An Immigrant Whose Embrace of the American Dream in Film Helped Make Hollywood’s Golden Age Golden
By Gregory N. Joseph
“YOU KNOW, ONE LITTLE GUY can make an awful lot of difference in this world,” Frank Capra told me in 1983 as we had sat down for dinner with Theodor Geisel, known to the world as the iconic children’s author “Dr. Seuss.”
It was an encomium that easily could have referred to either of these men.
But that’s getting ahead of the story.
One of my jobs at the large California newspaper where I once worked was to review books about show business, often including an interview with the subject or author — sometimes one and the same for the likes of autobiographies or “as told to” ghostwritten works.
There were scads of publications about “the business” told from a first-person perspective, but none came close to one in particular that I encountered — “The Name Above the Title,” Capra’s 1971 autobiography — in fleshing out what the movie business is like at its highest levels from both a personal and professional standpoint.
This is important, revealing, and untterly fascinating because Capra was that rare 20th-century artist whose name became an adjective.
Remembered now as the Oscar-winning director of such Golden Age-defining film classics as “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Mr. Smith Goes Goes to Washington,” “It Happened One Night,” “You Can’t Take It With You,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “Meet John Doe,” “Arsenic and Old Lace” and “Lost Horizon,” he was synonymous with Hollywood in his time.
(His impact across the cultural spectrum, in and out of Hollywood, was driven home for me in a most personal way. Years after my parents had passed away, I discovered a small newspaper clipping wedged in their earliest family scrapbook — the only newspaper clipping, in fact, besides their wedding announcement that was included in the album— reporting that my father, pictured in his best suit at age 24 grinning ear to ear, had won the local “Meet John Doe” contest promoting Capra’s film of the same name; the reward was $25 and two tickets to the movie, giving my dad a chance to take mom, whom he was then courting, out on the town. It was only then that I recalled as a child having heard him proudly recall the whole incident, moment for moment, and what it meant to him.)
But many don’t realize now how hugely Capra was involved in the evolution of Hollywood itself, a behind-the-scenes force when he was at the top of his game in the industry.
In addition to winning three Academy Awards for Best Director out of six nominations and scoring three other Oscar wins from nine nominations in other categories (he was nominated seven times for Outstanding Production/Best Picture), he served as the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and headed the Directors Guild of America.
During World War II, a desperate U.S. government turned to him to make the “Why We Fight” series of seven propaganda films, a direct response to German director Leni Riefenstahl’s devastatingly effective works “Triumph of the Will,” a visually stunning, devilishly manipulative black-and-white film about the Nazi Party’s 1934 rally in Nuremberg, and “Olympia,” about the 1936 Berlin Olympics — influential movies still being studied for their aesthetic brilliance despite their nefarious underpinnings. Capra’s series more than met the challenge, and in its own right is regarded as an historic cinematic masterwork of the genre; his “Prelude to War,” the first installment, won the 1942 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
For his efforts, Capra, who served in the Army Signal Corps during the conflict, the U.S. rewarded him with the Legion of Merit in 1943 and the Distinguished Service Medal in 1945. In 1975, he was given the Golden Anchor Award by the U.S. Naval reserve Combat Group for his Naval photography and production of those films during the war.
Capra’s other honors included the George Eastman Award from the George Eastman House in 1957 for distinguished contributions to the art of film, “Frank Capra Day” in Los Angeles on May 12, 1962 (the first time in Hollywood history that the city of Los Angeles officially recognized a creative talent), the Distinguished Alumni Award in 1966 from his alma mater the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California (where years earlier, when it was called the Throop Polytechnic Institute, he had studied chemical engineering), and in 1972, the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement.
During the ceremonies in Los Angeles, it was announced he had received an honorary Order of the British Empire (OBE) on the recommendation of Winston Churchill.
Capra either knew or worked with virtually all the top names from the silent film era through Hollywood’s Golden Age — from Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Lionel Barrymore, Bette Davis, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck and Jean Arthur. To name just a few.
I had extensive interviews with Capra three times, the first just after his autobiography was published when he paid a day-long visit to Caltech, then in 1983 to discuss “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939) to coincide with a screening of that film, and the same year, over dinner with him and Geisel when they reunited decades after they worked together on propaganda films for the U.S. government during World War II, an experience that introduced Geisel to the film medium.
Frank Russell Capra was born Francesco Rosario Capra on May 18, 1897, in Bisacquino, a village near Palermo, Sicily, Italy, the youngest of seven children of fruit grower Salvatore Capra and the former Rosaria Nicolosi.
In 1903, when he was five years old, the family emigrated to the United States, a hardscrabble journey that took 13 days in the steerage compartment of a steamship, an ordeal that Capra later described as “degrading” and “miserable.”
The brood settled on Los Angeles’ tough east side, which Capra referred to as “a ghetto” at the time, now known as Lincoln Heights.
While Capra’s father toiled as a fruit picker, Capra sold newspapers after school for a decade until graduating from high school. Then, at his parents’ urging, he enrolled in college — Caltech — paying for his education through a series of odd jobs ranging from playing banjo at nightclubs to waiting tables. He graduated in 1918, crediting the college experience with transforming him from “an alley rat” to a cultured human being.
During World War I, after graduating from Caltech, Capra, who had completed ROTC in college, was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, where he taught mathematics to artillerymen at Fort Point, San Francisco. After contracting the Spanish flu, he was medically discharged and returned home, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1920. His father had died in the accident during the war, and he lived with his mother and siblings for a while, but unable to find work even though he was the only family member with a college education, he eventually moved out, living in flophouses and hopping freight trains, at one point traveling the western United States and taking a series of jobs. One of those was as a movie extra.
At age 24, he directed a documentary short film about a visiting Italian naval vessel to San Francisco. At 25, while employed selling books by philosopher Elbert Hubbard, he noticed a newspaper article about a movie studio opening in San Francisco. He contacted studio officials, implying that he had moved to the Bay Area from Hollywood, falsely saying he had worked in the film industry (in actuality, the only film experience he had came while he was in high school). He was hired — and directed a one-reel silent film.
After that, he moved to another small film studio in San Francisco, eventually receiving an offer from producer Harry Cohn at his new studio in Los Angeles. Then came a job as a gag writer for Hal Roach’s “Our Gang” series, and work for slapstick producer Mack Sennett, where he wrote scripts for comedian Harry Langdon. When Langdon left Sennett for feature movies at First National Studios, he took along Capra, where together they made a trio of successful films that elevated Langdon’s status as a film comedian to be reckoned with.
Eventually they split, and Capra returned to Cohn’s studio, which by now had been christened Columbia Pictures, where he produced short films, and eventually, features. His engineering background came in handy as he more readily adapted to the new sound technology than so many others. Capra, especially, understood that sound in movies was not a passing craze, and film professionals on his productions quickly learned that Capra really knew what he was doing.
Capra eventually directed some 20 films for Cohn’s Columbia Pictures, nine movies alone in his first year, which Cohn later recognized as the period when films made by his studio — which had largely identified as part of Hollywood’s ragamuffin “Poverty Row” — were now being recognized for their quality.
The first sound film Capra directed, “The Younger Generation” in 1929, was about a Jewish immigrant who grows up in the ghetto of New York. The influence of Capra’s own life in the film was unmistakable, although he would later claim otherwise. Yet the film undeniably set the tone for his future films, and the concept of rising above one’s circumstances while maintaining dignity and hope became a staple of his work.
When I first met Capra, during his visit to Caltech, he spent a significant amount of time with the school’s nascent film club, where students anxiously screened a half dozen or so silent eight-millimeter shorts for him in what amounted to a tiny closet of a room on campus.
The films were basic but clever and entertaining, woven by these brightest of the bright young minds out of a sheer fascination with film. In these young people, Capra saw himself.
Capra, visibly moved by their affection for movies, especially his own, at one point looked at them and intoned, his voice catching as he held a bit of celluloid up to the light, “You know, I love film. I love everything about it. I even love the way it feels in my hands.”
What I saw and experienced that day with this titan of cinema, and again years later when I joined him and Geisel for their “reunion dinner,” matched the person I discovered on the pages of his autobiography and in his films. He was as I had hoped he would be.
In the book, his movies — and in person — he was unashamed to wear his emotions on his sleeve. Despite being labeled a sentimentalist, which brought his productions the critical nickname “Capra-corn,” he was strong and unyielding in his optimism and beliefs.
Watch his movies still, and for a fascinating insight into the history of the business from a filmmaker whose influence is still being felt to this day, you can’t do much better than to read “The Name Above the Title.” The industry may have evolved dramatically by leaps and bounds technologically, but its heart and soul remain intrinsically unchanged.
His is the quintessentially inspiring story of an immigrant who fell unabashedly in love with his adopted country.
America continues to love him back, as witness the countless showings of his classics by new generations who find his stories especially compelling at a time when society seems hopelessly divided, a condition Capra would have considered a challenge but never an inevitability.
The legacy of Frank Capra, who died on Sept. 3, 1991, at the age of 94, remains as clear and strong as ever: “One little guy can make an awful lot of difference in this world.” Of that, he was his own best example.
