[Whatever] it is that gives the thirties their air of curious innocence also gives Capra, at this distance, a slight but distinct aspect of futility. The hero of Mr Smith Goes to Washington consciously embraces a lost cause, but twenty-four years later the nobility of this looks faintly ridiculous and pathetic. In a period insulated at one end by a technical innovation (the sound film) and at the other by the war, Capra suffers the fate of his generation…. Capra speaks to us now in accents poignant but somehow muffled….

This is most true of the most perfect of the comedies, the earliest of the films….

[For example, most] of the humours of It Happened One Night [rise] out of the contrast between [Peter], tough, self-possessed, uncouth but endearingly honest and straightforward, and [Ellie], tough, self-possessed, extremely at ease yet ready to deceive herself and others about her feelings. (p. 87)

[Peter is] interesting to me as an embodiment of certain native virtues which Capra is holding up for our admiration. Capra is a moralist; and he contrasts [Peter's] independence and absorption with his work with [Ellie's] world of money and idleness. What [Peter] stands for is good: what [Ellie's] aviator stands for is bad….

It is not hard to see how influential the film has been in the later development of the cinema. It may however take a second glance to notice that its success was the result not only of a wily balancing of contrasts, but also of a profound optimism. It is this optimism which gives the film what I can only describe as its quality of euphoric warmth. The sequence at the end of the film, when [Ellie] breaks away from the aviator as they are about to be married, and runs in her wedding dress across the crowded lawn to join [Peter], transports the audience both by the beauty of the images and by the lyrical movement: the talk and the misunderstandings are resolved in one sweeping decisive gesture. Of course, ninety-nine out of a hundred films end with lovers falling into each other's arms; it is part of the common language of popular art. The distinction of this film, I think, lies principally in three things. First, Capra's optimism is of the sort which generalizes, and it asserts itself in the face of unlikely odds….

Secondly, but connected with this, the basis of the comedy is character, and the characters are realized fully enough for the climax when it comes to be both painful and exhilarating for the audience: Capra convinces us, in the terms of his art, that [Ellie] and [Peter] are real people, and their reality is not left behind at the end. And thirdly, his talents (in this instance) are so matched to what he sets out to do, and he works so easily within his own limits, that without any sense of straining for effect he succeeds in giving the film a warmth of feeling and a great fastidiousness of perception. (p. 89)

[Mr Deeds Goes to Town and Mr Smith Goes to Washington] are more ambitious in content than It Happened One Night, but to me they are less successful; not, I think, because he overreaches himself within his own terms but because his analysis of the realities of money and politics seems … to be over-simple…. Both Smith and Deeds represent a kind of American wholesomeness which (as in the earlier film) Capra proceeds to demonstrate doing battle against impossible odds. They are his personal contribution to the New Deal. (p. 91)

[In spite of surface similarities], Mr Smith seems to me to be quite a different film from Mr Deeds. In the early days of the Roosevelt era the straightforward solutions were novel and convincing; but by 1939, if this film is a reliable indicator, obdurate problems remained, and the straightforward solutions had a hollow sound to them. The film doesn't recognize alternatives to Jefferson Smith's appeal to constitutional principles (except perhaps obliquely in a reference to representatives of two totalitarian powers watching his performance from the Senate gallery), and this clearly is its serious limitation. It is at once Capra's most overtly patriotic and most desperately sceptical film.

It is also extremely uneven in quality. The scenes in the Senate, including an impressive sequence of Smith's arraignment before a committee (like Deeds he doesn't at first defend himself) have a solidity which I found intensely gripping. But elsewhere it is a little too anxious to get its message across, at the expense of character and narrative flow…. (pp. 91, 93)

Mr Deeds is completer, more fully imagined and better written…. [Because] it concerns money, Mr Deeds is a more obviously Puritan film than the others. Man has a natural dignity which money corrupts and debases….

And yet, for all that, money remains desirable. Deeds becomes fabulously rich and is not corrupted by it; indeed having money makes it possible for him to exercise the supreme Puritan virtue of giving it away. In America all things are possible: a boys' club leader can become a senator, a bashful tuba-player from the Middle West can inherit an empire. The meek shall inherit the earth, say some. But for Capra it is a matter of individuals, and in this sense he is the most unsocialist of preachers. And not merely unsocialist: in his reiteration of optimistic themes, his self-imitation, and above all in his moral and political innocence, there is something of a twentieth-century Pangloss. (p. 93)