This chapter analyses how Hollywood focused on recognizable and venerable architectural representations of federal institutions to symbolise the new relationship that had developed between the citizenry and the national government under the aegis of the New Deal. Through case studies of three films respectively featuring the executive, legislative and judicial edifices of the national state – Gabriel over the White House (1933), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and The Talk of the Town (1942) – become sites of masculine transformations, as the three male protagonists each experience private revelations that help them take on new roles as president, senator and Supreme Court Justice respectively. Though each contains a romantic sub-plot, none of the movies ends with the expected scene of romantic coupling whose trajectory was established in the early scenes. Accordingly the male leads become defined less by private heterosexuality than by public involvement in the Roosveltian state.