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

It was in the making of American Madness that I made a rather startling discovery about pace. A scene that, to me, was normal in pace during its photography, or when viewed by a few people in a small studio projection, seemed to slow down when I saw the same scene projected on a large screen before a theaterful of people. And since American Madness dealt with crowd reaction to rumors, panic, and faith, I decided to counteract the apparent “slowing down” of a film’s pace in theaters by artificially quickening the pace during photography. First, I cut out the long walks, such as prolonged entrances and exits of actors. I jumped the performers in and out of the heart of the scenes. Second, I cut out “dissolves”. Third, I overlapped speeches. Fourth, and this was a radical change, I speeded up the pace of the scenes to about one-third above normal. During photography the speed of the scenes seemed exaggerated – in fact, it was exaggerated – but when American Madness hit the theater screens, the pace seemed normal! Moreover, there was a sense of urgency, a new interest, that kept audience attention riveted on the screen.

Frank Capra, The Name above the Title, MacMillan, 1971