Frank Capra

Francesco Rosario Capra was born on May 18, 1897, in Bisacquino, a small hill town in the province of Palermo, Sicily, then part of the Kingdom of Italy ^[1]. His parents, Salvatore Capra and Rosaria Nicolosi, were peasant farmers with little formal education. In 1903 the family sailed to the United States in steerage aboard the steamship Germania, a thirteen-day crossing that the director recalled for the rest of his life as a defining ordeal. They settled in Los Angeles, where an older son had already established himself ^[1].

The Capras were poor, and young Frank sold newspapers, played banjo in local clubs, and took whatever odd jobs he could find while attending school. Unlike his siblings, he insisted on continuing his education past the elementary grades, a decision his family initially resisted. He graduated from Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles and then enrolled at the Throop College of Technology, the school that later became the California Institute of Technology, earning a degree in chemical engineering in 1918 ^[2].

Engineering work proved scarce after his graduation. Capra enlisted in the United States Army near the end of the First World War, teaching mathematics to artillery officers, and became a naturalized American citizen in 1920 ^[1]. The years that followed were unsettled. He drifted through the West, selling books and mining stocks door to door, an experience that later informed the fast-talking salesmen and hustlers who populate his films.

Capra entered the movie business almost by accident. In 1921 he talked his way into directing a one-reel adaptation of a Rudyard Kipling poem, Fultah Fisher's Boarding House, for a small San Francisco producer, despite having almost no experience behind a camera ^[2]. He then worked his way up methodically, taking jobs as a film lab assistant, prop man, editor, and gag writer, determined to learn every stage of production.

His apprenticeship in comedy came at the Hal Roach and Mack Sennett studios, where he wrote gags for the Our Gang shorts and for the comedian Harry Langdon. Capra directed two of Langdon's best-regarded features, The Strong Man in 1926 and Long Pants in 1927, before the two men fell out and Langdon fired him ^[3]. The break turned out to be fortunate. In 1928 Capra signed with Columbia Pictures, then a minor studio on Hollywood's Poverty Row run by the famously abrasive Harry Cohn.

At Columbia, Capra worked at a furious pace, directing films in nearly every genre and helping to lift the studio into the ranks of the majors. His 1931 picture Dirty Money, released as Platinum Blonde, and the 1932 drama American Madness, about a run on a bank during the Depression, showed a director finding his voice: quick dialogue, sympathy for working people, and suspicion of concentrated wealth ^[3]. The 1933 film The Bitter Tea of General Yen, an atmospheric drama set during the Chinese civil war, opened the newly built Radio City Music Hall and demonstrated his range beyond comedy.

The film that changed everything was It Happened One Night, released in 1934. A romantic comedy about a runaway heiress and a brash reporter, played by Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, it became the first film to sweep the five major Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adaptation ^[4]. No film matched the feat until One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1975. The victory made Columbia a major studio and made Capra the most sought-after director in Hollywood.

Over the next several years he consolidated that position with remarkable consistency. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), the story of a small-town tuba player who inherits a fortune and tries to give it away, brought him a second Best Director Oscar. You Can't Take It with You (1938), adapted from the Kaufman and Hart stage comedy, won him a third, along with Best Picture ^[4]. Three directing Oscars in five years remains one of the most concentrated runs of recognition in Academy history, and it is central to any account of Frank Capra achievements. He also served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1935 to 1939, steering it through a period of labor conflict, and later led the Screen Directors Guild ^[2].

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), starring James Stewart as an idealistic young senator battling a corrupt political machine, drew protests from some Washington politicians who considered it an insult to the Senate, yet it became one of the most celebrated American political films ever made ^[5]. During the Second World War, Capra rejoined the Army as a major and supervised the Why We Fight series, seven documentary films explaining the war to American soldiers and the public. The first of them, Prelude to War, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, and Capra received the Distinguished Service Medal for the project ^[5].

After the war he co-founded the independent company Liberty Films and directed It's a Wonderful Life (1946), with Stewart as George Bailey, a small-town banker rescued from despair by a guardian angel. The film performed modestly at the box office and Liberty Films soon folded, but decades of television broadcasts turned it into perhaps the most beloved Christmas film in the United States. The American Film Institute later ranked it among the greatest American movies ever made, and in 1990 the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in the Registry's second year ^[6].

Capra married the actress Helen Howell in 1923; the marriage was troubled and ended in divorce in 1928 ^[2]. In 1932 he married Lucille Warner Reyburn, known as Lu, and the marriage lasted until her death in 1984. The couple had four children, one of whom, John, died in infancy after surgery. Their son Frank Capra Jr. became a film producer and later president of the EUE Screen Gems studios in North Carolina, and grandson Frank Capra III worked as an assistant director ^[7].

Away from the studio, Capra was an enthusiastic outdoorsman who fished, hunted, and collected rare books and guitars. From the 1930s onward he kept a ranch near Fallbrook in northern San Diego County, where he grew avocados and olives, and he spent his final years in the desert community of La Quinta, California ^[7]. His scientific training never left him: in the 1950s he wrote and produced a series of television science documentaries for Bell Telephone, including Our Mr. Sun and Hemo the Magnificent, which were shown in American classrooms for decades ^[2].

Politically Capra was difficult to categorize. A registered Republican for much of his life, he made films that attacked bankers, press barons, and machine politicians with a fervor that led some contemporaries to read them as New Deal populism. During the postwar Red Scare he faced questions about his associations with left-leaning screenwriters such as Robert Riskin's colleagues Sidney Buchman and Michael Wilson, an episode that biographers argue deepened his caution in the 1950s ^[3].

Capra's postwar career never recovered the momentum of the 1930s. State of the Union (1948), a political drama with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, was well received, but a pair of Bing Crosby vehicles at Paramount, Riding High (1950) and Here Comes the Groom (1951), felt routine by his own admission. He found the new studio economics, with powerful stars and agents dictating terms, incompatible with the control he had enjoyed at Columbia ^[3].

He returned to features with A Hole in the Head (1959), starring Frank Sinatra, which introduced the Oscar-winning song High Hopes, and closed his directing career with Pocketful of Miracles (1961), a remake of his own 1933 film Lady for a Day ^[2]. In 1971 he published an autobiography, The Name Above the Title, which became a bestseller and helped revive interest in his work among a new generation of film students. The book burnished his image as the sole author of his films, a claim later biographers, notably Joseph McBride, contested by documenting the contributions of screenwriter Robert Riskin and others ^[3].

Honors accumulated in his final decades. The American Film Institute presented him with its Life Achievement Award in 1982, and he received the National Medal of Arts from President Ronald Reagan in 1986 ^[6]. After a series of strokes, Frank Capra died in his sleep of a heart attack at his home in La Quinta on September 3, 1991, at the age of 94 ^[7]. He was buried at Coachella Valley Public Cemetery in Coachella, California.

Few directors have given their name to an adjective. Capraesque entered the critical vocabulary to describe stories in which an ordinary, decent individual confronts entrenched power and prevails through stubborn integrity, usually with the help of a community that rediscovers its own conscience. Admirers see in that formula a genuine democratic faith; skeptics have long dismissed it as Capra-corn, a charge the director wore with some pride ^[5]. Any Frank Capra biography has to reckon with both readings, because the films themselves are darker and more anxious than their reputation suggests: George Bailey stands on a bridge contemplating suicide, and Mr. Smith is nearly destroyed by the institutions he reveres.

His technical influence was equally real. Capra pushed for overlapping dialogue, faster pacing, and location shooting at a time when many studio films remained stagebound, and his handling of James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, and Jean Arthur shaped their screen personas ^[4]. Six of his films, including It Happened One Night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and It's a Wonderful Life, have been added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant ^[6].

The basic Frank Capra facts, an immigrant childhood, a Caltech engineering degree, three directing Oscars, wartime service, and a Christmas classic that failed on release, sketch a career that mirrored the country he adopted. Filmmakers from Steven Spielberg to the makers of contemporary political comedies continue to borrow his structures, and every December television audiences revisit Bedford Falls. For a man who arrived in America unable to speak English, that endurance is the achievement that outlasts all the statuettes ^[6].