Capra, Frank

(b. 18 May 1896 in Bisacquino, Sicily; d. 3 September 1991 in La Quinta, California), film director most identified with populist New Deal-theme films of the 1930s and the “Why We Fight” armed forces documentaries of the 1940s.

Francesco Capra was the son of Salvatore Capra, a peasant farmer, and Rosaria Nicolosi, a craftsman’s daughter. The family immigrated to the United States in 1903. The family settled in Los Angeles, where both parents toiled at menial jobs. Frank attended public schools while working as a newsboy. Industrious and determined, he overcame his mother’s opposition to his further education. But the only book he owned for years was The Three Musketeers, which he read from age twelve onward, according to his own account, about “two thousand times.” Capra performed in school plays while attending Manual Arts High School in modern-day Hollywood. He also heard socialist ideas from teachers and grew fascinated with movies. Some of his classmates were already film extras, but his first job in entertainment was playing guitar in brothels in downtown Los Angeles.

He attended Throop College of Technology (later the California Institute of Technology) in Pasadena and majored in chemical engineering as a reliable means of upward mobility. He also wrote short stories and won a fellowship for a six-week travel expedition around the United States, during which he took numerous photographs for a school presentation. He entered the army in 1917 and became an engineering instructor. He was discharged in December 1918 after contracting influenza. Capra returned to school but lost interest in science before graduation and, seeing his grades drop sharply, turned to the burgeoning movie industry.

Capra took work picking hops in the Sacramento Valley, where he heard about a call for extras on a western being shot nearby by the director John Ford. He signed on and soon obtained fulltime work as a jack-of-all-trades at the Christie Film Company, which made slapstick comedies on Sunset Boulevard. Released after two months, he sought repeatedly to make a living in movies as a writer, scripting several early unsuccessful silent films.

His first venture at directing was Fulta Fisher’s Boarding House (1921), shot for $1,700 in a small studio across from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Based in part on a Rudyard Kipling poem set in a Calcutta grog shop with assorted rough characters, it featured a Mary Magdalene-style heroine redeemed at the end. Fulta Fisher’s Boarding House received a few glowing notices and earned a profit, but plans to make a series of films from famous poems quickly fell apart. Capra also directed a short documentary (title unknown) in 1921 celebrating the two-week visit of an Italian naval cruiser to San Francisco, a prototype for Capra’s later wartime documentaries; it starred Dorothy Revier, who soon became famous as the model for Columbia Pictures’s trademark “torch lady.” Capra’s first important break came thanks to his romance in the early 1920s with the actress Helen Howell, whose connections helped him rise to near-director status. She reputedly sought him out after viewing Fulta Fisher’s Boarding House and he began working for a small company whose financial backer was Helen’s father. Cheaply produced comedies, sometimes starring Revier or Howell, at first found Capra working as a prop man, then gag writer, and finally assistant director. In 1923 Capra and Howell married; the next year they left San Francisco for Hollywood.

Capra later observed that writing gags had been the “shortcut” to screen success because a skilled comedy writer could advance quickly if studios noticed his talent. By 1924 he was working with the Hal Roach Studios, writing gags for the Our Gang comedies and some twenty-five Mack Sennett films, including several starring comic Harry Langdon. Like many other “caption” writers or “titlists” of the silents, his work grew more sophisticated, approaching themes and treatments later used in his major films. Sennett gave Capra his first chance to direct for a major studio in 1925 with Soldier Boy, but fired him as an incompetent after the third day of shooting.

Luckily for Capra, Langdon broke with Sennett and moved over to First National Pictures, taking Capra with him as gag writer. Langdon soon sponsored him as a director, first of several scenes in Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926), a Langdon box-office hit. Capra’s direction of the comedian in The Strong Man (1926) established his own style—hailed at the time and ranked by subsequent critics as one of the foremost of the silent comedy standards— mixing satire and sentimentalism in social themes, in this case a naïf (played by Langdon) who manages somehow to clean up a corrupt town.

Beginning with That Certain Thing (1927), Capra struck up a useful relationship with producer Harry Cohn and cameraman Joe Walker at Columbia Pictures that would last through the best of Capra’s career. Known for his exacting approach, he soon turned out feature after feature for the studio, first gaining the credit “A Frank Capra Production” with Say It with Sables (1928)—the year he divorced Helen Howell. Paid handsomely and owning Columbia stock, he rapidly became wealthy as the studio prospered. Capra bought a small house in what would become the exclusive Malibu Colony, where (along with the Roosevelt Hotel and the Hollywood Athletic Club) he would frequently spend his time between pictures. He had arrived, but not entirely.

Loaned out by Cohn to Louis B. Mayer and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Capra went to work in 1928 on Brotherly Love, about a prison guard and an inmate who both fall in love with the warden’s daughter. Although offering higher production values than Columbia, MGM controlled its directors tightly. Frequently using substitute directors for retakes, the larger MGM produced more impersonal films. Perhaps because of Capra’s rejection of that method, but likely because of a series of continued smaller conflicts over creative control, Capra was fired during the last weeks of shooting. It was a blow to the rising director but also a reminder that whatever its limitations, Columbia offered him the best artistic climate for his work.

Meanwhile, Harry Cohn was gambling Columbia’s profits on a near-spectacular that cost eight times more than any of Capra’s earlier films. The sound feature Submarine (1929), made with full cooperation of the navy, fell into difficulties during production. Cohn replaced his big-name action director Irvin Willet with Capra, who reshot nearly every scene. A critical success, Submarine became the largest moneymaker in the studio’s short history, catapulting Capra into sound movies.

Capra had developed a feeling for films about the “little guy” and the Hollywood-style redemption of the downcast and even the degraded. The Wall Street crash of 1929 and resulting Great Depression also had a dramatic effect on the instinctively conservative, Republican Capra. He grasped the value of the socially conscious narrative, both for the integrity of the story and for the film’s potential box-office success. Undertaking Ladies of Leisure (1930), based upon a Broadway play about a prostitute, he wrote a draft of a script and then turned to the leftist writer Jo Swerling, initiating an era of his intimate collaboration with writers sympathetic to unionism, antifascist causes, and even to the Soviet Union. Not only did the social and economic climate of the time affect the way Capra made his films, it also impacted the audiences, who hungered to see their senses of betrayal and estrangement from the American dream reflected on the screen.

Ladies of Leisure had another important influence upon Capra. Stage actress Barbara Stanwyck had only three failed films to show for her Hollywood career thus far and had decided upon a return to Broadway when Capra asked her to test for the lead. She reluctantly agreed, and he discovered in the former chorus girl the female complexity and toughness that he had been seeking. Thanks in no small part to his filming of Stanwyck—with whom Capra subsequently had a romance of several years—Capra learned to direct in ways maximizing his actors’ capacities, female and male alike. Platinum Blonde (1931), the first of his sound films about the little guy (and written in part by Swerling), received good notices and made a healthy profit. Jean Harlow’s role as an heiress and sweetheart won her star status with the film. The comedy also prepared Capra for later films through the narrative of a male lead (played by Robert Williams) who suddenly finds himself surrounded by luxury, only gradually grasping the emptiness of his worldly success.

Capra married Lucille Warner Rayburn in 1932, when he began working with rising screenwriter Robert Riskin. He and Riskin turned out a series of hits: the screwball comedy It Happened One Night (1934), for which Capra received his first Best Director Academy Award; Lost Horizon (1937); and You Can’t Take It with You (1938), for which he received another Academy Award. The social shockers Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), written by Riskin about a native fascist movement and for which Capra won his third Best Director Academy Award and starring Gary Cooper, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), about corruption in Congress and written by the communist Sidney Buchman, stand among the foremost “message” films of 1930s Hollywood. Not surprisingly, contemporary reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Hollywood agents and informers describe Capra’s working relationships as highly suspicious at best, potentially subversive at worst.

At the leftward apex of his trajectory, Capra urged studio negotiations with the screenwriters and actors unions, spoke at public events of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, walked a local newspaper strike picket line, and bought the rights to Clifford Odets’s radical play Golden Boy—then traded them away. Although politically mild, You Can’t Take It with You pokes fun at the fanatical anticommunist “red hunters,” who in real life set into motion the congressional investigations resulting a decade later in the Hollywood blacklist. Capra also served simultaneously as president of the Screen Directors Guild and of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1935-1941).

Capra had become an American icon by the late 1930s but also a tragic private figure. A cover story on Capra in Time magazine (8 August 1938) described him as master of the “peculiarly American, peculiarly kinetic humor” and the “top director of the industry.” As You Can’t Take It with You was being previewed grandly for the press, one of his three children died suddenly following a tonsillectomy. According to friends, the director soon after returned to the Catholic church he had abandoned and assumed a melancholy that pursued him the rest of his life.

During World War II Capra became the most important Hollywood director of propaganda-edged documentaries. The seven “Why We Fight” documentaries (including The Negro Soldier, written by the communist writer Carlton Moss without credit), won Capra a Distinguished Service Medal in 1945. As Winston Churchill wrote, “I have never seen or read any more powerful statement of our cause or of our rightful case against the Nazi tyranny [than in Capra’s war series].”

Emotionally burned out by the war effort and no longer in heavy demand by the studios, Capra formed Liberty Films, with William Wyler, George Stevens, and Sam Briskin, to make It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), scripted by Capra, Riskin, Swerling, and the communists Albert Maltz and Michael Wilson. Melancholy despite its happy ending, Wonderful Life marked a loss of optimism for Capra and also for its star, James Stewart. As Capra biographer Joseph McBride explained, Capra drew upon his own gnawing uncertainties to show his lead’s “equation of lack of money with desperation and shame,”—to say nothing of self-doubt and temptation to suicide.

In Hollywood of the blacklist era, Capra made the satirical State of the Union (1948) about American politics. Bitterly attacked for the film’s mildly critical stance, he retreated, avowing his loyalty to “Americanism” against the rival communist system. But in the new conservative climate, his best talents were wasted. Capra’s style deteriorated severely in his next several pictures, and he left Hollywood with great bitterness in 1951. Working intermittently in television and a few further undistinguished films, Capra drifted into a retirement that was marked by participation in numerous film retrospectives and college appearances, where he spoke about his work and his involvement in Hollywood’s Golden Age. In a memoir and in public statements, he insisted repeatedly that he had never truly grasped the radical New Dealism that made him both famous and beloved. Perhaps he had understood the sentiments best intuitively, or perhaps, returning to the political conservatism of his youth, he had become ashamed of the social implications of his own cinematic accomplishments. The American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1982 may have reminded Capra, as it did the wider public, that his best work, done in response to social crisis, had been remarkably radical after all.

Capra succumbed to heart failure in La Quinta and is buried in the Coachella Valley Cemetery. His legacy endures decades after his heydey ended, as evidenced by features such as Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), which offered the little guy hope against the powerful and corrupt, and by use of the term “Capraesque,” which denotes the kind of populist sensibility that his work embodied.

The Frank Capra Archive is at Wesleyan University, including scripts, correspondence, and other materials. His autobiography is Frank Capra: The Name Above the Title (1980), and the outstanding biography is Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (1992). Other critical works include Bruce Henstell, ed., Frank Capra: One Man— One Film (1971); Richard Glatzer and John Raeburn, eds., Frank Capra: The Man and His Films (1975); Victor Scherle and William Turner Levy, The Films of Frank Capra (1977); and Raymond Carney, American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra (1986). Capra’s letters that are not in the Wesleyan archive are scattered in many locations, as are production documents of his films.

Paul Buhle