JOSEPH HARRISON PAINE

'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,' 1939

Claude Rains, right, as the politician whose idealism has tragically drained away. (Columbia Pictures)

Known for: Weary acceptance of corruption.

Hmm, of course I'm now realizing that the real topic of this compilation isn't Movie Politicians From Hell but Character Actors From Heaven; all five of mine are such, and we're all the luckier for it.

God bless Claude Rains. Rains graced American movies for close on three decades with his cosmopolitan charm, which could be played for wit (he was a superb comic actor, and could make a line such as "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" in "Casablanca" sing with delicious irony). At the same time, he could morph into gravitas without breaking a sweat. And he was at his best in Frank Capra's extraordinary "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" as his state's senior senator, a boyhood hero to James Stewart's idealistic Mr. Smith, who has, of late, succumbed to hubris and fatigue (a deadly combination).

Rains has a delicacy, a weight of grief, an almost eerie perfection of gesture and voice that so vividly (and tragically) evokes Sen. Paine. He is not so much the man you love to hate as the man you hate to hate. In Stewart's idealistically hot and burning eyes, you can see the man Paine once was. Now he is what he is and it's not pretty, and being self-aware and ironic, he knows exactly what that is. Rains conveys this so subtly, yet so profoundly, it's almost a miracle, and it's really the key performance in the film, the performance that establishes the moral tone of the picture.

For in a sense, he is Washington -- once so idealistic, so burning with passion, so animated by egalitarian ideals, but over the years, as age and environment took their toll, he -- it, the whole damn thing -- lost the way. Then (spoiler alert) he kills himself out of shame, saving Mr. Smith's career and crusade. This is a hammy, trite, absurd occurrence that, with a lesser actor, could have ruined the movie. In Rains you feel the heaviness of tragedy, you feel the sadness of corruption.