So as far as I can tell, there are three big parts to this movie:

  1. The comedy about a bunch of precocious kids. This is 100% great. The governor’s kids assault him with political advice, there are kids driving around in cars delivering newspapers (like, ten-year-olds maybe… and they get driven off the road by political opponents, with their murders forgotten instantly). I don’t know what was going on with this, and if they meant it to be funny, but it was well done in a way that kids being funny rarely is.

  2. A travelogue of Washington D.C. Worth remembering that in 1939 when this came out, airplanes were supes-expensive and the Interstate highway system didn’t exist (and plus also most people probably didn’t have cars), so going to Washington would have been impossible for the enormous majority of its audience. And I think they didn’t yet have Google Street View, either. So it seems a bit silly today to basically have a documentary of all the major landmarks in the city, but at the time, that was probably really cool to a lot of people. So, recommended if you live in 1939, but otherwise this aspect of it is pretty skippable.

  3. A political drama. This is the meat of the movie, and it just makes no sense whatsoever. It makes no sense politically, it makes no sense on a moment to moment basis, it makes no sense chronologically (apparently people printed professional signs and put together well-organized gatherings and parades inside of like three hours?), it glorifies the awful, awful filibuster, and just nothing about it could ever possibly have worked if the villain hadn’t had a bad case of the Perry Masons and just randomly confessed the whole thing.

Also, the movie is about Mr. Smith, but it really ought to have been called “Miss Saunders Stays in Washington” because she’s his secretary and basically she’s the one who actually knows how the system works and how to get things done, and everything Jimmy did that was even vaguely successful was at her behest. He just had one stupid idea — propose a boys’ camp — and the rest was all her.

I think this movie is harmful to the American conception of democracy, its ideals hurt the ability of democracy to actually work, and it’s just generally something where the world would be better off if it didn’t exist. But it’s also reasonably fun, as classic Americana goes, so that’s a thing.