Hollywood Storyteller: Frank Capra
FRANK CAPRA is one the great Hollywood directors of the 1930’s and ‘40’s. Hired by Columbia Pictures in 1928, Capra directed five classic films back to back: “It Happened One Night” (1934); “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” (1936) “Lost Horizon” (1937); You Can’t Take It With You” (1938) and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939). Capra worked well with liberal screenwriters Robert Riskin and Sidney Buchman, taking their populist material, casting gifted actors, and giving the stories sparkle and humor.
He was born as Francesco Capra, in Bisaquino, Sicily, in 1897. His mother Saridda had lost the child born before Francesco, and would lose the child born after him. She expected Francesco to die, too. The delivery was grueling, and her baby came into the world dehydrated and weak. Saridda’s father arrived, and commanded: “You take care of that child. He’s going to be known all over the world.”
Francesco’s father Salvatore (“Turiddu”) was a dreamer who loved to sing, swap jokes and tell stories from the Bible and Italian folklore. He had a knack for growing things, but didn’t work harder than he had to. He and his four brothers hosted parties and made music. Saridda, of a higher social class, was frustrated by her husband’s poverty. Her nagging only made him retreat further into the outdoors, and to his jokes, songs and stories. Saridda was an excellent weaver and cook, expert at handling what little money they had. But she had a blistering tongue.
One day around 1898, Francesco’s older brother, Benedetto, went off with the family flock. The sheep returned that day; Benedetto did not. Capra’s parents were frantic, then deeply sad. They prayed that their son was alive somewhere — but assumed he was dead. Then around 1902 came a letter to Mr. Salvatore Capra, from Benedetto, which the local priest was summoned to read aloud to the family. Francesco’s great joy that day that his brother was alive was mixed with anger and shame that his parents couldn’t read the letter without help.
The letter from Benedetto said he was in Los Angeles, California, in the United States, and now called himself “Ben.” He urged his whole family to move to Los Angeles, and said if they did not, they would never see him again. Turiddu hated to leave Sicily but Saridda wanted to see her son, and thought her husband might be less lazy in the United States. Turiddu, Saridda, and four of their children rode steerage for 23 miserable days, seasick almost all the way, never able to bathe or change their clothes. Ben greeted them with hugs in Los Angeles.
They bought a home and moved into working-class Lincoln Heights. There were many other Italian immigrants there, the weather was good, and the streets were safe. Saridda Capra worked 10 hours a day in an olive plant, slapping labels on cans that passed by on chain belts, for 10 dollars a week. Standing all day, her feet blistered. Her husband’s job was even harder, at a glass factory. One of Frank’s chores as a boy was to bring lunch to his father, and he never forgot that factory. It was a kind of hell on earth: fiery furnaces roaring, blinding heat, gleaming, half-naked bodies straining to carry bottles.
But California, the Capras believed, would be better for their children. So they worked and suffered, and made home and family the center of their lives. Low pay and anti-Italian slurs they tried to ignore. The Capra house was modest but clean and in good repair, surrounded by a white picket fence. Turiddu planted a pepper tree in the yard, with branches easy to climb.
Francesco was a proud, gifted child stung by the anti-Italian slurs. He changed his name to “Frank.” His brothers and sisters plunged into working. Making a lot of money or being famous didn’t concern them; finding a job and sharing love and money with the family was everything. Then there was Frank, who loved his family, but felt apart from them — who had a raging will to become wealthy and famous. He used to climb the pepper tree and dream of being rich and important. Selling papers on the street, he saw well-dressed men step into chauffeur-driven limousines and thought: ‘Someday I’ll live like that.’
The newspaper selling game could be brutal. Newsboys bought papers for 2 cents a paper, and resold them on street corners for 3 cents. No adult assigned the street corners, so the most profitable downtown corners went to the toughest newsboys who often brawled to defend “their” corner. A further problem for Frank was that people knew newsboys had money and could be mugged. Unsold papers could not be returned, which hurt profits. One day, when Frank had many unsold papers, he and his older brother Tony played a little scene. Tony pretended to beat him up; Frank cried pitifully. When an onlooker stepped in, Frank told him he was being beaten for not selling all his papers. The onlooker bought all the remaining papers on condition that Tony stop the beating. It was a crucial moment: Frank learned that people could be manipulated into feeling genuine sympathy about a piece of theater staged for their benefit, and also that he enjoyed doing the staging, and knowing that it had touched people, and made him some money.
After Manual Arts High in Los Angeles, Frank Capra went to what’s now Cal Tech. His mother scrimped and saved to help pay his tuition. Frank was fascinated by movies while studying there. An English professor, Professor Judy, asked the class to write essays on questions like: “Describe Health” or “What is Intelligence?” Capra enjoyed airing his views on these questions, though the professor often belittled Capra’s work.
Capra was trained as an engineer, and graduated in 1918. What to do next? He had vague notions of becoming an astronomer. He thought scientists worked all the time, while artists were carefree and worked only when inspired. Neither life was appealing. Starting in the Spring of 1918, Capra bummed around the west for several years. Late in 1921, he was approached by a guy from the old neighborhood — a Sicilian tough who’d gone into bootlegging and was making a fortune. He wanted an engineer who could design better stills and offered Capra a lot of money to join him. Though Capra was dying to be rich, he said no. He hated the sleaziness of the man.
But what SHOULD he do? He got on a streetcar, gave the driver the nickel fare and impulsively threw the other 12 cents in his pocket off the trolley. Now that he was dead broke something would have to happen. The startled conductor, having seen Capra empty his pockets, handed Capra a newspaper column titled GREAT WEEK FOR SCREWBALLS, and said “This column is perfect for guys like you. Read it.”
The column announced that the Jewish gymnasium in Golden Gate Park was being turned into a movie studio. So Capra walked in, and met a second-rate vaudeville actor named Walter Montague who hoped to break into the movies by making a film of the Rudyard Kipling poem “The Ballad of Fisher’s Boardinghouse.” Capra found himself telling Walter Montague that he, Frank Capra, was a veteran of the movie business. His plan was to raise some cash by selling the gullible old man some “insider advice” — and then fleeing before the man realized Capra knew nothing about making films.
But, to Capra’s surprise, Montague begged Capra to stay with him and direct the picture. Capra did. They rounded up amateur actors, hired a newsreel photographer, and spent $1,700 dollars on the film, which seemed lavish to Capra. But he got to work on the emotions of strangers by staging something and making it seem real. He’d stumbled on something which suited many of his interests: it was part art, part science; part old-fashioned storytelling and part newfangled technology.
The movie got rave reviews, and made good profits. The distributor promptly sent a check for $3,500, and requested more films by Capra and Montague. At that point, Capra confessed: “Mr. Montague, I lied to you. I know nothing about pictures. I never — “ Montague waved it off, said he knew all that, and recited some of the low-lights of Frank Capra’s recent history.
How do you know all that? asked Capra, astonished. “One of my sponsors, a prudent attorney, had you checked out,” said Montague. Why didn’t you fire me when you found all that out? asked Capra. Montague replied: ‘I found it interesting, but unimportant. I believed in your initiative, your enthusiasm — the audacity of your creative ideas — and not in a dossier of your misfortunes. You proved me right.’
In the mid-1920’s, Capra apprenticed with Mack Sennett of Keystone Studios. Sennett was surrounded by writers, comics, gagmen, directors, actors, pretty girls, yes men, finance men. His life was a constant swirl of animated conversation. Sennett knew what he wanted, and was a perfect barometer of popularity. If Sennett laughed, the audience would laugh; if he didn’t, the audience wouldn’t.
While Capra was working for Mack Sennett, Columbia Pictures called. Frank Capra had never heard of Columbia Pictures, or the shrewd, cunning mogul Harry Cohn who owned Columbia. Born in New York City in 1891, into a working-class German-Jewish family, Harry Cohn’s Columbia Pictures made low-budget shorts and two-reel comedies. Sound films were just coming in at that time which gave Capra leverage over Cohn, who knew that Capra understood the engineering of sound films, as Cohn did not. Cohn merely knew that people wanted to see sound films, so Columbia would have to make them.
Sensing Cohn’s controlling nature, Capra demanded control over his own films, and pretended he’d walk out the door if he didn’t get it. Cohn gave him room but retained “final cut” on all of Capra’s Columbia films. At Columbia, Capra learned that some actors are at their best on the very first take, and have less emotion and range in later takes. So he tried to get the cast and crew ready to get each scene on the first take. He was learning how to handle a film crew, too. They presented directors with a constant barrage of questions. Where to place the lights? What kind of light? Can we shoot this scene in this certain way? They respected directors who made quick, capable decisions. “Hell, no!’ was better than ‘Maybe…” When people told Capra they wanted to be a Hollywood director, he told them they’d need to make quick decisions.
Capra absorbed some of the best qualities of his mismatched parents. Like his father, he admired songs and storytelling and knew that songs and stories knit people together and steer us past blue moods. Like his mother, he believed you have to be practical, work hard, and never squander your money. Capra was always leery of big government programs handing money to the down-and-out. He’d grown up among the poor, and felt many of them deserved to be poor. They should work hard, as he had worked hard. Then they would have money and the self-respect that comes with having earned it.
“It Happened One Night” in 1934 was his breakthrough picture for Columbia. It has some wonderful scenes: Claudette Colbert showing Clark Gable how to get a driver to pick up a hitchhiker; the “Walls of Jericho” scene; and the bus passengers all singing “The Man on the ‘Flying Trapeze.” It was a populist film, but amusing and unafraid to be sentimental.
Capra realized he wanted to put serious messages into his films. “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” (1936) had a message that the plain virtues of small-town and country life are more powerful than all the wiles of the city slicker. Capra had Gary Cooper star as Longfellow Deeds, a simple man who inherits 20 million dollars but still wants to play the tuba in the town band. Several executives warned Capra that heroes must be heroic, and to stop asking Gary Cooper to act like a half-wit. But by then Capra had learned to trust his instincts; he knew how to take a simple, uplifting message, fit it into an entertaining story, and tell that story in visual terms.
Capra savored the vast differences in temperament between his leading man, Gary Cooper and his leading lady, Jean Arthur. Cooper never felt that acting was intellectual or taxing. He said his lines and moved on, knowing the scene would play. Jean Arthur was wonderful when the lights went on. She could convey surprise, delight, melancholy, disappointment and make each take look fresh. But in between takes, she shivered with fear.
“You Can’t Take it With You” (1938) was Capra’s sixth straight hit, very rare for anyone in Hollywood. Every studio boss assumed his top directors would have a few clunkers. “You Can’t Take it With You” was already a smash as a play, but Capra changed it when he filmed it. He wanted to see if a man could be both hero and villain of the same film, and made the rich, arrogant character Anthony P. Kirby, played by Edward Arnold, play that role.
Capra made “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” in 1939. James Stewart played idealistic outsider Jefferson Smith perfectly, and Stewart and Capra became friendly.
Three times in a five-year stretch, Frank Capra had won Best Director at the Oscars. He was now an insider, getting lots of respect and attention and making big money. It was what he’d always wanted — but it forced him to see himself differently. He couldn’t play the harassed outsider anymore. All of the Columbia films celebrated “the little man” who didn’t have much money but was nice and loyal to family and friends. In life, Frank Capra wasn’t much like that “little man.”
Capra volunteered for duty in WWII. General George Marshall told Capra he wanted Capra to make a series of films explaining to servicemen what the war was about. “Why We Fight” did this skillfully, and in time the authorities showed the films to the American public, too. These “Why We Fight” films were propaganda pieces, which used stirring music, and dramatic newsreel footage of war-torn Europe and of the Japanese attacking China, to argue that the world was already at war, and the United States must enter the war, too.
Capra’s script didn’t just talk about what had started World War Two, but created a pure dichotomy through history between dictators who tried to enslave the world — and freedom fighters who believed all men are created equal. The history was a little dubious; slave owners George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were lumped in with the freedom-fighters, along with Moses, Mohammed, Confucius and Jesus Christ. But the films succeeded on their own terms — they made people feel that this Second World War was part of a long, honorable history of freedom-fighting.
Frank Capra left Columbia Pictures because he wanted more control. His career had fewer hits after he left Columbia — but he made his greatest film “It’s a Wonderful Life” as an independent. “It’s a Wonderful Life” is about a man named George Bailey, played beautifully by James Stewart, who lives in a small town in New York State called Bedford Falls. He keeps alive his father’s dream of a building and loan association to help low-income families own their first home. George Bailey is a caring husband and father with friends all over town — yet he’s prone to depression and comes to feel he’s been a failure in life because he’s never left Bedford Falls and seen the world. Capra shows us that it’s not so, that George Bailey has had a wonderful life without knowing it, without ever leaving his little town.
Capra put on the screen in the person of George Bailey many aspects of himself: the intense desire to go to college and be someone big and important in the world; the debts owed to a mother who scrimped so he could afford college; the nagging sense that you can’t escape your own family and hometown; the sudden, devastating loss of a father; the thoughts of suicide in someone whom most people see as a success.
Capra improvised the famous scene where the jitterbugging George Bailey and Mary Hatch fall into the high school swimming pool. Capra had planned for Stewart and Reed to meet as adults, but when he heard that Beverly Hills High had a swimming pool under their basketball court, he changed the film script. For his villain, Mr. Henry Potter, Capra cast Lionel Barrymore, an actor confined to a wheelchair. Having Barrymore play the role in a chair suggested why the man might have become such a miser and petty sadist.
By the 1950’s, Frank Capra was a has-been. He’d started copying himself, clumsily remaking old movies. A few old friends kept in touch and a few film historians or elderly fans remembered him. But the movers and shakers of Hollywood wanted nothing to do with this cranky, egotist who’d lost his touch. In 1964, he went back to Columbia, to make a film called “Marooned.” The guy who greenlighted it, and whom Capra had brought into the film business, forced Capra to either make the film for under three million dollars or back out. Capra backed out, and watched his protege hand another director eight million dollars to play with. That was humiliating for Capra, who had done so much to make Columbia a major studio. He retired, feeling restless, and unwanted.
In 1969, when his older brother Ben died, it hit Frank hard. It was Ben, the shepherd, who had first come, alone, to Los Angeles, and had brought the whole clan of Capras here. Ben had never known wealth, fame or glory — but he had deep faith, and was beloved by all who knew him. Wasn’t he a better man than Frank? That raw ambition in Frank had always separated him from Ben and the other Capras, but he’d always felt grounded by talking to Ben. Now he’d never talk to Ben again.
He decided to write a memoir. “The Name Above the Title,” though not always truthful, is entertaining and feels like Capra through and through. On a whim, he drove back to the old house in Lincoln Heights where he’d lived as a boy. It was heartbreaking to see it now, the roof sagging, part of the the white picket fence lying in the weeds, parts of the porch banister broken and hanging slack. The pepper tree in the yard that his father had planted, and that Frank had climbed so many times, looked sick now, its leaves blackened by smog. He parked his car and gazed at the house. The homely couple living there now sat on the porch and fixed him with a hostile stare.
Capra was convinced that no one would watch his films anymore. But in the 1970’s, a curious thing happened. While few of his films were shown, the lone exception — “It’s a Wonderful Life” — got very high ratings whenever it showed on TV, and began to be shown at revival movie houses. Frank Capra’s image shifted from a guy who spent the Depression era cranking out corny, uplifting movies to a guy who made one great movie in 1946 — a hell of a Christmas movie, maybe the best.
Frank Capra died in 1991. He liked to say: “There are no rules in film making, only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.”