Frank Capra

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Already in 1938—before Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, the Why We Fight films, and It’s a Wonderful Life —Capra was the first director to grace the cover of Time Magazine, in part because of his vaunted claims for the role of the director as auteur. He had become president, simultaneously, of the Motion Picture Academy and of the inimical Screen Directors Guild. Before the decade had ended, his films had earned three Academy Awards for Best Picture and gained him four for Best Director. It has been said that Capra dominated Hollywood in the 1930s as his hero D. W. Griffith had done in the 1910s. But Capra’s fall from prominence after 1948 was dramatic and it affected his reputation in criticism and scholarship during the emergence of film studies as a major field in the late 20th century, although he helped his cause some with his 1971 autobiography and the interviews and campus lectures that followed it. Capra himself came to believe that the coming of television helped to seal his fate, but eventually it also led to a degree of popular redemption. It’s a Wonderful Life fell into public domain in the period of the early United States cable revolution, and by the early 1980s it would be aired on so many cable stations nationally that in several major markets it would compete against itself on several channels. This film would shape an image of pre-1948 Hollywood for viewers about to be exposed to the next technological revolution—that of video and then DVD recordings—which would give them access at their discretion to a longer history of cinema. This partly explains the extraordinary vogue for Capra in the 1990s when a series of films appeared under the widely recognizable sign of “Capraesque.” Capraesque here meant chiefly the post-1934 Capra of It’s a Wonderful Life, along with the programmatic trilogy—Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Meet John Doe—and perhaps Lost Horizon and You Can’t Take It With You. But these developments also aroused interest in some of the nearly twenty films Capra made before 1934. Retrospectives on the Early Capra began to be staged in various venues. The DVD revolution also made it possible for wider audiences to become acquainted with these films, and students to study them. This survey, then, of Capra materials and Capra scholarship proves a timely stocktaking of Capra’s contributions to American film and American culture more broadly. It was John Cassavetes who once quipped, “Maybe there never really was an America. Maybe it was all Frank Capra.” (The bibliography was compiled with the help of Andrew Yale, who also assisted in the preparation of the commentaries for the press.)