YMMV / Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

• Award Snub: A lot of people think that Jimmy Stewart should have won the Academy Award for his performance as Jeff Smith. Even the Academy seemed to feel guilty for not giving Stewart the award, because they gave him Best Actor the very next year for his performance in The Philadelphia Story, which most people agree wasn't as good. On a side note, quite a few people wanted Claude Rains to win Best Supporting Actor. And Jean Arthur, perhaps owing to her frosty relationship with the studio and the press, wasn't even nominated for Best Supporting Actress. It did win for Best Writing, Original Story.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Senator Paine has gathered a fanbase for being an accurate portrayal of how corrupt politicians can be seen as, and being a sympathetic anti-villain who lost his initial zest and is now a jaded shell of his former heroic self, giving him some depth and saving him from being a standard one-dimensional villain. Plus Rains put in an amazing performance to this character.
  • The President of the Senate barely gets any screen time and a minor role in the story, but Harry Carey's performance really made it count, plus he gave Smith some confidence right when things seemed hopeless, and is a funny comic relief character.
• Evil Is Cool: Well... "evil" is kind of a stretch, but Senator Paine is definitely on the antagonistic side. Claude Rains does a rather memorable performance with his character, and he's shown to have a shade of remorse and caring side underneath his corrupt behavior as shown towards the ending and various points in the film.
• Jerkass Woobie: Senator Paine is an unquestionably corrupt tool of the political machine, but is shown to regret what Taylor pushes him to do to Jefferson Smith. As the film goes on, the guilt is visibly eating away at him culminating in his attempted suicide after Smith collapses.
• Memetic Mutation: Jefferson Smith turning towards the Lincoln Memorial and looking at the Gettysburg Address nearby.
• Spiritual Successor: To Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, another Frank Capra movie in which a rube from the sticks gets taken advantage of by urban sophisticates, until he rises to the occasion. Also, both films feature Jean Arthur as the cynical girl who exploits the hero before falling for him. This wasn't a coincidence—the original idea was for this to be a sequel to Mr. Deeds Goes To Town. After the filmmakers couldn't get Gary Cooper, they revised the story and changed the main character's name.
• Values Dissonance: The movie romanticizes the filibuster as a way for Smith to ultimately defeat the Taylor machine. In reality, the filibuster (or the threat of one) has most often been used for things like delaying the passage of civil rights legislation, preventing the passage of meaningful gun reform, and preventing the passage of a minimum wage law, among other things.
• Values Resonance: A tale of corruption in the highest body of law is more relevant in the post-Watergate era than it was in the 1930s.
  • The speech about the number of hoops a congressman has to jump through or work on to accomplish anything certainly resonates well with viewers after the United States suffered a government shut-down in 2013 (and a couple more since then) simply because Congress was unable to agree on a national budget.
• The Woobie: Jefferson Smith. He just wants Truth, Justice and the American Way! But Washington just isn't run that way anymore.

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