http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Madness"American Madness was the first of Frank Capra's topical social dramas, anticipating his later, broader work in this sub-genre with Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Meet John Doe, and It's A Wonderful Life (two vital elements of which -- a key scene midway through the picture and the denouement -- were derived from the key dramatic moment in this movie).
Indeed, it stands at the nexus of Capra's early career, between actual events that took place at the Bank of Italy, involving its founder A. P. Giannini, and the decade-and-a-half of cinematic storytelling that the director would generate out of moments such as that. And for fans of the filmmaker's uplifting, socially conscious brand of story-telling (which also figures into such comedies as It Happened One Night and You Can't Take It With You), this film is a great discovery on that basis alone. Some may chide the script for some improbabilities, such as the idea that bank president Thomas Dickson would hire a felon and housebreaker as his head cashier; or that seemingly to a man, the people that Dickson has helped out with his liberal loan policies would be willing and able to mount a rescue effort of the bank. But those flaws can be overlooked in the context of the bigger picture here -- in 1932, Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin were getting away with a lot just making a movie like this, which was not entirely well-received in cities that had seen bank runs in recent months and years (it closed in Baltimore, where such incidents had occurred, in just two days).
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But the real triumph here belongs to Capra and Riskin, a conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat, respectively, who found a common ground and common purpose in devising this tribute to the common man.