By Marilyn Ferdinand
Just as Allan was a beloved member of the online film community, there are few directors whose films have been as warmly embraced as those of Frank Capra. The Sicilian immigrant to the United States who has been called “the American Dream personified” made his love for his adopted country and humanity a cornerstone of his film oeuvre with such classics as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and You Can’t Take It with You (1938), as well as the World War II propaganda series Why We Fight, which he made when he was enlisted in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Most famous of all is the inspirational It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), which many name as their gateway film to Capra’s work primarily because it was shown endlessly on broadcast television during many Christmas holiday seasons. Thus, it is interesting to look at a clear precursor to this canonical work, the comparatively little-known American Madness, a heist film that ends up being a tribute to the communal spirit.
The appropriately named Union National Bank is a large institution in the heart of New York City, one to which we are introduced by a blonde switchboard operator (Polly Walters) intoning its name in a singsong, little girl voice as she puts a caller through. Capra moves us from this small transaction to a larger one. A group of bank tellers wait impatiently for Matt (Pat O’Brien), the head teller, to open the vault so that they can get their cash drawers out for the day. They quip about what punny joke he is planning to tell that morning—he does not disappoint—as the procedure for unlocking the massive door and retrieving the drawers is filmed in meticulous detail. The impression this sequence leaves is of a strong, secure, well-regulated economic engine built to weather any crisis.
As the tellers wheel their drawers into position, the film moves into the large bank lobby as customers start to stream in. Among those entering are members of the bank board, who intend to force Union National’s founder and president Thomas Dickson (Walter Huston) to merge with a larger bank to ensure that his portfolio of unsecured loans doesn’t sink the institution during the financially precarious Depression years. Dickson is a great believer in his own ability to assess risk based on a loan seeker’s character and declares to the board defiantly that no one has ever defaulted on a loan at his bank.
Dickson’s position seems unshakeable until the bank is robbed that evening and the night watchman is killed. Cyril Cluett (Gavin Gordon), the head clerk who set up the robbery for some gangsters to whom he owed $50,000, is a cad who flirts with Dickson’s wife (Kay Johnson) to set up his alibi. Because the timer to open the vault is Matt’s responsibility, the police assume he reset it for midnight, when the robbery occurred, and charge him with the crimes. Unwilling to break Dickson’s heart over his wife’s infidelity by revealing that he walked in on her and Cluett in the latter’s apartment at the time of the robbery, he says nothing. It is up to Dickson to get to the truth. Worse, he has to head off a run on the bank, as gossip about the robbery balloons to a charge that he stole several million dollars from the bank himself, putting every account holder’s money in jeopardy.
American Madness is, in many ways, a typical 1930s film. Crime and infidelity were common topics at the time, and bank runs were as current then as the Depression itself. Yet, Union National is portrayed as rock solid not only through Dickson’s speeches, but also through shots of the enormous vault and locking mechanism, marble-clad lobby, and imposing Neoclassical architecture.
In addition, Dickson pushing two coy sweethearts, his secretary Helen (Constance Cummings) and Matt, into marriage seems a bit corny for the period. Then again, Dickson is a pretty cornball character. He believes the loans he makes are smart business, but his reliance on gut instinct and faith in human goodness are pure Capra invention. In this, he and his regular screenwriter, Robert Riskin, may have been tapping into a feeling in their audience that they were handed a raw deal by the careless speculators who collapsed the economy and the money-hoarding banks and businesses reluctant to help them get out of the hole.
With its short 75-minute running time, American Madness also typifies the fast filmmaking of the 1930s, but the full-bodied performances and especially the fascinating camerawork of frequent Capra cinematographer Joseph Walker prevent the film from feeling slapdash or sketchy. Of particular note are two sequences: the game of Telephone that causes the bank panic and the panic itself.
Following the robbery, a delightfully hayseed Sterling Holloway tells his fellow bank employees about discovering the body of the night watchman. “You could have knocked me over with a pin,” he repeats with each telling, ending with the switchboard operator, who repeats this catchphrase back to him in a comic interchange. Her rendition of the story over the phone lines ups the stolen amount, and the fuse keeps burning through a long line of gossip mongers.
Quick cuts between skewed close-ups of faces and mouths as they distort the incident out of all proportion build momentum until the final explosion. Masses of panicked depositors—far more, it seems, than could possibly have money at Union National—converge on the bank and mob the harried tellers as they deplete the cash reserves with their withdrawals. Walker favors overhead shots that help him flood the screen with the “American madness” of a titanic bank run. It is in this situation that American Madness most crosses arms with It’s a Wonderful Life.
Walter Huston brings his characteristic authority and brashness to the screen as a populist-minded tycoon. During the panic, he stands almost like a preacher in a pulpit as he tries to calm the horde and assure them that the bank will remain open all day so that they can get their money. His desperate calls to friends to loan him cash to keep the doors open fall on deaf ears, but he doesn’t really lose his cool until he learns that his wife went to Cluett’s apartment. Her betrayal completely deflates his will, but we have seen that he is a very neglectful husband who makes a promise with one breath and breaks it with the next. The light only comes back into his eyes when he learns that some of his best customers have come to the bank to deposit money and shore up the confidence of the other depositors. As with George Bailey, the good will he engendered in the community comes back to him many times over.
The pro-capitalist bent of American Madness contrasts the warped greed of Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life. Is this an example of an evolution in Capra’s thinking, or was American Madness simply a feel-good attempt at squaring the circle? Either way, Frank Capra found a delightful way to share his rose-colored glasses with the rest of us, and I’m awfully glad he did.
American Madness is streaming at https://ok.ru/video/335660517890. It is also available on DVD {Frank Capra Collection, Columbia, 6-Disc Set, 2006)