Frank Capra’s Mythmaking Magic

Whoa. McBride returned to the fray in 2019, with “Frankly: Unmasking Frank Capra,” in which he detailed the dastardly efforts of his publishers to hamper and curtail (or, as some would say, edit) his prolonged undoing of the Capra myth in his earlier book. It was as if the emotional lifeblood that courses through Capra’s most rousing film, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939)—a fable of one hardy fellow railing against a corrupted system—had leaked into the soul of his biographer. Why the transfusion? Many directors, heaven knows, make it their lucrative business to get under our skin or clutch at our hearts, but there is something about the person of Capra, as disclosed in his memoir and in his uneasy masterworks, that seems uniquely calculated to enrapture and disturb.

Now we have a fresh take on the issue. “Frank Capra: A Life” (Harper), by Sam Wasson, is hefty and dense, like “The Catastrophe of Success,” but altogether less corrosive in its tone. You can tell a fair amount about a biography from its opening chords, so it’s notable that McBride starts with a “ferocious attack of diarrhea” that was suffered by Capra when, as a movie director of global renown, he went back, in 1977, to the village where he was born. Wasson, by contrast, kicks off by quoting three letters from prisoners in San Quentin, from 1947, addressed to the warden. All of them praise a film that has recently been shown at the jail—Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” with James Stewart. “It gives rhyme and reason for existing,” one inmate writes. And the moral is: like a movie star, Capra can be shot from multiple angles. Take your pick.

In theatrical terms, the life of Frank Capra had a hell of a run, like a Broadway musical that never seems to close. Born in 1897, as the Klondike gold rush was swelling into a stampede, he didn’t expire until 1991. Like many of those who believe, with evangelical fervor, in the gospel of American opportunity, Capra sprang from elsewhere. His full name was Francesco Rosario Capra, and he came from Bisacquino, a village in Sicily. Head north from there, toward Palermo, and you find yourself going via the town of Corleone—the cradle of another kid who went west and made it big.

Capra’s father, Salvatore, an impoverished farmer, possessed what McBride calls “the poetic soul of a troubadour.” Translation: he was a bum. But the boy’s mother, Rosaria, was a do-it-all force of nature, and it was she who shepherded five of her flock—Salvatore, Francesco, and three of her daughters—all the way to California, in 1903, where one of her older children, who had emigrated five years before, awaited them. Unlike the curiously pristine ship that brings the future patriarch of the Corleone clan into New York Harbor in “The Godfather Part II,” the S.S. Germania, which bore the Capras across the Atlantic, was a lurching tub of horror. Capra recalled “thirteen days of stench and misery in steerage.”

Wasson is unambiguous about the state of mind in which the young Capra disembarked in the New World. “Francesco had no home, no memories of value,” he writes. “What he had was hate.” Strong stuff, and the biographer backs it up with extra psychological unpeeling: “In his mother and father, in what their peasant heritage and personal failures had deposited in him, lay the seeds of self-loathing, Capra’s wellspring of preternatural ambition and its shadows, the fear of being returned, like a bad avocado, to the peasant class he came from.” So now you know. As the kid grew up in Los Angeles, shining shoes, selling newspapers, and vowing, unlike the rest of his family, to get an education, one impulse drove him on. He would not just be top banana. He would be a premium-grade avocado.

At the age of twelve, Capra went to Manual Arts High School. From there, in 1915, he went on to Throop Polytechnic Institute (soon to become Caltech), a move that inspires Wasson, peering into his hero’s internal superstructure, to channel Ayn Rand: “Engineers, not priests, bent the universe to fit the dreams of men. Skyscrapers, bridges, foundries!” Capra won a travel scholarship—Buffalo, Boston, New York City!—and, the following year, wrote an essay about film. Its bombast suggests that Capra, too, had a rash of Randian fever:

The motion picture will be, and is now, a very vital modifier of social, and consequently, of economic conditions, and its influence is going to be for the better of humankind.

In the meantime, however, humankind was not there to be bettered. It was there to be worsted, sweet-talked, and conned. After surviving the Spanish flu and polishing his skills as a wandering huckster, selling flaky mining stock to the gullible, Capra jammed a foot in the door at Montague Studios, in San Francisco, and ended up directing a one-reeler, “Fulta Fisher’s Boarding House” (1922), less than twelve minutes long and based on a poem by Rudyard Kipling. Though the actors are not so much hammy as salt-encrusted, Capra keeps them bustling about within the frame. This was not his first experience of the trade; in 1919, he had briefly worked at a studio in Los Angeles, but the toil had been janitorial—“cleaning up the horseshit,” he said. Now, even if he hadn’t yet made something of himself, he had at least made something. It was better than manure.

Why is it that tales of the infancy and the adolescence of Hollywood retain their zest? “Frank Capra: A Life” is more than six hundred and fifty pages long, and it has much to say about Capra’s activities during the Second World War—among other projects, he made seven propaganda films under the banner of “Why We Fight”—and the oddly changing fortunes of “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946); yet what grabbed me, above all, was the legend, reported by Wasson with a raised eyebrow, of Mack Sennett’s coming to Los Angeles in 1912 and starting to shoot the first Keystone comedy half an hour after arriving in town. The very creation of the industry was verging on the comic in its breakneck brio. It was as if Henry Ford had begun building his first Model T while he was already on the road, merrily adding doors and gears as he rolled along.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1923, Capra married an actress named Helen Howell. The following year, thanks in part to a recommendation from his best man, he was hired as a gag writer. He worked for Hal Roach, who would later oversee the glorious ascension of Laurel and Hardy. From there, Capra went to Sennett, in whose domain the pressure to provide a stream of funny business, on tap, was unrelenting. In such an environment, Capra’s college degree meant less than nothing. One of Sennett’s mantras was “No gags in books.”

In spite—or because—of that emphasis on the purely physical, Capra thrived. In the words of a colleague, “When he wanted to get over how funny a plumber could be, lying on his back under a kitchen sink, he would sprawl on the floor and make like a plumber.” The next step was the most perilous stunt of all: Capra would make like a director. One of Sennett’s stars was Harry Langdon, the definition of what Macbeth calls a “cream-faced loon.” To our eyes, his eminence is baffling, but Capra got the point. “Chaplin thought his way out of tight situations; Keaton suffered through them stoically; Lloyd overcame them with speed. But Langdon trusted his way through adversities,” Capra wrote in his memoir. Armed with that acuity, he directed Langdon in “The Strong Man” (1926) and “Long Pants” (1927). Then, with the insouciance of Daniel strolling into the lions’ den, he went to work for Harry Cohn.

So much has been written about Cohn, the roaring beast who ran Columbia Pictures, that it’s easy to overlook his genius for finding and fostering talent. The studio was on Gower Street, off Sunset Boulevard, which meant that it was on Poverty Row, which in turn meant that—unlike M-G-M, say, or Paramount—its facilities were crummy and its budgets were laced up tight. But, as Capra conceded to Cohn, the personnel were great. “You can bet your Aunt Tilly’s tits they’re great,” Cohn replied, adding, “Get to work, you damn Dago.” Cohn was a comprehensive bastard with a mouth like a soil pipe, and the way to deal with him, as Capra rapidly twigged, was to stand up straight, take your lumps, and lump him right back again. What got you fired (as opposed to being merely in bad odor, which would wash off after a while) was indecision, and one thing that rises from Wasson’s pages is Capra’s knack for seizing the initiative, marshalling his troops, and marching on.

One example: on Monday, July 9, 1928, Capra surprised the cast and crew of “Submarine,” a new Columbia production, by showing up on set and assuming control. The previous director had been sacked over the weekend, and Capra had read the script on Saturday. In short, if your movie needed saving, he was your guy; if someone else had chickened out or lost the plot, he would chicken in. He had already done so for “The Strong Man,” and he would do it again for “American Madness” (1932), one of his finest early pictures, for which he insisted on reshooting everything that had been filmed by other hands and even on having the set rebuilt. Henceforth, the movie would be molded by his hands. Among those observing the process was the film’s sound man, Edward Bernds, who later said, “I fully realized, for the first time, what directing really was.”

Given such authority, it’s no wonder that Capra could command enduring loyalty. Bernds, who collaborated with him through to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” was one of the gang. Others included the editor William Hornbeck; the assistant director Art Black, an ex-plumber who was famous for the candor of his instructions on set (“Don’t just stand there like somebody’s milking you”); and the screenwriters Riskin and Jo Swerling—“a squat, heavy-set, seething young man, furiously chain-smoking strong White Owl Cigars,” as he is described in “The Name Above the Title.” With a lovely Dickensian flourish, Capra adds, “One got the odd impression the cigar was smoking the man.” McBride is indignant on behalf of these and other invaluable folk, accusing Capra of sidelining their contributions to the films he directed. Ingratitude is indeed sharper than a serpent’s tooth, and McBride isn’t wrong, but since when has Hollywood not been a pit of snakes? Every year, as we see Oscar winners churning out thanks to their agents, their deities, and everyone in between, we can’t help hearing the chant inside their heads: “This is all mine and not yours.”

In his autobiography, Capra is, without a doubt, a hundred times less reliable than Wasson and McBride. The darnedest thing is that he’s also ten times zippier. (“As with heroin, the antidote for film is more film,” he tells us. “It bosses the enzymes.”) What matters to Capra diehards is that, when you treat yourself to almost any of his features from 1930 to the outbreak of war, you feel swept along by the efforts of a well-drilled outfit. Was it a happy ship? Not in the case of “Lost Horizon” (1936), for sure, which was about a quest for Shangri-La, and which, thanks to reshoots and overruns, cost twice its original budget. On the other hand, don’t forget a handsome tribute that was paid by Clark Gable, who was loaned out by M-G-M for “It Happened One Night.” He showed up at Capra’s office drunk, but soon realized that the change of air might just do him, and his image, good. According to Bernds, “I think what Gable felt when he came to Columbia was, ‘Jesus Christ, picture making can be fun!’ ” Two weeks into the shoot, Gable said to his co-star, “You know, I think this wop’s got something.”

If that movie doesn’t give you a healthy jolt, ninety-two years on, you should probably try another art form. What hits you, aside from its momentum and the lightness of its wit, is how absurdly beautiful it is, and with what ease the beauty kindles a sensuality so unexpected that it’s virtually a twist. The celebrated haystack sequence, in which a roguish reporter (Gable) fashions a couple of scratchy beds, by moonlight, for himself and a wealthy heiress (Colbert), who lies there and looks over her shoulder at him in a trance of desire, belongs to the world of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The resident Titania is Joseph Walker, Capra’s favored cinematographer and, for what it’s worth, a hero of mine.

Born in Denver in 1892, Walker had a feline taste for the dark, especially if the silk of it was shot through with light. To double the magic, running water could be added to the mix. Check out Jean Harlow and Robert Williams, in Capra’s “Platinum Blonde” (1931), leaving a bright soirée for a shadowy garden, the better to make out behind a fountain that transforms their kisses into a rippling blur. (Williams, who used his dialogue to muse aloud and fast, as if life were on the verge of comic verse, died of complications from a burst appendix days after the movie opened. His loss was, and remains, a calamity.) Walker was also a dab hand at hats, the gradual disappearance of which from American heads has been indisputably bad news for motion pictures; what could be nobler than Gary Cooper, in Capra’s “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” (1936), gazing down at Jean Arthur with raindrops gleaming on his trilby’s brim?

Hang on, though. Given that a similar rain drips from Cary Grant’s hat in Howard Hawks’s “Only Angels Have Wings” (1939), during an unforgettable deathbed scene, and that Walker was the director of photography on both films, what’s so special about Capra? Aren’t both masters being served by the same supreme technician, and doesn’t he deserve the credit? True, yet each movie has a distinct social mood—tenser for Capra, looser for Hawks—and it is Capra who seems more discernible, so to speak, at the forefront of the action, whereas Hawks is content to hang out behind the arras.

For further proof, I refer you to a couple of trailers from 1941. First, Hawks’s “Ball of Fire,” which begins with the phrase “What a Pair of Gams!” blazoned across the screen before glancing at the plot and announcing the leading players, Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. Only in the last ten seconds does Hawks rate a mention. Compare this to Capra’s “Meet John Doe,” released a few months before. It, too, stars Cooper and Stanwyck, but they get second billing in the trailer. Instead, in gigantic letters, up come the words “Frank Capra,” followed by a slow crawl of the kind that we associate with “Star Wars,” listing the director’s earlier triumphs in chronological order. Then, at the end, a homely touch—“It’s your story, and it’s great!”—and a final plug for Capra. You get the feeling that, as far as he was concerned, his name belonged not just above the title but before, after, and practically instead of it.

It is the puff of that self-belief, in part, that provokes the ire of Capra’s detractors. “One man, one film,” he said, and in that preëmptive claim to the status of an auteur he left himself open to censure. Yet Capra’s movies from his golden years do look and sound like his and nobody else’s, with their signature blend of blends: the loner and the bunch of pals, the cracker-barrel and the wisecrack, and the accelerating narrative that finds time to stop and stare. For Capra, as for Dickens, a mob could be either a chorus, pleading for justice, or a milling source of dread. Death itself could be used as a tool. Near the start of “Meet John Doe,” a journalist played by Stanwyck (the archetypal Capra actress) chatters like a ticker tape about her fancy plan—find a hobo to play a hobo who might jump from the top of City Hall. It’s really no joke, but the glee of her riff somehow turns it into a lark.

Nothing about Capra is weirder, to be honest, than the way in which, from one film of his to the next, suicide tugs at our sleeve. In “The Bitter Tea of General Yen” (1933), the tea is lethal, and the General knowingly drinks it; in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” a disgraced senator pulls a gun on himself and cries, “I’m not fit to live!”; and, in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” James Stewart, as George Bailey, leans over the parapet of a bridge with maddened eyes, while the river roils below. How did such a nightmare end up as America’s most beloved Christmas movie? Because George is saved by an angel, I guess, and by generous mounds of cash.

As for Capra’s politics, search me. Readers of McBride’s 1992 book were alarmed by the revelation that Capra was a flinty Republican who voted against Roosevelt “because I thought he was getting too big for the country’s good.” However, as Wasson informs us, when the first of the “Why We Fight” documentaries, “Prelude to War,” was shown at the White House, in 1942, all of Capra’s reservations dissolved with one shake of the President’s hand. (“Every man, woman, and child in the world must see this film,” F.D.R. said to the assembled gathering.) Bernds reckoned that Capra was “muddled and reactionary.” To the screenwriter Julius Epstein, he was “a right-wing populist.” At the same time, Epstein said, “I was not sure how he felt outside his pictures.”

There’s the rub. It’s the pictures that do the talking, and the raging, and—if Cooper is around—the keeping mysteriously quiet. The fact that Capra’s political persuasions, such as they are, fail to square with the deeds of his protagonists is more of a relief, I’d say, than a reason to charge him with hypocrisy. Who wants to watch a film that unwaveringly demonstrates the voting intentions of its maker? The crazed filibuster that concludes “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (Stewart, as Jefferson Smith, had his throat dabbed with dichloride of mercury to make him hoarse) sounds more ominous than uplifting in the age of Donald Trump, and the reactions to the film were equally nuts. James F. Byrnes, a Democratic senator from South Carolina, protested that “the thing was outrageous, exactly the kind of thing that dictators of totalitarian governments would like to have their subjects believe exists in a democracy.” Wrap your head around that.

“Mr. Smith” was written by Sidney Buchman, a card-carrying Communist. Riskin, who wrote for Capra to miraculous effect for a decade, starting in 1931, was snappier, subtler, and less ideologically heated, but he, too, was nonetheless a man of the left. (He was also a swell; he dated Carole Lombard and married Fay Wray, which must have been a scream.) The point is that Capra surrounded himself with the best and the smartest, whatever flavor they came in; Stanwyck, Colbert, Gable, Cooper, and Stewart were all solid Republicans, and it’s unlikely that Capra gave more of a damn about their politics than their adoring public did. A movie screen is a dream, not a pamphlet. “What did Capra want to say in his films?” McBride asks, but we don’t watch them for the sake of the saying. What they bequeath to us is not a set of ideas but the fluent, rhythmical beat of a story and a treasury of looks.

The decline of Capra, in the wake of the Second World War, was a sorry spectacle. He made many films after “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but the wonders pretty much ceased. In 1951, he was invited by the president of Caltech, his alma mater, to join a secret Cold War think tank, but was denied security clearance; in a bid to prove his worthiness, he named the names of left-wing sympathizers, including Buchman. (Among the sins of which McBride accuses Capra, this midlife ratting may be the gravest.) Ornery, unwanted, and adrift, Capra found his schemes for movies running out of gas. A bio-pic of St. Paul, starring Frank Sinatra, was never going to fly, though I can’t help imagining the result (“How ya doin’, Colossians?”).

Yet all was not lost. With his second wife, Lucille, whom he had married in 1932, after his first marriage foundered, Capra went to live on a ranch that he had bought in Fallbrook, a hundred miles from Hollywood. He planted fruit trees and produced his own olive oil. Later, the Capras moved to Palm Springs, where he played golf with Gerald Ford and Barry Goldwater. That may not be everybody’s notion of delight, but each to his own. There is a heartening swing, too, in the final chapters of Wasson’s book, as we learn that the maker of “American Madness” got to watch “Mean Streets”—“a helluva beautiful picture,” he called it—and, after the publication of “The Name Above the Title,” began to revel in the company of students, who lapped up his tales of times past (or, for McBride, “his self-aggrandizing pseudopersonality”). For their benefit, he would take apart the mechanism of an old movie, like a clockmaker, and explain how it had been put together.

What kept Capra all wound up and ticking? Wasson detects a lingering resentment in the poor Sicilian kid gazing up at the idle rich. “He would get them. If it would take his whole life, he would get them,” Wasson writes. But where, exactly, is that hatred to be found in the films? They seem tolerant rather than vengeful, and a movie like “Platinum Blonde” is far more amused than appalled by the antics of the well-to-do. Where Capra did strike back was in the sheer vigor of his anti-idleness; he did so much so well, and, if he was amazed by the country he lived in, and confused by what sort of place—horrific or tranquil—it might yet become, well, he is hardly alone in his bewilderment. It was John Cassavetes, a director about as distant from Capra as one can be, who delivered the most haunting homage of all. “Maybe there really wasn’t an America,” he said. “Maybe it was only Frank Capra.” ♦