Washington Merry-Go-Round is an inexplicably neglected gem of a political comedy from the early sound era. I can’t figure out why it gets so little respect. Maybe it’s because its director, James Cruze, a visually inventive director of silents, didn’t make many other sound films and never made the A-list. Maybe its star, speed-talking Lee Tracy, also faded from view too early to make an impression on film historians. Maybe there’s a hidden bias against tough, tendentious politics of the pre-FDR days. None of that makes sense to me. The film’s script is sharp and taut, and Tracy’s performance is fascinating. Only Cagney could match Tracy’s characteristic energy and words-per-minute pace.
The story is essentially identical to Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington released seven years later. There’s no question in my mind that it influenced that much-admired classic, but there’s no record of anyone associated with Capra’s film even mentioning Washington Merry-Go-Round. You can decide. Here’s the plot:
Button Gwynette Brown (Lee Tracy) has just been elected to Congress. Congressman Brown (a name so very different from “Smith,” n’est-ce pas?) is a descendant of one of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence. (You’ll recall that Mr. Smith’s first name is “Jefferson.”) He is fully aware that he was not elected honestly, but schemed into the job by corrupt bosses at home and in Washington. He accepts the post because it allows him to go on a mission to expose and uproot the corrupt shadow establishment that manipulates government for its own gain. Brown is not a naif like Capra’s Smith. He knows precisely how Washington works. He is cryptically warned by his political mentor, Tilden (Wallis Clark), that the sinister lobbyist Norton (Allan Dinehart) manipulates Congress to shield and further his corrupt interests, which range from bootlegging to exploitative mining in South America. In despair at his entanglement with Norton, Tilden commits suicide, leaving a note that exposes Norton’s evil practices. (Capra’s film also includes a melodramatic Senatorial suicide attempt.)
Like Smith, Brown is expected to back a pork barrel bill — to build a statue for the “semi-legendary General Digger,” about whom nobody knows anything other than that he helped expel Indians from their own land. And like Smith, Brown can’t stop himself from making speeches — never doubting his own truth. He confronts a gathering of the Bonus Army, criticizing them for protesting passively instead of voting and serving the country. He regularly attacks the betrayal of American democratic ideals by a government clearly based on the Hoover administration in soap-box addresses, and like Smith he becomes a populist hero after giving a rousing speech against corruption in Congress. But Brown — here unlike Smith — is a tough guy. More Elliot Ness than Jimmy Stewart, he faces off against Norton, eventually recruiting members of the Bonus Army (who have come around to his thinking) to abduct Norton and persuade him that he has no way out other than a semi-honorable suicide.
I prefer Washington Merry-Go-Round to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Capra’s film is very smooth cinematically, but its sentimentality verges on the hysterical. Cruze’s film is visually and narratively rougher. It’s pretty fervid too, but it lacks sentimentality entirely. Seeing it now, living under an administration that is even more corrupt than Hoover’s or Harding’s, Washington Merry-Go-Round feels more honest, braver, and tougher. It’s said that it was released the day before the election that elevated FDR into the White House. It has militant Democratic reformism written all over it — and Popular Front sentiments too, although these are explicitly muted in Brown’s meeting with the Bonus Army. (More on that later.) Most folks’ interest in pre-code cinema seems to gravitate toward sex, but pre-censorship politics is every bit as interesting. The Hays Code proscribed “un-American” politics just as much as sexual freedom.
The film walks a thin line between comic satire and crime melodrama, which makes it an interesting example of both pre-screwball and pre-noir, two genres founded on savvy talk. The story is swept along by its language. Clearly influenced by the highly prized Hecht/MacArthur city-desk screenplays, Washington Merry-Go-Round fits the pattern of American machine-gun patter comedies of the time. Tracy had played the stage lead in Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page on Broadway. It’s a puzzle to me why he wasn’t hired to play it in the film adaptation. Tracy is the quintessential “Hechtian” actor. (The film’s screenwriter, Jo Swerdling, had also been a newspaperman like Hecht.)
The comedy revolves around Brown’s irrepressible energy; he’s never at rest, and he’s basically never wrong. And he’s appropriately annoying. We first see him heading to Washington by train. We learn he’s descended from one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and possesses a letter from his illustrious forebear that’s worth $50,000. (There was a real Button Gwinette, who really was a signatory of the Declaration. First signature on the left.) As he’s showing it to a Black porter, the wind whips it away, down the car corridor, to the compartment of Alice Wylie (Constance Cummings), a beautiful young woman with a high Washington social pedigree.
No sooner has he arrived in the Capital than Brown is persuaded by an old army buddy who has come to Washington with the Bonus Army to meet with the encamped protesting World War I veterans. To everyone’s surprise and outrage, Brown lectures the vets, whom the audience knew had traveled at great personal cost to demand that their war bonuses be delivered to them. Brown’s speech has a startling effect even now — maybe especially now. Eschewing cheap patriotism regarding the War, not even sure whether it was necessary for the US to join it, Brown declares an emergency in the here and now of the Depression; American democracy has been bought and sold by corrupt political operators. The speech is a populist stemwinder against a deep state. It’s discomfiting. It has all the rabble rousing of reactionary populism, but the target is oligarchs, lobbyists, and banksters. It’s also cleverly comical. Brown manages to articulate the needs of a plundered populace but at no point does he tell them what they want to hear. He doesn’t care about their votes, because he’s backed by vote-buying crooks. He doesn’t intend to be re-elected, he wants only to bring the crooks down. He doesn’t support the vets’ bonus demands, he wants them to go home and organize voters. It’s a speech that he’s sure will guarantee he won’t ever be elected into the Chamber of Vipers again.
Alice, who thinks he’s cute, commandeers his attention and, given her deep familiarity with the official Washington social scene, ensconces herself as his secretary. Brown is also sweet on her, but he simply can’t stop with the speechifying. Taking her out to view the actual Declaration of Independence (and to point out his forebear’s signature on it), Brown is seized with patriotic passion once again. (Alice has lived in Washington all her life, yet she hasn’t seen the Declaration.) This time he is overheard by a group of tourists, who give him a spontaneous ovation. Alice is impressed. He’s good at this jack-in-the-box orating. He means it.
It’s not all Tracy/Brown. The nemesis, Norton, is played subtly and elegantly by Allan Dinehart, an accomplished Hollywood villain. In a fine scene, Brown confronts Norton in a posh club for the city elite. Brown reads from Tilly’s suicide note, incriminating Norton in a massive bootlegging scheme — and also making clear that Norton has been employing US military interventions in South America to defend his business holdings while claiming they are only protecting American citizens. The old reliable. Note that when Norton asks to see the note, Brown refuses. He let the $50,000 personal note fly away from him; this one he’ll protect.
The center of the film is a great scene in Congress. It starts with a Gettysburg Address gag edit. Brown is prepping for his first speech before the body. His forte is spontaneous oratory, but he plans to begin by quoting Lincoln’s most clichéd words. Then this happens.
The whole scene is beautifully done. To the amazement of everyone, Brown objects to the Digger Bill and tears off on another thrilling speech against the “chiseling little camphor ball measures” that are the norm of congressional corruption. He rouses the hall until the whole gallery is chanting “Down with General Digger!” I really like this scene, especially in comparison with Jefferson Smith’s aw shucks filibuster. You may recall that Smith begins by reading out the Constitution and ends with the Bible. Brown’s speech feels like an anticipatory parody of that scene, which was filmed several years later. Tracy sounds real — and the smarmy appeal to American patriotic sentiment is lampooned right from the start. Capracorn this is not.
The ending is tougher — so tough that the film moves into very dark spaces indeed, both literally (no noir is visually darker) and narratively. Norton, who has maneuvered Alice into agreeing to marry him, reveals his aspirations to become a Mussolini or Stalin (Hitler was not elected Chancellor until the following year). Brown recruits some of the Bonus Army vets to help him to “arrest” Norton. They abduct him to the vets’ camp, where Brown delivers his verdict: Norton can either go to prison or take the Roman way out.
The film is rough. No romance, no spiritual ordeals, no gauzy soft focus close ups, and no musical coaching of the audience by an underscore. Nothing about the milk of human kindness. It’s about fighting and language as a weapon for the good. In 1932, at the deepest point of the Depression, that was honest.