American Madness, [Capra's] film about an idealistic banker, is one of the finest American movies to emerge from the early years of the Depression. Very little in Capra's early career as a director suggested he was capable of creating a film as sharp in its social observation and as ambitious in its analysis of American values as this melodrama about robbery, murder, a bank panic, and the conflict between social responsibility and greed. (p. 57)

There is a good deal of "business" in the plot of American Madness but basically the film centers on what would become Capra's perennial subject in his best films: the conflict between a resolute individual, full of goodwill toward his fellow men, and the forces of disunity and corruption who would create and exploit social dislocations for their own benefit. (pp. 57-8)

Capra's mastery of his medium is obvious in American Madness, as it would be in most of his later films. Form and content are inextricably linked, and meaning derives from the fusion of the two. The tempo of the film, for example, is perfectly synchronized with the action. (p. 58)

Like any superior artist Capra shows rather than tells his audience what it needs to know. The relationship between Cyril Cluett …, the chief cashier, and Dude Finley …, the gangster to whom he is in debt, is obviously an important one which has to be established early in the film; and Capra reveals it with a visual subtlety and an economy beyond the powers of a less gifted director…. [By] purely visual means, Capra establishes not only Finley's disreputability, but also Cluett's indebtedness to him. It is only when the four men are walking together back to Cluett's office that we overhear one of the bank employees say to another, "Isn't that Dude Finley? He's one of the toughest gangsters in town." (p. 59)

[The] dialogue is vivid and colloquial…. Capra added to the naturalistic quality of the dialogue by having speakers overlap one another, as they often do in ordinary life; this was an innovation that helped to move the talkies away from the example of the legitimate stage, which early in the history of the sound film was an accepted but imperfect model for it.

It was not only with language, however, that American Madness extended the resources of the sound film. Capra also used sound as an important element for creating mood and for underscoring what was being seen on the screen. (pp. 59-60)

[American Madness] was a self-consciously topical film, rooted in the social tragedy of its times in a way few other Hollywood movies were. Capra's willingness to confront directly questions of social and cultural value—his artistic ambition, in other words—was one of the reasons his work was, and is, so satisfying. Yet for all its timeliness, the society we see in the movie is not American society of the 1930s, or even the 1920s; it is American society of the mid-nineteenth century, and even at that it is probably mythical. (p. 62)

[There was] a considerable degree of nostalgia in Capra's treatment of Tom Dickson and his bank, certainly not an unusual attitude in a period of extreme social distress. But Capra's nostalgia had a cutting edge that uncovered the reason for the passing of the old system, and it gave to his film a significance that a purely sentimental look at the past would have lacked. If it had not been a comedy, American Madness would have been an elegy for individualism; but since it was a comedy it pretended as if individualism were still the dominant ethic, while at the same time it undercut its own primary assumption by demonstrating that Tom Dickson was the last of a dying breed. (p. 63)

Capra was not of course the first to point out that the concentration of capital in ever-expanding corporate enterprises was making the individualistic ethic obsolete, but he was among the few artists—certainly in Hollywood, the very few—who were able to give this perception suitable dramatic form.

Capra's skillful exposition of the clash between the corporate and individualistic ethics would alone have made American Madness one of the most interesting films of the 1930s, but there is more to it even than that. Like Mark Twain, an artist whom he often resembles, Capra portrays American culture at its breaking point, but always within the context of a comic vision….

It is in the scenes of the mob panic that Capra portrays most vividly his alarm about the state of American culture in the early years of the Depression. (p. 64)

Individual man, under the pressure of the Depression, was becoming mass man, and mass man was irrational, cruel, and uninterested in the value of community. Capra recently said—referring to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, but the statement is even more appropriate for American Madness—that he "was fighting for … the preservation of the liberty of the individual against the mass." Tom Dickson is the exemplar of that besieged individual man, and he successfully resists absorption into the herd, and in fact disperses the herd, at least temporarily. But the potential for the mob to form again is still there—is always there—and if the conditions are right, it will surely reappear. The comity of American society (at least in Capra's model of it) is based upon the goodwill and the reasonableness of its members; and its encouragement of individually determined standards of conduct is at once its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. (p. 65)

This perception informs much of the action of American Madness, but is given specific representation in the figure of Oscar …, one of the tellers. Oscar is l'homme moyen sensuel, not corrupted like Cyril Cluett, not inspired by a lofty ideal like Tom Dickson; he is also the dramatic depiction of the potential ugliness which a social dislocation can uncover in the average man. He delights in disaster because of the tempting possibilities for self-aggrandizement it gives him. (pp. 65-6)

American Madness was much more than a "fantasy of goodwill."… The sense of crisis brought on by the Depression, with all of its implications for the private lives of Americans, permeates the film; and that crisis was far from over in 1932. Capra realized that it took very little in such times to unbalance the delicate equilibrium of American society, and the film never suggests that the period of testing was over. The goodwill was there but so was the implication that the battle would have to be fought again and again. The happy ending of American Madness, with Tom Dickson triumphant, only nominally resolved the insistent tension between the individualistic values Capra affirms by his portrait of the benevolent, resolute bank president and the herd instinct of Oscar and the mob which storms the bank; and it is the verve and subtlety with which this tension is made palpable that gives to the film its significance as both a social document and an important work of the imagination. (pp. 66-7)