Kyle Chandler, Linda Cardellini and Sissy Spaceck in new Netflix drama show

Reports at THR and Deadline have Sissy Spacek, Linda Cardellini, and Ben Mendelsohn (The Place Beyond the Pines) joining Friday Night Lights alum Kyle Chandler in a new untitled Netflix series, described as a psychological thriller. The 13-episode show comes from Damages creators Todd A. Kessler, Daniel Zelman, and Glenn Kessler and revolves around “a close-knit family of adult siblings whose secrets and scars are revealed when the black sheep oldest brother, Danny (Mendelsohn), returns home.”

Chandler and Cardellini will play the other siblings, and Spacek will play the family’s matriarch. This is a high-profile show not only because it marks the next effort from the Damages creators, but also because it’s Kyle Chandler’s return to television after the incredible Friday Night Lights.

Kyle Chandler has been one of the most in-demand actors in pilot season since FNL ended its run, and he shot a pilot about the Vatican, directed by Ridley Scott, that was not picked up by Showtime. Expect this new series to debut on Netflix late this year or early next year.
Source: collider.com

Kyle Chandler's progression: video & article

Kyle Chandler video, featuring photos and stills from films and TV shows starring by Kyle Chandler: Homefront, Early Edition, Friday Night Lights (with Connie Britton), King Kong, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Super 8, Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, The Wolf of Wall Street, etc. Soundtrack: "Little Baby" by Buddy Holly, "I Want Your Love" by Tranvision Vamp, and "Ooh Wee Baby" by Jeff Barry.

“Guys are all about watches, boots, sunglasses, jackets. For us, simplicity is best.” -Kyle Chandler

"What I do is not rocket science, but I sure do love it." -Kyle Chandler

"I love playing a role where I think I’m right and then you learn you’re not. And it’s what you do with that information." -Kyle Chandler

“Every man at some point in his life is gonna lose a battle. He’s gonna fight, and he’s gonna lose. But what makes him a man is that in the midst of that battle, he does not lose himself. Success is not a goal, it is a by-product.” —Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler)

You can tell instantly why they picked Chandler to play the imperturbable Texas high school football coach on NBC's Friday Night Lights. Having spent much of his childhood in Georgia, Chandler has the Southern accent, but he also has the old-school values: Hard work is its own reward. Slow and steady wins the race. And, above all, never ever believe your own hype.

"I've been acting for 20 years, and I'm still under the radar, and that's fine," he says. "It lets me do what I really want, which is to be a good husband, a good father. I'm quite happy just plodding along." "I like to live simply," says Chandler. "My wife is my best friend. We don't go to parties. I believe kids are supposed to get dirty and have fun. When we have people over the house, I'll fire up the grill outside and we'll have good food, but it's potluck. I love what I do, but I don't need the lavish lifestyle that's supposed to go with it."

His first major television role was as a Cleveland Indians outfielder on Homefront, a critically acclaimed series about a group of WWII vets returning to Ohio.

Next came Early Edition, on which he played a man who mysteriously receives a copy of The Chicago Sun-Times one day in advance, giving him knowledge of the future. From there, Chandler became a kind of everyhunk with roles as testosterone-fueled as his characters' names suggest: Jake Evans (What About Joan), Grant Rashton (The Lyon's Den), Mac McGinty (Capital City), Bruce Baxter (King Kong).

Chandler met his wife at a dog park in the mid-'90s at the tail end of a sowing-oats phase. He had come to Hollywood several years earlier on a talent program for ABC after majoring in theater at the University of Georgia. Acting work was scarce at first, which gave Chandler--who is a strapping 6-foot-1--time for other pursuits. "My first job was as a bouncer at the Palace nightclub in Hollywood, and it gave me a lot of opportunities with women," he says, though he's above giving details. "Let's just say I was not suffering in that department."

But Kathryn took Kyle to a whole new level, literally. After breaking up and getting back together several times, he followed her on a climbing trip to Pico de Orizaba, an 18,000-foot peak in Mexico, where Kyle promptly got altitude sickness but was bowled over by an epiphany. "I know it sounds corny, but when we got back home, I bought a bottle of wine and some candles, went to her place, and told her I couldn't live without her." What's the secret of their lasting love in a town where divorces are as common as strip malls? "She knows who I really am and still appreciates me," says Chandler. "Here I have a new show, and for a minute you think, How can I reinvent myself? But success is attached to being who you are. My wife knows I'm a complete idiot, and she reminds me every day that success is meaningless if I'm pretending to be someone I'm not."

For Chandler, family is the great equalizer. "No matter what happens in other areas of my life, I get my soul and essence from them," he says. "Spending time with my girls clarifies my perspective on just about any problem. And if I'm still struggling with something, my wife and I will have one of our late-night conversations in bed, and that will put the problem to rest."

"Making the best of a bad situation is what life is about, because the frills and fancies, they just come and go." What would his dad think of the man Kyle is today? Chandler finishes his second pint and thinks about it a minute. It wouldn't be like him to sugarcoat the answer, and he doesn't: "I always think if Dad climbed up out of the grave, he'd look at me and say, 'Kyle, you son of a bitch, why don't you get a real job?' But then he would look at the business side and say, 'Okay, I get it now.'"

Chandler laughs, but you can tell the conversation has tapped something deep inside him. He puts his hands together and his head down, almost prayerlike, or as if he's about to deliver one of those inspirational speeches in the locker room on Friday Night Lights. But this one's for real. "My dad always said, 'Listen to that inner voice. It won't steer you wrong,'" he says. "The world tries to mess with you in all kinds of ways. If Dad were here today, I think he'd be proud of me for becoming my own man. I think that's all you can hope to accomplish in this life." Source: www.menshealth.com

Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara and Sarah Paulson are already signed on for Todd Haynes' drama Carol, and now they have a further co-star in Kyle Chandler.

He'll play Blanchett's husband in the Patricia Highsmith adaptation. As a novel, Carol was originally published as The Price Of Salt in 1952, with Highsmith (Strangers On A Train, The Talented Mr Ripley) writing pseudonymously as "Claire Morgan". The book's lesbian trappings prompted the secrecy: a positive and sympathetic portrayal of a sapphic relationship unusual in an era when such things were viewed as degenerate. Blanchett and Mara are, obviously enough, the couple at the heart of the film, with Chandler the other half of Blanchett's divorce proceedings. Source: www.empireonline.com

Margot Robbie talks nude scenes in "The Wolf of Wall Street"

You remember the scene: hot-pink mini-dress, legs wide open, camera positioned just so. “Mommy is just so sick and tired of wearing panties,” purrs Robbie, proceeding to demonstrate this point with such resolve that her howling husband (Leonardo DiCaprio)—the loudest man in a movie full of loud men—is reduced to a whimpering bystander. It’s Robbie’s Basic Instinct moment, give or take some flesh-­colored underwear and a nanny cam. And it’s the scene that may turn a 23-year-old Australian actress with exactly one previous major film credit (Richard Curtis’s About Time) and one canceled TV show (Pan Am) into a brand name.

Robbie was still under contract on Pan Am, ABC’s 2011 drama about sixties flight-attendants-slash-spies, when the Wolf of Wall Street script—based on convicted financial scammer Jordan Belfort’s memoir of the same title —went out to every unknown actress in Hollywood. Robbie was initially uninterested. “I said, ‘If I was a dude, I’d wanna be in this, but I’ve got no interest in playing a gold-digger mistress.’ And my managers said, ‘Okay, Margot, that’s great, but it’s a Scorsese film. We’re obviously not expecting you to get this role.’

 In the end, it was Robbie who convinced Scorsese that she should parade around topless. “He was the one saying, ‘Technically, for this sex scene she could have kept her bra on.’ But the first thing Naomi would do is get naked. That’s how she’s gonna win the fight.” Robbie learned to appreciate the character’s competitive instincts. “She figured out the one power that she has, and she uses it over the douchebags of the world. If I need to be painted as the bitch, paint me as the bitch, because you need to be on his side at the end of the day.” Source: www.vulture.com

Featuring in full-frontal nude scenes, Robbie confessed to downing tequila shots on the set of the fast-paced flick to help her lose her inhibitions before stripping down. Her raunchy performance alongside Hollywood veteran Leonardo DiCaprio recently attracted the attention of Playboy publisher, Hugh Hefner who despite not knowing her name, told Us Weekly he was impressed with her nude scenes. 'The girl that plays [Jordan Belfort's] wife in [Wolf of Wall Street] is very, very pretty.'


'We're ready for her. She would be great.' The former Neighbours star has had a busy past few months, recently wrapping up her latest film Focus, where she stars opposite Will Smith, as well as war-time romance Suite Francaise. Robbie is currently preparing to appear in science fiction film Z for Zachariah alongside Chris Pine and Chiwetel Ejiofor, for which she has already darkened her blonde locks. The Aussie beauty is also rumoured to be starring in the hotly anticipated film Tarzan.

The Wolf Of Wall Street was released in Australia two weeks ago and is already a box office smash, grossing more than $1 million on its opening day - the biggest ever for a Martin Scorsese film. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Kyle Chandler will play Cate Blanchett's husband in Todd Haynes's "Carol"

Cate Blanchett, Oscar nominated for "Blue Jasmine" (2013) directed by Woody Allen

Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara now have a third wheel in Carol. Hot off snagging the lead in Netflix‘s upcoming psychological thriller from the Damages creators,

Kyle Chandler has now also joined the Todd Haynes-directed film. Picked up by the Weinstein Company in Cannes last year, Carol chronicles the burgeoning and tempestuous relationship between two very different women in 1950s NYC. Oscar winner Blanchett plays the older of the two, a wife trapped in a dead marriage who’s desperate to leave but also fears losing her daughter if she does.

Friday Night Lights alum Chandler, who can currently be seen in The Wolf Of Wall Street, plays Harge, the Blanchett character’s jealous husband. Filming is scheduled to start in mid-March on the Phyllis Nagy penned adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley author Patricia Highsmith’s novella The Price Of Salt. Sarah Paulson also stars in the film. Chandler is repped by Gersh and Brillstein Entertainment Partners. Source: www.deadline.com

Wolf of Wall Street (Yatch scene with FBI cop) from Kendra on Vimeo.

Wolf of Wall Street (Yatch scene with FBI cop) between Leonardo DiCaprio (Jordan Belfort) and Kyle Chandler (Agent Denham).

Postwar noir, Fatalism, Mob City, L.A. Noir

Although the movement was named by the French, film noir has always been an American genre. But as the 12th San Francisco Film Noir Festival shows, the bitterness of American crime films of the 1940s found some kindred spirits in Europe and in Asia - places that had been ravaged by World War II. "In many cases you are watching bleak, dark, cynical movies made by people working directly in the aftermath of the war," said Noir City director Eddie Muller. "If you think Hollywood noirs are about postwar cynicism and nihilism, wait till you see movies made by the countries that lost the war."

"It's eye-opening. You realize how fortunate America has been in that the war wasn't fought on our soil. When you look at 'Stray Dog' and 'Drunken Angel' (showing Sunday, filmed on the streets of Tokyo by Akira Kurosawa), you're looking at the losers of the war literally living in atomic fallout. Despite its foreign flavor - 16 of the 27 films are in a foreign language with English subtitles - there is an unmistakably American noir angst: gangsters (Britain's "Brighton Rock," starring Richard Attenborough, screening Wednesday), meticulously planned heists (France's "Rififi," Feb. 1), and even the deliciously titled "Never Open That Door" (next Thursday), a 1952 Argentine film based on the work of American crime author Cornell Woolrich ("Rear Window"). Source: www.sfgate.com

"Fatalism in American Film Noir," by University of Chicago professor and Hegel scholar Robert B. Pippin, constitutes (perhaps for the first time) a philosopher’s take on the genre. It centers in particular on agency, i.e., the extent to which all of us (and particularly film noir protagonists) are agents of their own actions. It’s hard to deny that noir protagonists exhibit a certain helplessness—as though their actions, or the motivation to act, are derived from outside themselves, whether the result of fate, obsession, or various socioeconomic factors.

Pippin cites Burt Lancaster in Criss Cross (1949) and The Killers (1946) as demonstrating this passive tendency, immobilized by his belief that he’s been dealt a hand over which he has little, if any, control. It is no coincidence that the question of agency, and film noir, came together at a particular moment in history. According to Pippin, these films show us “what it literally looks like, what it feels like, to live in a world where the experience of our own agency has begun to shift.” Pippin focuses on three works: Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947); Orson Welles’s The Lady From Shanghai (1948); and Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945).

Pippin points that in Out of the Past, we are shown events and, through flashbacks and a voice-over, we are told about those events. Consequently, there’s a gap between what we see happening and what Jeff Bailey, as he narrates the story in order to explain himself to Ann, maintains is happening.

Jeff is unable to move out of the past (in this case his relationship with femme fatale Kathie) due to his belief that—here Pippin quotes Oedipus—”I suffered those deeds more than I acted them.” Of course, Jeff and fellows like him aren’t thinkers, but improvisers who move from one event to another, trying to create a space for themselves in which to act, only to be stymied by their past. Trapped by what he does and who he is, Jeff seeks to become the agent of his actions, only to meet his death. Any room for self-generated action is limited, though the heroic-existential position is to act despite everything. As Pippin notes: “He ends up an agent, however restricted and compromised, in the only way one can be. He acts like one.” And then he dies.

Analyzing Scarlet Street, Pippin notes how Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson) seeks to break out of his own self-inscribed world, even relating it to the film’s final music, which morphs from a Christmas tune to Melancholy Baby—heard earlier when the needle becomes stuck (a metaphor for Chris’s life) to Jingle Bells. It’s as though Lang is counterposing the socioeconomic facts of Chris’s life with the Christian account of fate and redemption. Trapped by class and the limits of their self-understanding, these characters seem to embrace a narrowing of their future course of action.

“I had no choice” is the excuse they seek to employ. But these characters are neither free nor fated. They make choices, even if they are trapped by them. Says Pippin, “The danger of exaggerating our capacity for self-initiated action and so exaggerating both a burden of responsibility and a way of avoiding a good deal of blame is...as great as the danger of throwing up our hands and in a self-undermining way becoming the all-pervasive power of fate.”

Pippin concludes with a brief look at Double Indemnity (1944), in which egoist/predator Phyllis Dietrichson conspires with easy-going nihilist Walter Neff. But Pippin notes that it’s Barton Keyes who, as arbiter, defines the boundaries separating accident, fate, and intentionality. As a Socratic figure, Keyes doesn’t condemn Neff, but recognizes that he’s trapped. Since it’s Keyes’ job to realize such things, he, according to Pippin, must bear the burden of the narrative. In the closing moments of Double Indemnity, Phyllis suffers her fate because she finally acts as a free agent, choosing not to shoot Neff a second time, which leads to her death. Despite the fact that noir is often couched in nihilistic terms, there’s actually something heartening in reading an author who suggests that shared knowledge might ultimately lead to self-knowledge, and that ethics matter whether we are free agents or not. —Woody Haut for 'Noir City' magazine vol. 8 No. 2 (Fall 2013)

Based in 1940s Los Angeles, where a battle is raging between the gangs and the police, the story centres on Jon Bernthal's detective Joe Teague. Bernthal fits the bill as the mysterious lead who keeps his cards so close to his chest, we're still not entirely sure where he sits in the crime divide. Noir-lovers will get a thrill from Mob City, but it currently feels like it's lacking ambition when compared to its contemporary rivals. Source: www.digitalspy.co.uk

Los Angeles was "Mob City" in the 1940s, as the title of a new TV miniseries puts it. The second pair of episodes of the TNT crime show air tonight, continuing to track the real-life era of Bugsy Siegel, Mickey Cohen, and a deeply corrupt LAPD. "Mob City" is based on the 2010 book "L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City" by John Buntin. I reached Buntin in Nashville, where he lives with his family, and asked him to describe how organized crime and corruption came to dominate the City of Angels. Source: www.csmonitor.com

Siegel had never built a large establishment before, and it showed. The original budget for the new casino was $1.2 million. Siegel spent a million on plumbing alone. By the time the Flamingo opened on December 26, 1946, Siegel and his investors—who included the top leadership of the Syndicate—had plowed more than $5 million into the project. Rumors of outrageously expensive design changes started to spread. Some Syndicate chieftains became concerned that Bugsy’s new girlfriend, Mob moll Virginia Hill was stashing their money in Swiss bank accounts. Bugsy knew the boys could get tough. When he flew into Los Angeles early on the morning of June 20, 1947, violence was on his mind. After catching a few hours of sleep at the Beverly Hills mansion that Virginia Hill was renting (from Rudolph Valentino’s former manager), Bugsy headed over to associate Al Smiley’s apartment, where he met with Mickey Cohen.

On a typical workday, some 260,000 cars jammed downtown Los Angeles, making the intersection of Adams and Figueroa on the edge of downtown the busiest in the world, with more than double the traffic of its nearest rival, Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. Los Angeles also had one of the most extensive streetcar networks in the country. Together, the intraurban Yellow and interurban Red lines provided service over more than a thousand miles of rail and transported an average of 520,000 people into the downtown area every day. Total number of passenger trips in 1924: 110,000,000. “All of the talk was ‘boom,’ ‘dollars,’ ‘greatest in the world,’ ‘sure to double in price,’” marveled the author Hamlin Garland, who visited L.A. in 1923. High in the Hollywood Hills, a giant sign, each letter fifty feet tall and covered with four thousand lightbulbs, promoted one of Harry Chandler’s new developments, “Hollywoodland!” The “-land” later fell over, and the sign became the new city’s most distinctive symbol. -"L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City" by John Buntin

Happy Anniversary, Donna Reed!

Happy Anniversary, Donna Reed!!

Donna Reed and James Stewart in "It's A Wonderful Life" (1946) directed by Frank Capra

Capra told friends that Lu had convinced him to retire, but though his concern for her health was genuine, that was just another excuse. "I want to work! What do you think I'm dying for? I'm in great shape except that nobody wants me for a job. I want to direct —if people would let me alone to do my own picture." In those rare instances when anyone approached him with a "go" project in his later years, Capra would go away. Perhaps he could not be criticized for rejecting such a motley bunch of offers as a 1972 documentary on Frasier, the Sensuous Lion, an elderly resident of Southern California's Lion Country Safari who was renowned for his sexual exploits; a 1975 television special starring Lucille Ball, who had played a bit part in Broadway Bill; Mr. Kruegers Christmas (1980), a sentimental, mildly religious half-hour TV drama with James Stewart and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (Capra was uncomfortable because the Mormons were the producers);

and It's Still a Wonderful Life, a later-abandoned TV sequel project with Stewart and Donna Reed playing their characters in later years, originally proposed by Reed to the author of this book and offered by Universal in 1982 to Capra, who responded, "That's the kind of goddamn thing a producer would suggest. They can go fuck themselves."

Frank Capra and Robert Riskin "Magic Towns"

James Stewart confirmed that Robert Riskin did not direct any part of the film "Magic Town" (1947), and William Wellman told John F. Mariani in 1975, "Frank's just being kind about it. I was in on that thing from the beginning, and I wish I never started it. It stunk! Frank and Bob had a big argument about the picture and Riskin asked me to do it. I told him this is the kind of picture only Capra could do. It's not my kind of film. In my book Capra's the greatest, and I thought of giving Magic Town the Capra touch while shooting."

-Mary Peterman (Jane Wyman): The air becomes charged with electricity around desperate men.

-Lawrence 'Rip' Smith (James Stewart): "I've been searching for a town like this for years. You know, when I got off that train this morning, I said to myself 'This is it.' I've just walked through your town, folks, with its shade trees and its lovely parks. I stood before your impressive buildings mellowed with age, and I said to myself 'Here is a sturdy challenge to the evils of the modern era.' I watched your people on the street, and I felt their vitality and their sense of security. Your children are happy. They're happy. You can see it in their dear little faces, and hear it in their wholesome talk. There's beauty here. It's almost indescribable. You're used to it, you're all a part of it, you take it for granted. But to me, it's a hope and a dream of a lifetime. I too want to become a part of it. Please don't change it."

With Riskin unavailable for Liberty Films, Capra went to Leo McCarey, the producer-director whose 'Going My Way' had won the Oscar as best picture of 1944 and whose Rainbow Productions was making a sequel for RKO, The Bells of St. Mary's. McCarey was formally offered a Liberty partnership on May 7, 1945.

When he explained in a 1968 public appearance why he did not want to film the first script RKO had commissioned for The Greatest Gift —the one by Dalton Trumbo— Capra gave a simple reason that spoke volumes: Trumbo's script "was about politics." Already by 1946, politics for Capra had become a dirty word. Trumbo's George is a politician who rises from an idealistic state assemblyman to a cynical congressman contemptuous of the people he represents. He goes to the bridge to attempt suicide after losing a race for governor. The angel shows him Bedford Falls as it would have been not if he had never been born but as it would have been if he had gone into business instead of politics. Bedford Falls in Trumbo's nightmare sequence has changed from an idealized small town to a foul, polluted, overindustrialized modern city: there is no Potter to serve as George's nemesis, for George, in effect, serves as his own Potter—a ruthless modern businessman who carelessly spoils the town for his own profit.

Capra's postwar regression was manifested in his depiction of sexual politics in Bedford Falls. The fact that Donna Reed's Mary Bailey is a housewife and mother, unlike the Jean Arthur and Barbara Stanwyck single professional women in the Capra-Riskin films, reflects the prevailing mood of postwar America, in which women were being pressured to give their jobs back to returning servicemen and stay home raising children.

Yet in Wonderful Life, Mary's yearning for marriage, home, and family is portrayed with considerable ambivalence by Capra in the deeply moving telephone scene with Mary, (which Capra considered "one of the best scenes I've ever put on the screen"). George blames his wife and children for their role in keeping him in Bedford Falls and curbing his ambitions to be an architect and city planner; what finally drives him to attempt suicide is Mary's turning on him after his frightening outburst in the living room in which he smashes his models of a bridge and skyscraper. Capra's reaffirmation of family and small-town values at the end is accomplished, as critic Robin Wood put it, "with full acknowledgment of the suppressions on which it depends and consequently, of its precariousness."

Capra's unborn sequence is a powerful vision of despair—though labeled a "fantasy," the sequence was shot in the fashionable film noir style, and it much more closely resembles the reality of 1946 than the rest of the film—but politically it is Capra's ultimate cop-out, his way of washing his hands of the modern world and the clearest expression of how much his social optimism depended on Riskin (whose absence is felt in the unborn sequence just as strongly as George Bailey's) and how utterly distrustful Capra had become of the American public. William S. Pechter noted that the supernatural resolution of Wonderful Life exposes the "fatal weakness" of Capra's work, his tendency to resolve impossible social dilemmas with "strangely perfunctory" happy endings that are imposed "deforce majeure... Yet, for those who can accept the realities of George Bailey's situation and do not believe in angels the film ends, in effect, with the hero's suicide. Capra's desperation is his final honesty. It ruthlessly exposes his own affirmation as pretense."

Jean Arthur explained in 1987: "I am awfully angry when he always says that [It's a Wonderful Life] his favorite picture. I think Stewart did a great job, it was a great part, but I wouldn't have liked to have been that girl, I didn't think she had anything to do. It was colorless. You didn't have a chance to be anything." Capra's thoughts went to his old flame, Ginger Rogers, but she also turned down the film because "the woman's role was such a bland character." He thought of Olivia de Havilland, Martha Scott, and Ann Dvorak.

Then he saw Donna Reed in an MGM film. It probably was They Were Expendable; Reed gave a strong and luminous performance as a Navy nurse. She was only twenty-four when she made It's A Wonderful Life, but her fresh Iowa beauty made her an ideal match with Stewart.

Capra was fed up with independence. "It was the most gentlemanly way of going broke, and the fastest way, anybody ever thought of," he told Richard Schickel in 1971. "We didn't have enough capital, so we decided to sell Liberty Films, which was a very, very hopeless thing to do. My partners did not want to sell. But I got cold feet, and I'm the one who insisted that we sell. And I think that probably affected my picture-making forever afterward." By the spring of 1950, after almost a year of forced inactivity, he was beginning to despair of feature filmmaking altogether, telling the press that he was "gloomy about his future projects" and that he didn't know "where ideas are coming from that will seem worthwhile to him and safe to the studio."

During the shooting of "Here Comes the Groom," he told Alexis Smith, whose playing of Wilbur's spinster cousin Winifred is one of its few delights, that he did not want to make any more movies because "It isn't fun anymore." "I was shocked," she remembered. "I thought he was kidding at first, he seemed to be enjoying himself so much on the set, but he said, 'No, I'm serious. I don't mean it isn't fun here, I mean the pressures that come from the schedule and from money.' That drove him crazy. He said he wasn't used to the banks moving into a position of creative control. This was before the drastic changes in the industry became apparent, and he was probably ahead of a lot of people in realizing what was happening. But I remember being very disturbed by it, because I didn't think Frank Capra should just walk away from it."

The fact that "a large part" of the public "seem[ed] to have more or less forgotten" Capra and Stewart during the war (as Variety observed after Wonderful Life opened weakly) should have been only a temporary setback for Capra. Not only Stewart but also Capra's fellow directors who had spent the war in uniform—Ford, Huston, Wyler, Stevens—were, in time, able to regain their former prominence in the industry. Hollywood's lack of enthusiasm for Capra on his return from service stemmed from an accumulation of factors unique to Capra: it was a reflection on his faltering box-office track record and his reputation for extravagance; a delayed backlash against his rebellious posture toward studio control before the war, both in his own career and on behalf of the Screen Directors Guild; and, perhaps, a resentment of his arrogance toward Hollywood during his Army years, such as his blast from London at Hollywood for "embarrassing" the troops with "flag-waving" war movies. Capra continued to talk poor mouth to the press, telling The Washington Post in 1972, "I wasn't really wise financially — I'm the poorest director you ever saw."