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American Madness

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Frank Capra's fast-paced Depression-era drama stars Walter Huston as a bank manager facing a financial panic that leads to a run on his bank. It's easy to peg this early talkie as a dry run for "It's A Wonderful Life," but it also stands on its own as a fine film, shot with a nice noir-ish feel. The desperation and panic of the time is painfully palpable throughout this film, and the indiscriminate hysteria of the opening sequences ratchets up into individualized, personal agony as Huston steels himself to lose all that he's ever worked for. Tense and anxiety-provoking; worth checking out!

This review refers to "American Madness"

Something a little different from Capra, in the form of a drama. The time is the Great Depression era, one bank President(Walter Huston) will not give in to the demands of the Board of Directors to merge for the good of the bank. Huston plays a bank president with a heart(yes they used to have some of these around). He believes in people. If they are honest, hard workers, he can't say no to granting them a loan. He has faith. He has run the bank for 25 years, always steering it in the right direction.

But times are different now. Money is tight. People are out of work. Huston won't budge and the board looks for reason to oust him. Things start snow-balling out of control for the bank. There's a robbery, probably an inside job and the rumors abound that the bank is going down.
Customer's are panicking and there's a run on the bank.

Huston's character, a sort of happy-go-lucky bank president, never gives up. The money is about to run out and in a very Capraesque turn of events, things will greatly improve. The people Huston has been so good to, will now be there to help him.

Other sub-stories add to the plot to create a total snowball effect of what can go wrong will - Huston believes his loving wife is having an affair, there's an office romance and some very tough thugs to deal with -and our guy in on the verge of losing everything.

Capra's style is evident in this early film(1932). A style that lifts our spirits even when the going gets tough. And as always you'll find marvelous acting,filming and dialogue and you can't help but get involved with the characters and the tense storyline.

Highly recommended for Capra and Huston fans, you can also find the Region 1 edition(and a very nice quality transfer with commentary,and subtitles) in "The Priemere Frank Capra" collection. The collection also includes "It Happened One Night","Mr Deeds Goes To Town","You Can't Take It With You","Mr. Smith Goes To Washington", and a Documentary - "Frank Capra's American Dream"

Happy New Year To All and enjoy the film.....Laurie

American Madness is a film about the insanity of a crowd and the way a rumor can turn into a major problem. For fans of It's a Wonderful Life, this film is the problems of the Savings and Loan under a microscope. A bank is thriving during the Great Depression and is still able to lend large sums of money in hopes of pushing the economy back up to it's height. This is all thanks to the man who runs the bank (Walter Huston), fighting against his superiors the whole way. However, one of the workers (Gavin Gordon) gets into trouble with a group of gangsters, and out of fear, he aids them in robbing the bank. Now the bank has two major problems. There is a run on the bank as soon as the public finds out (and believes millions of dollars were stolen). Also, there is a murder/theft investigation among the employees for the money stolen and the guard who was killed.

This film takes a bit of time to get going since it is important that we gain some sort of fondness for all of the characters but also to understand the situation of the bank and the reasons why it is so important that it stay open. As always in Frank Capra's typical films, there is a great deal of comradory and the idea that good can triumph over adversity. It doesn't matter how many times you've seen his films or heard that theory, you can't help but get caught up in it when it's happening on the screen. This, like most of Capra's other films, is a true classic.

American Madness deals with a mid-size bank during the Depression years. Walter Huston is the bank president who must deal with a Board of Directors that wants him to stop loaning money to customers who they consider to be bad risks, a dishonest cashier, a robbery, a bored wife and a run on his bank that threatens to wipe out everything. Although all turns out OK in the end, this is a slight change of pace for Capra in that the story is more of a drama than his other pictures. This is not to say that this doesn't rank high with his other masterpieces such as "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" or "Lost Horizon". Watch carefully to see some character actors that appear in later Capra films. A film well worth seeking out.

"American Madness" is one of Frank Capra's early films in which the Capraesque style began to emerge. It stars Walter Huston and Pat O'Brien and is concerned with a run on a bank.

Walter Huston (1883-1950) plays a banker, a popular figure in the early 30s films. At this point in his career, Huston was churning out films at breakneck speed - 4 in 1931, 8 in 1932, and 5 in 1933. His performances are relatively undistinguished, even if some of the films (e.g., "Gabriel Over the White House") were hits. Huston got better as he got older, and he was nominated for an Oscar in 1937 ("Dodsworth"), 1942 ("Devil and Daniel Webster") and 1943 ("Yankee Doodle Dandy") and won in 1949 for "Treasure of the Sierra Madre".

The great Pat O'Brien (1899-1983) made over 100 films although his only award was an Emmy in 1974. O'Brien is well known for his films with fellow Irishman James Cagney ("Angels with Dirty Faces", "The Fighting 69th, "Ragtime") and Spencer Tracy ("People Against O'Hara", "The Last Hurrah), but his best known work was probably as the coach in "Knute Rockne" (1940). O'Brien plays an ex-convict to whom Huston has given a second chance, also a popular film icon in the early 30s.

Robert Emmett O'Conner (1885-1962) plays a policeman. He's best remembered as James Cagney's mentor Paddy Ryan from "The Public Enemy" (1931) and as the cop who pursues the Marx Brothers in "A Night at the Opera" (1935), although he appeared in more than 200 films, often with Huston.

Frank Capra (1897-1991) directs. He made nearly 50 films and was nominated for an Oscar 7 times, winning 3 times ("It Happened One Night", Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" and "You Can't Take it With You").

Writer Robert Riskin (1897-1955) is probably best known as the husband of actress Fay Wray ("King Kong") and as the long time collaborator with Capra, with whom he did 13 films He won an Oscar for "It Happened One Night" and was nominated for 4 others including "You Can't Take it With You" and "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town."

1932 was a good year for films - Grand Hotel" was the Oscar and box office king, Jean Harlow had 2 films in the top 10 ("Red Headed Woman" and "Red Dust") as did Miriam Hopkins ("Trouble in Paradise" and "Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde") and Wallace Beery ("Champ" and "Grand Hotel"). Other notable films from that year were "I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang", "Freaks" ,"A Farewell to Arms", "Scarface", "Horse Feathers" and "Tarzan The Ape Man".

The NY Times said the film "is emphatically melodramatic and parts of the dialogue are rough and crude", but called Huston an "excellent actor" and acknowledged that "there are some ingenious bits". Film critic Richard Schickel called this "Capra's first truly great film".

Capra's later film, "It a Wonderful Life" revisited many of the themes played out in this film - the role of the bank in the community.

The acting is good, the action moves right along, and it's very interesting to see the cultural mores of the early 30s. But this is not an exceptional film in any manner, apart from being one of the first films in which we see Frank Capra's style emerge.

I discovered this movie via the Frank Capra Collection that I bought this week; In it, Walter Huston plays this bank President who uses his hunches to help the people and the majority of his board of directors don't care for it. Pat O'Brien plays a clerk that always go for the punchline and ruffles the feathers of the other tellers; When one of Huston's Exec get into trouble by running up a gambling debt of $50Gs with the local mob, they hatch a plan to take the money from the bank, while he has an airtight excuse for the time the robbery happened. so the fella in trouble gets the boss' wife who had plans for her and her husband's anniversary, but now has to change them due to hubby going to Philadelphia to go to the theatre with him; When O'Brien catches them kissing innocently, he adds up a little too much and later that night goes to the guy's home to stop them from their madness; It also happens to be the very time the bank is robbed and the night watchman killed; The next day, a rumor hatches that more money than stated was taken out and causes a serious run on the bank;(After all, this is the Depression) but the day is saved things turn around thanks to the quick thinking of Pat O'Brien and his girlfriend; A nice interesting film that don't get much play but is worth the look especially with history repeating itself as we speak.

This is a riveting film and has all of the elements that made Frank Capra an enormously popular and distinguished director. The screenplay by Robert Riskin is magnificent and can hold its head up alongside his other screenplays for Capra ("Lost Horizon," "It Happened One Night," "You Can't Take It with You," and "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town"). Walter Huston's performance in the lead role of honest bank president Tom Dickson is one of his finest (meaning one of the finest of the period), as is Pat O'Brien's as bank-robber-turned-honest-bank-cashier Matt Brown. The sprawling plot--a lucrative bank merger driven by a hostile board of directors, a bank heist that triggers a panic, a suspicion of infidelity that causes Dicson to turn on his wife, a long engagement seemingly going nowhere between Brown and Dickson's secretary Helen--culminates in a full-blown run on the bank that is magnificently choreographed and startlingly real.

There are many beautiful things in this movie: close-ups of the locking mechanism on the bank's safe deposit door, close-ups of clock faces, wide shots of the bank lobby, broodingly-lit scenes of the vault that anticipate Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity," and marvelously crisp editing throughout. One of Capra's best achievements is the underlying feeling of control and watchfulness at one level while everything else in the movie's world seems to descend into madness. It would not be a Capra film if there were no humor in it, and there are many charmingly funny moments throughout. Dickson's banter with his employees, from encouraging the romance between Brown and Helen to polishing the star on the breast of the bank's security guard to ordering a uniform for a lowly janitor sweeping the lobby floor, are pure Capra and, with Huston's acting, utterly believable.

Capra surely was making propaganda with this film: in Aug. 1932, when the film was released, there had already been many bank failures and many more would come in the next few months. The film assigns the blame for such panics to malicious, careless gossip quickly transmitted by telephone. In a particularly brilliant scene, a series of telephone conversations, filmed in tight close-ups, is broken up and spliced together to breed a feeling of mounting craziness and inevitable collapse (one of the callers is a dead-ringer for Joan Crawford--could it be she in an uncredited role?).

Capra ultimately reassures his audience that Dixon's bank (and others like his) are operated by honest executives who don't believe in fleecing their customers and making the fastest buck. That may or may not have been true in 1932, but I can only admire Capra's and Riskin's nerve in making a movie that so eerily and accurately drew on the headlines of the moment and that tried to reassure an audience who had come to the theatre in 1932 to escape the frightening world outside. The movie is wonderfully entertaining and beautifully crafted, and it deserves to be much better known.