On the whole, then, Depression Hollywood came to the defense of the traditional American democratic system in the face of rising authoritarianism, but its defense was ridden through by a recurrent streak of pessimism and doubt. From the beginning of the decade, Hollywood evinced a pervasive ambivalence concerning the American people, who were constantly referred to as the core and hope of the state but who were depicted again and again as weak, fickle, confused sheep who could be frightened, manipulated, and controlled. 241

Ambivalence toward the people was paralleled by an ambivalence concerning politics. This took the form of a deep suspicion of politicians and the political process. One John Doe Club in a small town refuses to let the mayor join, explaining, "You know how politicians are!" Indeed, if Hollywood audiences didn't know, they soon learned as they watched a parade of greedy, short-sighted politicians in movies depicting national and local politics. 242

In Meet John Doe, the answer to the crisis of the Great Depression resides not in the government but in the John Doe clubs that blossom all over the nation, in which local people dedicate themselves to helping each other. Still, it is implied that without the media-manufactured symbol of the great and good quintessential American John Doe, the clubs would crumble and the people would be incapable of sustaining their local efforts. Thus, even in those many movies which do not openly advocate authoritarian rule, the thrust is toward the importance of the leader. 244

Popular genre of private eye movies and books -

The means, a desperate Hollywood seemed to be saying, were less important than the ends. If there was in the 1930s a growing consciousness of the importance of institutions, it was accompanied by a good deal of anger and discontent, by much awareness of the fact that the system no longer operated as it had been designed to. This distrust of modern institutions, this sense that the world no longer fuctioned as it was supposed to, that the old verities and certainties no longer held sway, formed the bridge of continuity between aspects of 1930s culture and the bleak film noir mood of the 1940s. 247

For some time now we have understood the 1920s as a period of cultural conflict - a period of dissonance between the traditional ideals and the new patterns of modern living, between small-town ways and the new urban presence, between the longstanding model of what an American was and the new realities of what Americans were actually becoming. 247

The films of the 1930s remind us that similar laments could be found in the mass culture of the Great Depression. A significant number of the decade's films were concerned with restoration, as if something had been removed from American life . . . 248

Throughout the films of the Depression it was the city, as the representative of modernity, that corrupted the traditional dream and fouled the promise of America; the city that spawned the amoral men and fallen women of the gangster films; the city that formed the backdrop for the glittering but empty antics of the glamorous men and women of the decade's screwball comedies.

Hollywood's Washington became a symbol of the forces and developments that had derailed America from its destiny and led it astray. Into the nation's capital, troop a group of starry-eyed reformers from small-town America who quickly become the dupes or victims of the sordid, cynical urban businessmen, journalists, politicians, and lobbyists. 249

In each of these films Capra focused upon a small-town hero who came, like a lamb to the slaughter, into the midst of the sharpsters and hucksters of the big city, suffered profound humiliation and disillusionment, and survived to convert the heroine and the cynical newspapermen whom Capra used to symbolize urban values. 250

Babe Bennett and Clarissa Saunders, like their counterpart, Anne Mitchell, in Meet John Doe, are drawn back to the small-town innocence and unpretentiousness they - and America - have somewhere lost. 251

Scene in which DB Norton silences John Doe by cutting off his microphone -

This telling scene reminds us that Capra focused on not only the values of traditional small-town America but also its chief means of communication: oral culture. His heroes invariably function through the spoken word while many of his urban villains - cynical newspaper reporters and snobbish literary types - are people of the written word. 252

It is important for us to investigate seriously the possibility . . . that, culturally, people can have their cake and eat it too; the possibility that a substantial number of Americans understood that the implied endings of many of the films they saw were closer to reality than the imposed endings; the possibility that audiences were able to learn from the main thrust of the films they saw even while they derived comfort and pleasure from the formulaic endings. 253

While they [Regionalist painters and Agrarian writers] were native-born Midwesterners or Southerners, Capra had been born in a village on the outskirts of Palermo, Sicily, and brought up in an immigrant neighborhood in Los Angeles, the son of poor, illiterate parents. Capra is an important reminder that the reiteration of the traditional American creed emanated not just from defensive, old-stock Americans but often issued in its most dynamic and aggressive form from converts to Americanism. 253