Allan Dwan and Roy William Neill were earlier directors who shot parts of the film before Capra took over and reshot all their footage. The first scene of American Madness takes place in the banking world, and it coincides with the overly confident distribution of loans: a madness we could today, even too easily, define as chronic. But in the world of Robert Riskin, who wrote the film (the story’s first title was Faith), and Frank Capra, who directed it, this madness is healthy and fair; it is an idealism that takes the form of Walter Huston’s unfailing charisma and that eventually is rewarded. Madness strikes again, as often happens, with the public responding just to the call of emotions: word of mouth spreads panic like wildfire, while the right word said at the right time induces people to make noble gestures. Perhaps it is true that, as Pauline Kael noted ironically, that ever since then the Capra-Riskin team “underestimated the audience”, but they certainly showed some nerve choosing such a story in 1932: in fact, when the film was released “some expressed surprise that Hollywood would make a film with a banker for a hero, at a time when the public image of the banker was near its lowest webb”(Joseph McBride). American Madness was Capra’s first “militant” film and the first written entirely by Riskin: structured, dense, set entirely inside the bank and with an ideological focus on faith and positive energy as a response to the Crisis. McBride’s claim that structure and compactness were already a part of Riskin’s screenplay is true; on the other hand, Capra demonstrated that he was capable of truly admirable visual solutions in a seventy minute film which relentlessly advances to its destination like a train: the best being perhaps the scene in which word about the amount stolen from Union National Bank spreads from shoeshiners to barber shops and then through a feverish game of telephone calls, multi-plying from 100,000 dollars to five million.

Paola Cristalli