Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a 1939 American political comedy-drama film directed by Frank Capra, starring Jean Arthur and James Stewart, and featuring Claude Rains and Edward Arnold.

The film is about a naive, newly appointed United States senator who fights against government corruption, and was written by Sidney Buchman, based on Lewis R. Foster's unpublished story "The Gentleman from Montana".

[5][6] The film was controversial in the US when it was first released, with attacks from many politicians claiming that it brought Washington into disrepute, but it was very successful at both the domestic and international box offices, and it made Stewart a major star.

However, the proposed campsite is already part of a dam-building graft scheme included in an appropriations bill framed by the Taylor political machine and supported by Senator Paine.

Saunders, who looked down on Smith at first, but has come to believe in him, talks him into launching a filibuster to postpone the appropriations bill and prove his innocence on the Senate floor just before the vote to expel him.

In his last chance to prove his innocence, he talks non-stop for about 25 hours, reaffirming the American ideals of freedom and disclosing the dam scheme's true motives.

Paine has one last card up his sleeve: he brings in bins of letters and telegrams from Smith's home state, purportedly from average people demanding his expulsion.

[4] In January 1938, both Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount Pictures submitted Foster's story to the censors at the Hays Office, likely indicating that both studios had an interest in the project before Columbia purchased it.

Joseph Breen, the head of that office, warned the studios: "[W]e would urge most earnestly that you take serious counsel before embarking on the production of any motion picture based on this story.

Breen specifically objected to "the generally unflattering portrayal of our system of Government, which might well lead to such a picture being considered, both here, and more particularly abroad, as a covert attack on the Democratic [sic?]

form of government", and warned that the film should make clear that "the Senate is made up of a group of fine, upstanding citizens, who labor long and tirelessly for the best interests of the nation."

Later, after the screenplay had been written and submitted, Breen reversed course, saying of the film, "It is a grand yarn that will do a great deal of good for all those who see it and, in my judgment, it is particularly fortunate that this kind of story is to be made at this time.

[4] The ending of the film was apparently changed at some point, as the original program describes Stewart and Arthur returning to Smith's hometown, where they are met by a big parade, with the implication that they are married and starting a family.

[16] The film premiered in Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., on October 17, 1939, sponsored by the National Press Club, an event to which 4,000 guests were invited, including 45 senators.

[17] Frederic William Wile of The Washington Star wrote that the film showed "the democratic system and our vaunted free press in exactly the colors Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin like to paint them.

That did not happen, but one of the ways that some senators attempted to retaliate for the damage they felt the film had done to the reputation of their institution was by pushing the passage of the Neely Anti-Block Booking Bill, which eventually led to the breakup of the studio-owned theater chains in the late 1940s.

Joseph P. Kennedy, the American Ambassador to Great Britain, wrote to Capra and Columbia head Harry Cohn to say that he feared the film would damage "America's prestige in Europe", and because of this urged that it be withdrawn from European release.

When it premiered at the Radio City Music Hall, the critic for The New York Times, for instance, Frank S. Nugent, wrote that "[Capra] is operating, of course, under the protection of that unwritten clause in the Bill of Rights entitling every voting citizen to at least one free swing at the Senate.

Mr. Capra's swing is from the floor and in the best of humor; if it fails to rock the august body to its heels – from laughter as much as from injured dignity – it won't be his fault but the Senate's, and we should really begin to worry about the upper house.