CAPRA, FRANK
Frank Capra (May 18, 1897–September 3, 1991) was a motion picture director, producer, and writer who
won three Academy Awards for best director in the 1930s. Born in Bisacquino, Sicily, Capra emigrated at the age of six with his family to Los Angeles, where he grew up. In the early 1920s, after graduating from Throop College of Technology (now Caltech), he wrote gags for movie producers Hal Roach and Matt Sennett. After writing material for screen comic Harry Langdon, Capra directed three films starring Langdon in 1926 and 1927 before the two had a falling-out.
In 1928, Capra was hired by Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Between 1928 and 1933, Capra would direct nineteen features for Columbia, including American Madness (1932), a film about the collapse of a bank, which anticipated many of the themes of Capra's later social films. In 1931, Capra began working with screenwriter Robert Riskin, who would go on to write most of Capra's major films of the 1930s.
Although Capra had begun to make a name for himself during the early 1930s, his first huge hit came with It Happened One Night (1934). The film concerns an heiress (Claudette Colbert) who is secretly traveling from Miami to New York to escape her father. She is discovered by an out-of-work newsman (Clark Gable), who senses that her tale might make a good scoop. Naturally, the two fall for each other. It Happened One Night helped to create the screwball comedy, one of Hollywood's most important subgenres during the 1930s. It also established Capra as one of Tinseltown's most popular and powerful directors. It Happened One Night
swept the Oscars, garnering the awards for best picture, director, writer, actor, and actress.
With the exception of Lost Horizon (1937), a box-office disappointment that led to a bitter rift with Cohn and tensions with Riskin, Capra's success continued unabated over the next several years. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) earned Capra his second best director Oscar. A third arrived with You Can't Take It with You (1938). Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Meet John Doe (1941) capitalized on the success of Mr. Deeds with similar plots about a little man taking on corrupt and powerful interests. The darkly comic Arsenic and Old Lace (produced 1941–1942; released 1944) was just wrapping production when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Shortly thereafter, Capra became an officer in the Army Signal Corps, where he supervised the Why We Fight series of propaganda films during World War II.
After the war, Capra directed two more significant films: It's A Wonderful Life (1946), which despite later becoming his most watched film never found an audience at the time of its release, and State of the Union (1948). Thereafter, Capra's career experienced a rapid decline.
Critics and audiences have sometimes seen Capra's 1930s films, especially the social trilogy of Mr. Deeds, Mr. Smith, and John Doe, as cinematic embodiments of the spirit of the New Deal. On closer inspection they are less clearly liberal. Capra's own politics were far from Rooseveltian: He was a lifelong conservative Republican. While Capra's most important screenwriter, Riskin, was a New Deal liberal, another important writer on his pictures, Myles Connolly, was a reactionary antiCommunist. Out of this political stew emerged films that, perhaps unintentionally, illuminate the ambiguities of American populism during the Great Depression. Although Capra's films centered on tribunes of the little man, often their heroes' most implacable foe was the people themselves: the panicked crowd trying to withdraw their money from the bank in American Madness; the thousands of letters calling for Senator Smith's resignation in Mr. Smith; or the angry throng at the stadium in John Doe.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Capra, Frank. The Name above the Title: An Autobiography. 1971.
Carney, Raymond. American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra. 1986.
Maland, Charles. Frank Capra. 1980.
McBride, Joseph. Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. 1992.
Poague, Leland A. Another Frank Capra. 1994.
Sklar, Robert, and Vito Zagarrio, eds. Frank Capra: Authorship and the Studio System. 1998.
Wolfe, Charles. Frank Capra: A Guide to References and Resources. 1987.
