Charles Brabin's Washington Masquerade 1932

 Thanks as always to Turner Classic Movies for showing the relatively obscure Washington Masquerade; as was demonstrated by the late Henri Langlois at the Cinematheque Francaise and film historians generally films often rest in obscurity for reasons having nothing to do with artistic quality; the derided films of the past are sometimes the masterpieces of today or tomorrow.

Washington Masquerade seems to be something of a cynical precursor to Frank Capra's 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, both Lionel Barrymore in Brabin's film and James Stewart in Capra's have the first name of Jefferson and though I could find no evidence of Capra being familiar with Brabin's film I did find that one of the writers, John Meehan, on Brabin's film had also been a writer for Capra's 1931 The Miracle Woman.  Interestingly the good and the bad in Washington Masquerade are the same person, Lionel Barrymore, while in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington James Stewart is the good guy and Claude Rains the bad guy.

Lionel Barrymore is less hammy than usual as Jefferson Keane in the Brabin film, which has only three main characters:  Barrymore as Jefferson Keane, Karen Morley as Consuela Fairbanks and Diane Sinclair as Keane's daughter Ruth.  Keane is a reform candidate for the Senate and gets elected-- he wants to socialize natural resources -- but as a widower he gets caught in Consuela's honey trap and marries her, against the advice of Ruth.  Then Consuela pleads poverty and convinces Keane to resign from the Senate and take a no-show job for a corrupt lobbyist.  Keane is about to be indicted for corruption at the same time he discovers that Consuela has a lover and Keane ends up confessing to the Senate committee that he took a bribe; the exertion of his speech causes a heart attack and Keane dies. 

Barrymore, Morley and Sinclair are effective in this somewhat stagey version of Henri Berstein's play The Claw.  Brabin's direction is relatively passive (he started making films in 1911 and made his last one in 1934) and we get little of the long takes and the deep focus of cinematographer Greg Toland that we see later in the films he did with John Ford and William Wyler, and especially in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane.  What we do get in the pre-code Washington Masquerade is an unusual honesty about the corruption and the power of lobbyists in Congress.