PROBABLY no film maker ever dominated an era the way Frank Capra dominated his. During the 1930's, at the peak of his powers and his success, he won three Academy Awards and was Hollywood's most highly paid director. He also served as president of both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Screen Directors Guild. Time magazine put him on its cover. The Philip Morris Company used him to peddle cigarettes. ("I smoke quite a lot when directing a picture," he was paid to say. "I like to smoke Philip Morris because of their throat ease, so noticeable when one's voice is important.") The film critic for London's Daily Express thought that Capra's political influence was potentially as great as Franklin D. Roosevelt's. And Capra was one of those rare Americans whose name became not only a household word but an adjective as well.
Audiences flocked to see "Capraesque" movies like "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and "Meet John Doe" -- parables of ordinary people forced to stand up against the greed and corruption of the rich and powerful. Those dramatic comedies, with their depictions of hardship, their "common man" heroes (usually Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper) and their celebrations of small-town virtues, gave expression to a country struggling to climb out of the Depression; they have, ever since their release, been identified with Roosevelt and the New Deal. Yet it is one of the great surprises of Joseph McBride's masterly, comprehensive and frequently surprising biography, "Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success," that the man who seemed to put the spirit of the New Deal on the screen was, in reality, a closet reactionary and a dogged Roosevelt hater.
Frank Capra managed to fool just about everyone; even his wife was unsure of his political affiliations. Longtime co-workers who were Democrats assumed he shared their political convictions. Katharine Hepburn, who starred in his 1948 picture "State of the Union," thought him "quite liberal"; others applied the term "radical" to him. And why shouldn't they have, when Variety was calling a sympathetic character in "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" "quasi-communistic" and The Saturday Evening Post was reporting that in the Soviet Union Capra was "hailed as a comrade"? But as Mr. McBride, the author of previous books on Howard Hawks, John Ford and Orson Welles, tells us, Capra was a lifelong Republican who never once voted for Roosevelt. He was an admirer of Franco and Mussolini. In later years, during the McCarthy period, he served as a secret F.B.I. informer.
In part, the misperception was due to Capra's writers, who generally ranged from New Deal Democrats to card-carrying Communists. One of Capra's great strengths as a director in the 1930's was his ability to work with anyone who had something to contribute to his pictures, even those who were far to his left. He was also enough of a popular entertainer to cater to his audiences; he understood that during the Depression the most hissable villains were grasping bankers and businessmen.
But ultimately the misunderstanding over Capra's politics seems to be a case of people seeing what they wanted to see. In his analysis of "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," Mr. McBride points out that the Gary Cooper character, far from being some sort of socialist or New Deal liberal, was, if anything, an "enlightened plutocrat" whose philosophy of voluntary giving was little different from that of Republican businessmen opposed to the New Deal; and he shrewdly notes that while Deeds got into trouble for trying to distribute most of the $20 million he inherited to desperate farmers, he was still planning to keep $2 million for himself.
A plutocrat less enlightened than Deeds, Capra derived his conservative politics from his battles to reach the top. His was a Horatio Alger story, full of pluck and luck, but in the end, as Mr. McBride vividly demonstrates, more chilling than inspiring. Capra was born in Sicily in 1897 and came to the United States with his family in 1903. He was raised in Los Angeles, where his father was a laborer and farmhand, and he spent a lifetime escaping from his background and family. While still in grammar school, Capra changed his middle name from Rosario to Russell -- a name that he said "didn't smell of the ghetto." He was determined to go to college despite his family's peasant distrust of learning ("Those people with education can't make a living," his brother-in-law, a fruit peddler, told him). Through a combination of loans, odd jobs and some help from home, he succeeded in graduating in 1918 from the Throop College of Technology (later the California Institute of Technology).
THE movie business was an obvious avenue for an ambitious young Californian, and within a few years Capra was writing gags for the Our Gang series and the comedian Harry Langdon. In 1926 he directed his first feature, "The Strong Man," starring Langdon. A year later he moved to up-and-coming Columbia Pictures, beginning a productive 12-year association with the studio's equally ambitious head, the feared and fearsome Harry Cohn. By the early 1930's Capra was Columbia's most successful director, earning huge salaries from the Depression-resistant movie industry for action-adventure films with names like "Submarine," "Flight" and "Dirigible." As the economy collapsed around his countrymen, the self-made Capra, Mr. McBride says, "could see in himself the living proof of . . . faith in the American system."
Still, his greatest triumphs were ahead of him. In 1931 he met the playwright Robert Riskin and started a collaboration that ran through nine screenplays and included the bulk of his most memorable movies. With Riskin, a Roosevelt Democrat, giving edge to Capra's natural sentimentality, the director hammered out a formula that took his films to another level, turning him from a successful studio hack into the kind of person Time puts on its cover and The New Yorker writes profiles of. His peers recognized his transformation by voting his picture "It Happened One Night" the best film of 1934 and awarding him his first Oscar for direction. (Riskin also won for best screenplay, and the two leads, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, won for best actor and best actress, a sweep of the five top prizes that would not be duplicated until "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" in 1976.) Capra won another Oscar two years later for "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," directed from another Riskin script, and yet again in 1939 for Riskin's adaptation of the George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart play "You Can't Take It With You." Even without Riskin, Capra stayed with the formula to make "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" in 1939 and "It's a Wonderful Life" in 1946
IT is hard to believe that anyone who reads "Frank Capra" will ever be able to watch these movies in quite the same way again. Instead of lively, socially conscious entertainments, one is apt to see the idealized fancies of an insecure immigrant parading his Americanism across the screen, or the contradictions of a parvenu who was contemptuous of the masses yet eager to please them. The platitudes in the films -- their persistent prating about human kindness and loving thy neighbor -- are likely to be more annoying than before, the melodrama at their heart more obtrusive. Isn't "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" really about the conflict between an overaged Boy Scout and an ogre who beats up little children? Does it have anything to do with politics at all?
Yet among the elements that make this book so rich is its intertwining of the bad and the good, so that while we may be appalled at the way Capra turned his back on his parents, we can at the same time admire his sheer determination to make something of himself in the face of huge obstacles. Similarly, if the themes that once provided Capra's films with their resonance no longer hold up, other qualities in them emerge clearer than ever: Capra's narrative strengths, his skill with ensembles, his facility for wringing every bit of juice out of a scene, his attention to (and joy in) his secondary characters. By filling his pictures with an assortment of kooks and clowns, Capra looked forward a few years to Preston Sturges, and backward to Charles Dickens. Although Mr. McBride does not say enough about these particular virtues, he makes certain that we will never forget another of Capra's special talents: his extraordinary ability to bring out the best in his actors.
Mr. McBride shows that Capra almost singlehandedly created a pantheon of screen idols. He established Jean Harlow as a star. He turned Clark Gable into a sex symbol. He highlighted Barbara Stanwyck's special combination of grittiness and vulnerability, making her an overnight sensation. He coaxed Gary Cooper into two of his finest performances, as Longfellow Deeds and John Doe. He changed Jean Arthur from an anxiety-ridden contract player into a feisty leading lady. He molded Jimmy Stewart into Jimmy Stewart. His actors understood what he did for them. "I just had complete confidence in Frank Capra," Mr. Stewart said. "I always had, from the very first day I worked with him. . . . I just hung on every word Frank Capra said."
Jimmy Stewart had cause to be doubly grateful to Capra. Following his military service as a pilot in World War II, the actor's future was in doubt, and he was thinking of quitting Hollywood. Capra, just back from the Army, where he had produced a celebrated series of propaganda films called "Why We Fight," revived Mr. Stewart's career by casting him in "It's a Wonderful Life." It was Capra's first postwar movie. It was also the last significant picture he directed -- and while it may now be Capra's most popular movie, television's very own Christmas chestnut, it was, Mr. McBride tells us, a box-office disappointment at the time of its release.
Though Capra's film making stretched into the 1960's, the remainder of his work consisted of formulaic exercises and remakes of earlier films, banal star vehicles and clinkers pure and simple. His was, says Mr. McBride, "the most precipitous decline of any American film maker since D. W. Griffith."
One can glean a host of reasons for the collapse from the last 150 pages of Mr. McBride's text. Capra himself blamed Hollywood's lower budgets and standards. Jimmy Stewart thought the problem was the change in the industry after the big studios lost power. Another co-worker noted that Capra seemed more anxious after World War II. Certainly he was more closed-minded, no longer the sounding board for his colleagues' ideas that he had been in the 30's. Instead of collaborating with his writers, now he was interested in grabbing most of the credit for himself.
One critic, William S. Pechter, believed that Capra had nothing more to say in his films. "It's a Wonderful Life," he argued, should logically have ended with the hero's suicide; the intervention of a guardian angel was a mask for Capra's deep pessimism about his fellow Americans, and revealed his intellectual bankruptcy. Mr. McBride talks about a lack of courage, especially after the Red scare of the late 40's and early 50's took hold. Any and all of these explanations can serve, but together they add up to the fact that Capra was very much a man of his time and the times had passed him by.
Mr. McBride's account of the last years is grueling and terribly sad. Capra found it increasingly difficult to secure work. He managed to direct only three features in the 1950's, and his last film was the egregious "Pocketful of Miracles" in 1961, a remake of his 1933 success "Lady for a Day." One sign of Capra's desperation in these years was his offer to direct an episode of the television show "The Addams Family." Another was his idea for a movie on the life of St. Paul -- starring Frank Sinatra. He suffered from debilitating headaches and was often suicidal. Though his first wife and many of his closest collaborators, including Harry Cohn and Robert Riskin, were Jewish, he now began blaming the Jews for his troubles. He finally retired from film making in 1966 and devoted the next several years to writing his autobiography. "The Name Above the Title" was published in 1971, and appears to have been a lie practically from beginning to end. "Frank Capra" is in one sense a 768-page corrective to the false impressions it gave.
Amazingly, Capra hung on for another two decades. When he died last year at the age of 94, he had been out of the movie business for 25 years. He had not made a major motion picture for 45 years. No doubt many people who saw his obituary were taken aback, believing he had died long before. The truth is, he had.
Joseph McBride was on an assignment for Variety when he first met Frank Capra in 1975 at a country club near Palm Springs, Calif. The director, he recalled, "was telling me how he hated rich people. And right in the middle a man from the country club came over and said, 'Frank, here are the pictures of you playing golf with President Ford,' and Capra said, 'Ah, wonderful.' "
Capra looked at the photographs for a moment and then asked, "Where was I? Oh yeah, I was telling you that I've always had a hatred of rich people," Mr. McBride said by telephone from his home in Los Angeles. "Then he just continued, without losing a beat. That illuminated something for me about Capra: there was a contradiction between the image and the man."
In 1982, Mr. McBride wrote a celebration of that image, the television script for "The American Film Institute Salute to Frank Capra." During that assignment, he discovered more contradictions in the Capra myth. In 1984 he started working on "Frank Capra," his 11th book.
Capra was happy to help, the 44-year-old Mr. McBride said. "I'm very grateful to him." But the director's stroke in 1985 made further cooperation impossible.
Some members of Capra's family and film crew also cooperated. They "clearly felt very hurt by his autobiography," Mr. McBride recounted, "and they were more than willing to open up and tell me anything that I needed to know. If he had only given people more credit, they would have been better disposed toward him."
Nonetheless, Mr. McBride said, "I still think he's a great director, and I still respond to the same things in his films -- the energy and the idealism mixed with disillusionment." -- JOSEPH A. CINCOTTI
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