Frank Russell Capra (born Francesco Rosario Capra; May 18, 1897 – September 3, 1991) was an Italian-born American film director, producer, and screenwriter who was the creative force behind several major award-winning films of the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Italy and raised in Los Angeles from the age of five, his rags-to-riches story has led film historians such as Ian Freer to consider him the "American Dream personified".
Capra became one of America's most influential directors during the 1930s, winning three Academy Awards for Best Director from six nominations. Among his leading films were It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can't Take It with You (1938), and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). During World War II, Capra served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and produced propaganda films, such as the Why We Fight series.
After World War II, Capra's career declined as his later films, such as It's a Wonderful Life (1946), performed poorly when they were first released. Beginning in 1950, his cinematic output slowed, and he retired from filmmaking in the mid-1960s. In the ensuing decades, however, It's a Wonderful Life and other Capra films were reevaluated favorably by critics. Outside of directing, Capra was active in the film industry, engaging in various political and social activities. He served as President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, worked alongside the Writers Guild of America, and was head of the Directors Guild of America.
Early life
Capra was born Francesco Rosario Capra on May 18, 1897, in Bisacquino, a village near Palermo, Sicily, Italy. He was the youngest of seven children of Salvatore Capra, a fruit grower, and the former Rosaria "Sara" Nicolosi. Capra's family was Roman Catholic. The name "Capra", notes Capra's biographer, Joseph McBride, represents his family's closeness to the land, and means "goat". He notes that the English word "capricious" derives from it, "evoking the animal's skittish temperament", adding that "the name neatly expresses two aspects of Frank Capra's personality: emotionalism and obstinacy."
In 1903, when he was five, Capra's family immigrated to the United States, traveling in a steerage compartment of the steamship Germania—the least expensive way to make the passage. For Capra, the 13-day journey remained one of the worst experiences of his life:
You're all together—you have no privacy. You have a cot. Very few people have trunks or anything that takes up space. They have just what they can carry in their hands or in a bag. Nobody takes their clothes off. There's no ventilation, and it stinks like hell. They're all miserable. It's the most degrading place you could ever be.
Capra remembers the ship's arrival in New York Harbor, where he saw "a statue of a great lady, taller than a church steeple, holding a torch above the land we were about to enter". He recalls his father's exclamation at the sight:
Cicco, look! Look at that! That's the greatest light since the Star of Bethlehem! That's the light of freedom! Remember that. Freedom.
The family settled in Los Angeles's East Side (today Lincoln Heights) on Avenue 18, which Capra described in his autobiography as an Italian "ghetto". Capra's father worked as a fruit picker and young Capra attended Castelar Elementary School and sold newspapers after school for ten years until he graduated from high school. He attended the Manual Arts High School, with Jimmy Doolittle and Lawrence Tibbett as classmates. Instead of working after graduating, as his parents wanted, he enrolled in college.
He worked through college at the California Institute of Technology, playing banjo at nightclubs and taking odd jobs like working at the campus laundry, waiting tables, and cleaning engines at a local power plant. He studied chemical engineering and graduated in the spring of 1918. Capra later wrote that his college education had "changed his whole viewpoint on life from the viewpoint of an alley rat to the viewpoint of a cultured person".
World War I and later
Soon after graduating from college, Capra was commissioned in the United States Army as a second lieutenant, having completed campus ROTC. In the Army, he taught mathematics to artillerymen at Fort Point, San Francisco. His father died during the war in an accident (1916). In the Army, Capra contracted Spanish flu and was medically discharged to return home to live with his mother. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1920, taking the name Frank Russell Capra. Living at home with his siblings and mother, Capra was the only family member with a college education, yet he was the only one who remained chronically unemployed. After a year without work, seeing how his siblings had steady jobs, he felt he was a failure, which led to bouts of depression.
Chronic abdominal pains were later discovered to have been an undiagnosed burst appendix. After recovering at home, Capra moved out and spent the next few years living in flophouses in San Francisco and hopping freight trains, wandering the Western United States. To support himself, he took odd jobs on farms, as a movie extra, playing poker, and selling local oil well stocks.
During this time the 24-year-old Capra directed a 32-minute documentary film titled La Visita Dell'Incrociatore Italiano Libya a San Francisco. Not only did it document the visit of the Italian naval vessel Libya to San Francisco, but also the reception given to the crew of the ship by San Francisco's L'Italia Virtus Club, now known as the San Francisco Italian Athletic Club.
At 25, Capra took a job selling books written and published by American philosopher Elbert Hubbard. Capra recalled that he "hated being a peasant, being a scrounging new kid trapped in the Sicilian ghetto of Los Angeles. ... All I had was cockiness—and let me tell you that gets you a long way."
Career
Silent film comedies
During his book sales efforts—and nearly broke—Capra read a newspaper article about a new movie studio opening in an abandoned gymnasium, at San Francisco. Capra called on them saying he had moved from Hollywood and falsely implied that he had experience in the budding film industry. Capra's only prior exposure in films was in 1915 while attending Manual Arts High School. The studio's founder, Walter Montague, was nonetheless impressed by Capra and offered him $75 to direct a one-reel silent film. Capra, with the help of a cameraman, made the film, Fultah Fisher's Boarding House, in two days and cast it with amateurs. It was made for $1,700 and was sold to Pathé Exchange for $3,500.
critics noted that it was free from stunts, mannerisms, camera angles and Hollywood tricks. It had to be free from them as Capra never had time to learn anything of them. - Alva Johnston
After that first serious job in films, Capra began efforts to finding similar openings in the film industry. He took a position with Paul Gerson Pictures Corporation, Paul Gerson's minor San Francisco studio, as a property man, and subsequently received an offer to work with producer Harry Cohn at his new studio in Los Angeles. During this time, he worked as a property man, film cutter, title writer, and assistant director.
Capra later became a gag writer for Hal Roach's Our Gang series. He was twice hired as a writer for a slapstick comedy director, Mack Sennett, in 1918 and 1924. Under him, Capra wrote scripts for comedian Harry Langdon and produced by Mack Sennett, the first being Plain Clothes in 1925. According to Capra, it was he who invented Langdon's character, the innocent fool living in a "naughty world"; however, Langdon was well into this character by 1925.
When Langdon eventually left Sennett to make longer, feature-length movies with First National Studios, he took Capra along as his personal writer and director. They made three feature films together during 1926 and 1927, all of them successful with critics and the public. The films made Langdon a recognized comedian in the caliber of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Following the production of Long Pants (1927), Capra argued with Langdon over the direction his next project would take. Langdon's other confidant was writer-director Arthur Ripley, a fellow Sennett alumnus, and Langdon followed Ripley's suggestions. Capra quit, and the split was disastrous for Langdon, who took matters into his own hands and directed his films himself, to poor reception.
After Capra split with Langdon, he directed a picture for First National, For the Love of Mike (1927). This was a silent comedy about three bickering godfathers—a German, a Jew, and an Irishman—starring a budding actress, Claudette Colbert. The movie was considered a failure and is a lost film.
Columbia Pictures
Capra returned to Harry Cohn's studio, now named Columbia Pictures, which was then producing short films and two-reel comedies for "fillers" to play between main features. Columbia was one of many start-up studios on "Poverty Row" in Los Angeles. Like the others, Columbia was unable to compete with larger studios, which often had their own production facilities, distribution, and theaters. Cohn rehired Capra in 1928 to help his studio produce new, full-length feature films, to compete with the major studios. Capra would eventually direct 20 films for Cohn's studio, including many of his classics.
Because of Capra's engineering education, he adapted more easily to the new sound technology than most directors. He welcomed the transition to sound, recalling, "I wasn't at home in silent films." Most studios were unwilling to invest in the new sound technology, assuming it was a passing fad. Many in Hollywood considered sound a threat to the industry and hoped it would pass quickly; McBride notes that "Capra was not one of them." When he saw Al Jolson singing in The Jazz Singer in 1927, considered the first talkie, Capra recalled his reaction:
It was an absolute shock to hear this man open his mouth and a song come out of it. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
Few of the studio heads or crew were aware of Capra's engineering background until he began directing The Younger Generation in 1929. The chief cinematographer who worked with Capra on a number of films was likewise unaware. He describes this early period in sound for film:
It wasn't something that came up. You had to bluff to survive. When sound first came in, nobody knew much about it. We were all walking around in the dark. Even the sound man didn't know much about it. Frank lived through it. But he was quite intelligent. He was one of the few directors who knew what the hell they were doing. Most of your directors walked around in a fog—they didn't know where the door was.
During his first year with Columbia, Capra directed nine films, some of which were successful. After the first few, Harry Cohn said: "it was the beginning of Columbia making a better quality of pictures." According to Barson, "Capra became ensconced as Harry Cohn's most trusted director." His films soon established Capra as a "bankable" director known throughout the industry, and Cohn raised Capra's initial salary of $1,000 per film to $25,000 per year. Capra directed a film for MGM during this period, but soon realized he "had much more freedom under Harry Cohn's benevolent dictatorship", where Cohn also put Capra's "name above the title" of his films, a first for the movie industry. Capra wrote of this period and recalled the confidence that Cohn placed in Capra's vision and directing:
I owed Cohn a lot—I owed him my whole career. So I had respect for him, and a certain amount of love. Despite his crudeness and everything else, he gave me my chance. He took a gamble on me.
Capra directed his first "real" sound picture, The Younger Generation, in 1929. It was a rags-to-riches romantic comedy about a Jewish family's upward mobility in New York City, with their son later trying to deny his Jewish roots to keep his rich, gentile girlfriend. According to Capra biographer Joseph McBride, Capra "obviously felt a strong identification with the story of a Jewish immigrant who grows up in the ghetto of New York ... and feels he has to deny his ethnic origins to rise to success in America." Capra, however, denied any connection of the story with his own life.
Nonetheless, McBride insists that The Younger Generation abounds with parallels to Capra's own life. McBride notes the "devastatingly painful climactic scene", where the young social-climbing son, embarrassed when his wealthy new friends first meet his parents, passes his mother and father off as house servants. That scene, notes McBride, "echoes the shame Capra admitted feeling toward his own family as he rose in social status".
During his years at Columbia, Capra worked often with screenwriter Robert Riskin (husband of Fay Wray), and cameraman Joseph Walker. In many of Capra's films, the wise-cracking and sharp dialogue was often written by Riskin, and he and Capra went on to become Hollywood's "most admired writer-director team".
Film career (1934–1941)
It Happened One Night (1934)
Capra's films in the 1930s enjoyed immense success at the Academy Awards. It Happened One Night (1934) became the first film to win all five top Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay). Written by Robert Riskin, it is one of the first screwball comedies, and with its release in the Great Depression, critics considered it an escapist story and a celebration of the American Dream. The film established the names of Capra, Columbia Pictures, and stars Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in the movie industry. The film has been called "picaresque". It was one of the earliest road movies and inspired variations on that theme by other filmmakers.
He followed the film with Broadway Bill (1934), a screwball comedy about horse racing. The film was a turning point for Capra, however, as he began to conceive an additional dimension to his movies. Capra explains his new thinking:
My films must let every man, woman, and child know that God loves them, that I love them, and that peace and salvation will become a reality only when they all learn to love each other.
This added goal was inspired after meeting with a Christian Scientist friend who told him to view his talents in a different way:
The talents you have, Mr. Capra, are not your own, not self-acquired. God gave you those talents; they are his gifts to you, to use for his purpose.
Capra began to embody messages in subsequent films, many of which conveyed "fantasies of goodwill". The first of those was Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), for which Capra won his second Best Director Oscar. Critic Alistair Cooke observed that Capra was "starting to make movies about themes instead of people".
In 1938, Capra won his third Director Oscar in five years for You Can't Take It with You, which also won Best Picture. In addition to his three directing wins, Capra received directing nominations for three other films (Lady for a Day, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and It's a Wonderful Life). On May 5, 1936, Capra hosted the 8th Academy Awards ceremony.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
Although It's a Wonderful Life is his best-known film, Friedman notes that it was Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), which most represented the "Capra myth". That film expressed Capra's patriotism more than any others, and "presented the individual working within the democratic system to overcome rampant political corruption".
The film, however, became Capra's most controversial. In his research before filming, he was able to stand close to President Franklin D. Roosevelt during a press conference after the recent acts of war by Germany in Europe. Capra recalls his fears:
And panic hit me. Japan was slicing up the colossus of China piece by piece. Nazi Panzers had rolled into Austria and Czechoslovakia; their thunder echoed over Europe. England and France shuddered. The Russian bear growled ominously in the Kremlin. The black cloud of war hung over the chancelleries of the world. Official Washington from the President down, was in the process of making hard, torturing decisions. "And here was I, in the process of making a satire about government officials; ... Wasn't this the most untimely time for me to make a film about Washington?
When the filming was completed, the studio sent preview copies to Washington. Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., U.S. ambassador to the UK, wrote to Columbia head Harry Cohn, "Please do not play this picture in Europe." Politicians were concerned about the potential negative effect the film might have on the morale of the United States' allies, as World War II had begun. Kennedy wrote to President Roosevelt that, "In foreign countries this film must inevitably strengthen the mistaken impression that the United States is full of graft, corruption and lawlessness." Many studio heads agreed, nor did they want negative feelings about Hollywood instilled in political leaders.
Nonetheless, Capra's vision of the film's significance was clear:
The more uncertain are the people of the world, the more their hard-won freedoms are scattered and lost in the winds of chance, the more they need a ringing statement of America's democratic ideals. The soul of our film would be anchored in Lincoln. Our Jefferson Smith would be a young Abe Lincoln, tailored to the rail-splitter's simplicity, compassion, ideals, humor, and unswerving moral courage under pressure.
Capra pleaded with Cohn to allow the film to go into distribution and remembers the intensity of their decision making:
Harry Cohn paced the floor, as stunned as Abraham must have been when the Lord asked him to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac.
Cohn and Capra chose to ignore the negative publicity and demands and released the film as planned. It was later nominated for 11 Academy Awards, only winning one (for Best Original Story) partly because the number of major pictures that were nominated that year was 10, including The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons called it a "smash patriotic hit" and most critics agreed, seeing that audiences left the theaters with "an enthusiasm for democracy" and "in a glow of patriotism."
The significance of the film's message was established further in France, shortly after World War II began. When the French public was asked to select which film they wanted to see most, having been told by the Vichy government that soon no more American films would be allowed in France, the overwhelming majority chose it over all others. To a France soon to be completely occupied by Nazi forces, the film most expressed the "perseverance of democracy and the American way."
Impasse
Capra became enchanted with a German-made film biography of composer Frédéric Chopin. He purchased the film himself as a basis for his new production, and recruited one of Columbia's leading writers, Sidney Buchman, to fashion a screenplay. Capra spent a full year working on the Chopin project, and the film was ready to go into production. Capra wanted to make the film in the costly Technicolor process—a first for Columbia—but Columbia's New York office balked at the expense. As Cohn's biographer Bob Thomas recounted, "They were aghast at the prospect of trying to sell an expensive costume film about a piano player and a woman novelist who wore pants and smoked cigars. The opposition was strong enough to veto the project." The enraged Capra quit Columbia. Harry Cohn tried to lure him back with an unprecedented profit-sharing split of 50/50, but Capra accepted a million-dollar cash offer from Warner Bros. Columbia ultimately went ahead with the Chopin biography, in Technicolor, under the direction of Charles Vidor: A Song to Remember (1945).
Meet John Doe (1941)
Capra's first Warner project was Meet John Doe (1941). So important was the Capra name that Warner Bros. took its own name off the main title. Instead of the usual "Warner Bros. Pictures presents", Meet John Doe begins with "Presenting".
Some consider Meet John Doe to be Capra's most controversial movie. The film's hero, played by Gary Cooper, is a former baseball player now bumming around, lacking goals. He is selected by a news reporter to represent the "common man," to capture the imagination of ordinary Americans. The film was released shortly before America became involved in World War II, and citizens were still in an isolationist mood. According to some historians, the film was made to convey a "deliberate reaffirmation of American values," though ones that seemed uncertain with respect to the future.