Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1100404
founding documents. In Mr. Smith, the newly-minted senator visits the Jefferson Building as part of a city bus tour. ere he admires the elaborate Great Hall and marvels at the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights on the second floor, where they were located before their permanent transfer to the National Archives in 1952. In Born Yesterday, there is a similar discovery sequence where journalist Paul Verrall is intro- ducing his protégé Billie Dawn to the Library. Billie's face lights up when she sees the dra of the Gettysburg Address in the back of the Great Hall; then she herself points out to Verrall the founding documents. Billie and Paul are also shown later conversing at the elaborate Neptune Fountain in front of the Library. e Library featured prominently in an obscure 1952 espionage thriller e ief, whose plot turns on a American nuclear scientist named Fields (Ray Milland) who is passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. On three occasions the film shows Fields going into the Library and entering the Main Reading Room to make a "drop" of classified information into the stacks or into the card catalog. e third time he tries he is tailed by an FBI agent. e ief was an odd studio experiment at the time in that it had no dialogue, only music, live sound, and sound effects. It was not a hit. e Library was again used as a site for espionage in Scorpio (1973), a routine Cold War thriller starring Burt Lancaster as a renegade CIA veteran. One sequence involving a surveillance tape shows a woman both entering and leaving the Jefferson Building, performing a suspected "drop." at same footage is replayed on video near the end of the picture, but this time the camera closes in for a juicy "reveal." e aforementioned e Seduction of Joe Tynan achieved decent approximations for real Senate loca- tions although the production could not shoot inside the Capitol or the Senate Office Buildings. However, the director effectively used spaces in the Library of Con- gress as stand-ins. Sen. Tynan, for example, is shown in his "hideaway office," supposedly in a corner of the Capitol, but which was actually shot in the basement of the Library. Further, there is a shot of Senate staffers walking in the impressive Great Hall, standing in for one of Fig. 9. In All the President's Men, Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman, le) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) leave the Library of Congress aer doggedly researching information on the Watergate burglars. THE CAPITOL DOME 10