It's A Wonderful Life, Frank Capra's Life

Emerging as an annual cinephile tradition, The Criterion Collection has once again kicked off the New Year with an illustrated clue hinting at what fans of the boutique label can expect over the next 12 months. And if these hints pan out, it's going to be another strong slate of releases in 2014. So what is Criterion teasing? Well, the clues seem to be pointing toward: Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter"; Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" (previously issued by Criterion on laserdisc); Howard Hawks' classic "Red River"; the landmark documentary "Jazz On A Summer's Day" (recently re-issued in a theatrical run); Lawrence Kasdan's "The Big Chill" and more. Source: blogs.indiewire.com

“No one else can balance the ups and downs of wistful sentiment and corny humor the way [Frank] Capra can - but if anyone else should learn to, kill him.” —Pauline Kael

“I thought drama was when the actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.” —Frank Capra

"The most important person in my life" (as Capra later described her) had come to the location to visit her best friend from college, Alyce Coleman, the wife of his assistant director, C. C. (Buddy) Coleman. "What a lovely voice!" he thought when Lu finally spoke to him. She had been sitting at his crowded dinner table for several nights without catching his eye. The Colemans maneuvered her closer to Capra one night after rushes, and he drove her back from San Diego to the hotel along the Silver Strand, a peninsula favored for nocturnal romantic occasions. As he recalled the moment in his book, at the door of her room, "I kissed her. I knew. She knew." Lucille Florence Warner was a bright enough young woman, though in the end her personal ambition went no further than a good marriage. She'd worked as a stenographer, as a clerk for UCLA, and as a secretary for a real estate man. Capra denied that Lu ever worked before he met her. "When I met her," he said, "she wasn't anything."

Capra expressed in "Forbidden" (1932) some aspects of his convoluted emotional life in the characters of a newspaperman (Ralph Bellamy) who wastes his life in devotion to Lulu and of the politician's crippled wife (Dorothy Peterson), whose name is Helen (a reference to Capra's first wife Helen Howell). 'Forbidden' was set to start filming in April 1931, shortly after the completion of 'The Miracle Woman.' Though Capra was in no way to blame for Stanwyck's accident during the filming, it cast a retrospective shadow for him, one of the reasons he disparaged 'Forbidden' in his book. He may have linked her accident in his mind, whether irrationally or not, with Stanwyck's final rejection of his marriage proposal.

Capra and Stanwyck were discreet about their affair, and they were never linked romantically in the increasingly frequent press reports of her marital problems. Capra wrote in his book 'The Name Above The Title': "I fell in love with Stanwyck, and had I not been more in love with Lucille Reyburn I would have asked Barbara to marry me after she called it quits with Frank Fay." But it was Stanwyck who rejected him. Stanwyck must have been shrewd enough to realize, even if Capra did not, that despite their satisfying working relationship, they would not have been compatible in marriage. She must have known that Capra needed a more placid woman, a woman who would stay home and raise children, a woman whose life would revolve around him —not a career woman. Lu knew nothing about his proposal to Stanwyck or Stanwyck's rejection. Capra married Lu on 25 November 1932. "I wasn't after dames. I wanted to make good pictures. That was the good thing about my wife: She helped me."

The Capras were one of the rare married couples in Hollywood about whom there never was any scandal. John Huston, who lived with Capra in London bachelor quarters during World War II, marveled that he was "the most devoted husband I've ever known. He adored Lu."

'Platinum Blonde' (1931) firmly established Jean Harlow's stardom, bringing out qualities of humor and relaxed sexiness that had not been evident in her previous appearances. Los Angeles Express noted that "Jean Harlow shows a marked improvement as an actress. Credit for this, I believe, should go to Director Frank Capra, who again proves his right to be named with the ten best megaphonists." The brilliance of Riskin's contribution and of Capra's direction elevated 'Platinum Blonde' from a formulaic comedy into a first-rate film, probably the most underrated of Capra's career. "Someone is going to evolve a great film out of the Depression," Capra told Variety's Ruth Morris in an interview on February 2, 1932, three months after the release of 'Platinum Blonde.' "Satirical treatment of a plutocrat, insanely trying to conserve wealth and rinding happiness only when he is reduced to a breadline, will strike a responsive note in the mass mind. When that picture is made, it will inaugurate the cycle that follows in the wake of any successful film." Capra also observed that (as Variety paraphrased it) such films were just waiting for a director "cagey enough to capitalize on the present state of public mind."

Some critics recognized that there were political ambiguities in Capra's films, that they were considerably more complex politically than just sentimental paeans to the "little guy." But even the most perceptive critics seemed to have a great deal of trouble coming to terms with his films' political implications. Donald Willis summarized the dizzying variety of critical viewpoints: "Depending on what Capra films one is talking about, Frank Capra is an advocate of Communism, fascism, Marxism, populism, conservatism, McCarthyism, New-Dealism, anti-Hooverism, jingoism, socialism, capitalism, middle-of-the-road-ism, democracy, or individualism." Willis simply threw up his hands: "It's no accident that there are so many interpretations of his films: the composite Capra that emerges from those films is almost impossible to pin down politically. I myself think that Capra's films were basically not political." "If you're a real artist, forget the politics," Capra urged young filmmakers at a Directors Guild seminar in 1981.

The enthusiasm and sincerity Capra brought to his direction of 'American Madness' (1932) tapped into unconscious reserves of goodwill that Capra could not allow himself to express in his off-screen politics and which reflected his belated, reluctant, but nevertheless strongly felt awareness that the country's economic system needed overhauling if the American Dream was to survive. It was a time when, in the words of the historian Arnold Toynbee, "men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of society might break down and cease to work."

Frank Capra, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable during the filming of "It Happened One Night" (1934)

Gable's Peter is exasperated by the snobbery of Colbert's Ellen Andrews and too intimidated by class barriers to make anything more than a tentative romantic move until her Wall Street tycoon father (Walter Connolly) gives his approval. Burned before by his romantic view of women, he tries to protect himself emotionally by thinking of Ellie as "just a headline," a ticket back to his old job in New York. He spends most of the film criticizing her for her wealth and privilege (teaching her how to dunk doughnuts), but he also is criticizing himself for being attracted to someone from her class. And he is blind to the rebellious Ellie's true personality, which is closer to his feminine ideal ("somebody that's real —somebody that's alive") than he wants to admit. Capra saw Colbert's character as the personification of all the rich, "classy," stuck-up women who ever gave him the brush-off. "She wasn't looking for any man, she wasn't looking for any romance," said Capra, who renamed the character after one of the girls he knew when he was trying to crash Pasadena society, Ellen Andrews (in the story the character's name is Elspeth Andrews).

In 1934 Capra faced the prospect of a social message with great trepidation, for, as he told Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times shortly after he made 'Broadway Bill,' "People don't want to think." He worried that he would lose his audience, his money, and his newly achieved social status if he said too much in his films or if he said things the audience did not want to hear.

When Capra told Harry Cohn he wanted Jean Arthur for "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939), Cohn, according to both Capra and Arthur, scoffed that Arthur was a has-been. But, as Stanwyck had before, Arthur bloomed under Capra's firm but quiet authority, becoming a major star as she released previously untapped qualities in her personality, qualities best described by the other of her two favorite directors, George Stevens ('The More the Merrier' and 'Shane'):

"Jean Arthur was terribly vulnerable and exposed even under the most ordinary of circumstances, even if she had to stick her hand out into traffic to make a left-hand turn." She became Capra's quintessential leading lady, appearing in three of his last four Columbia films, 'Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,' 'You Can't Take It With You,' and 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.'

"Kick her in the ass!" Capra laughed when asked how to direct Jean Arthur. "She's a funny combination of things. You can't get her out of the dressing room without using force. You can't get her in front of the camera without her crying, whining, vomiting, all that shit she does. But then when she does get in front of a camera, and you turn on the lights — wow! All of that disappears and out comes a strong-minded woman. Then when she finishes the scene, she runs back to the dressing room and hides."

"Meet John Doe" (1941) finds Capra critically examining his own role as a manipulator of the mass audience and the interplay between sincerity and cynicism in his own feelings toward the public. As Charles J. Maland observed, "Doe's picture appears on the cover of Time, just as Capra's had in 1938. Both were getting recognition, and both wondered if they deserved it. When Doe tells Ann in the airport waiting room that he's beginning to see the true meaning of the platitudes he had heard for years and been spouting for weeks, one senses that Capra is also speaking. Yet Capra, like Doe, seems to be torn: who is he (the Sicilian immigrant, the ex-ballplayer) to be a national spokesman of values, communicating to millions through the media?" Underlying those doubts was Capra's fear that he was an "impostor," as the voice of an anonymous member of the public calls John Doe, and the fear that he would be exposed before his audience and vilified by them, as happens to John Doe in the rain-drenched convention sequence, one of Capra's most powerful visions of American madness. No other sequence in Capra's work more clearly reveals his latent fear of the "common man" and his awareness of how easily the public can be manipulated by the media, including the cinema itself.

"I never cease to thrill at an audience seeing a picture," Capra told Geoffrey Hellman shortly before making 'Meet John Doe.' "For two hours you've got 'em. Hitler can't keep 'em that long. You eventually reach even more people than Roosevelt does on the radio. Imagine what Shakespeare would have given for an audience like that!" It is Capra's awareness of the fragility of his hold over his audience, and his doubts about his own worthiness for such an important role, that give the convention scene its extraordinary tension.

The temptation to suicide is a major theme of Capra's work. The heroes of two of his most personal (and least commercially successful) films before 'Meet John Doe'—'The Way of the Strong' and 'The Bitter Tea of General Yen' —actually do commit suicide. Failed suicide attempts figure in several other Capra films, and almost every Capra film takes its central character on violent mood swings between elation and despair before reaching its fragile happy ending. At his best, as François Truffaut put it, Capra was "a navigator who knew how to steer his characters into the deepest dimensions of desperate human situations (I have often wept during the tragic moments of Capra's comedies) before he reestablished a balance and brought off the miracle that let us leave the theater with a renewed confidence in life." Capra's supposed optimism was a cover for his more fundamental pessimism, and his happy endings which seem tacked on, as in 'Meet John Doe,' represent an inability to reestablish the emotional balance.

In later years, Capra flip-flopped between defending and regretting his choice of endings. Commercial considerations undoubtedly contributed as much as religious scruples to his ambivalence about the suicide in 1941, particularly since the film was his first independent production and his own money was on the line for the first time. Even though he claimed that his primary motive for choosing the story was "to convince important critics that not every Capra film was written by Pollyanna," he ultimately backed away from the darker implications of his chosen theme, laying off much of the blame on his public. "The audience told us" that they didn't like the suicide. "You can't kill Gary Cooper," Capra rationalized.

Capra never was attacked by name in those [HUAC] hearings. In fact, it was remarkable how rarely his name was mentioned, since such criticism could have been construed as referring to his prewar films and since even "It's a Wonderful Life" came under suspicion in that atmosphere. "Frank Capra—Is He Un-American?" asked the British Communist paper the Daily Worker on April 5 in the headline over its favorable review of Wonderful Life. Calling it "one of those thought-timulating films which Hollywood produces so rarely these days," John Ross wrote that "the hunt for dollars is again the target of Capra's attack. . . The un-American Committee of the House of Representatives will probably denounce it as Bolshevik propaganda.

The extent of Capra's identification with George Bailey would have astonished those who knew him only through his successful public image and did not know that as he prepared his postwar comeback film he felt "a loneliness that was laced by the fear of failure." In lines he wrote for the film but did not use, Capra had George say after jumping into the river, "I was a 4-F. In my case it didn't stand for Four Freedoms, it meant Four Failures. Failure as a husband, father, businessman—failure as a human being." The fundamental pessimism that counterbalanced the superficial optimism of his prewar films had been brought dangerously to the surface during the war years, triggering Capra's awareness of the fragility of his art and the hollowness of his personal beliefs. Like his surrogate on screen, George Bailey, he was undergoing a secret metaphysical crisis, wondering whether he "had put too much faith in the human race."

Capra and George Bailey share some profound biographical characteristics—their equation of lack of money with desperation and shame, their conflict between a yearning for financial comfort and a desire to serve the community, their thwarted technological ambitions, the fateful roles of their fathers' deaths in deciding their careers, the calming and conservative influences of their wives, their frustration over having to stay in their hometowns during World War II, their terror of anonymity, and, underlying everything, their doubting of their own worth and their temptation to suicide. As critic Stephen Handzo wrote, "One can find the wild oscillations of euphoria and despair of Capra's films in his own life. . . Violent shifts of mood give his films the sense of life being lived." Never was that truth more evident than in "It's A Wonderful Life." -"Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success" (2011) by Joseph McBride