrupted senior Senator. Also features the documentary Frank Capra's American Dream, narrated by Ron Howard. These are classic slices of thirties Americana, tales of idealism confronting cynicism spiced with snappy patter and dynamic performances and basted in patented Capra-corn.