Happy New Year!

Who is Frank Capra?

A first draft (a New Year's draft) by Dee, yet another niche specialist in naïve film criticism.

As this year draws to a close, my thoughts keep returning to Frank Capra. What a strange sensation you get when you rediscover something you had no problem writing off before. Frank Capra is one of those directors you rediscover, and rediscover some more. I think that is one of the things that makes him a little bit different than the other American directors you can’t help but think of as the building blocks of American cinema from the forties and fifties – directors like John Ford, Samuel Fuller, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, and so on*. It doesn’t matter that Truffaut or Cassavetes were moved by the films of Frank Capra. And forget about film directors for a moment because this generalizes beyond them: If you don’t care for a certain artist and his oeuvre, that sort of argument can make you pause for a moment (What? Mapplethorpe loved Warhol that much?). But if you have any artistic taste that you can call your own, as opposed to sensibilities cobbled together from various sources, you will make up your mind on the matter in an independent fashion, probably by finding a line (or two) of reasoning allowing you to love one and hate the other even though you know the two happened to love each other (each other’s work, anyway). So, again, it doesn’t matter who was or is or could be or wants especially to be moved by Frank Capra within the cinematic lineage. The question we are asking is: “Who is Frank Capra?”

My answer to that question for the moment is that Frank Capra is a director you rediscover. Ford, Fuller, Hawks, and Ray – speaking on behalf of those of us who are well removed from the forties and fifties, these directors are ones whose works you seek out as the result of a desire, a real thirst, to know what the building blocks of American cinema are all about**. I am not certain that the same thirst is there for Frank Capra. Every good American has seen “It’s a Wonderful Life” just about every Christmas season, and with any luck, that is not going to change. But not every good American born after, say, 1970 has been able to link Capra with his early silent films and talkies, or even with “It Happened One Night,” “American Madness,” and “Forbidden.” Because Capra has a tagline – because you watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” every Christmas – it is just too easy not to know who Capra is. This is not only to draw attention to the fact that well-loved movies have thoroughly neglected directors behind them, although I suppose that is something that can be pointed out, too – a lot of people do not know that Frank Capra made “It’s a Wonderful Life,” or that Nicholas Ray was responsible for “A Rebel Without a Cause.” There are any number of reasons for that, one of them possibly being that the lead actors (Jimmy Stewart and Jimmy Dean – two Jimmys, by jiminy!) in those films are firmly planted in the public film conscience and the public has difficulty remembering too many names at the same time. I mention this as a mere possibility. In any case, there isn’t a thirst for Capra, or an initiative taken by the public to familiarize themselves with Capra’s range, because he is taken for granted, whereas people who go after “Pickup on South Street” or “They Were Expendable” know what they are doing. I mentioned the tagline – every director has a tagline. Perhaps you would call Hawks a stylist, Ray a pirate; I have heard people call Capra everything from a dreamer to a fascist. Frank Capra has gracefully slid into the sort of popularity that obfuscates everything he was ever about. Everybody (dis)likes him because nobody knows him. Naturally, that is one of the projects that I imagine a film buff would want to get their hands on. If it’s not singing the praises of someone whose work you have never heard of before, it’s someone whose work we all know but apparently haven’t taken the time to get right.

Absorbing the Frank Capra criticism out there is an ongoing pursuit of mine – so far I certainly have not absorbed enough to write home about – but I think that some things can be said about him right off the bat. Who is Frank Capra? Frank Capra is a director you rediscover, and when you rediscover him, you find that, mainly, what he does to you is to disarm you. If it isn’t unusual, it’s at least uncanny when a very sweet message is delivered very thoughtfully, with such determination, in the form of a razor-sharp technique. We are accustomed to tender messages delivered not as thoughtfully, but rather more reflexively – whoever is delivering the message senses that the tender message is what is desired, so hearts and candies are flung in our direction with the expectation that our arms have been outstretched and our mouths propped open a good long while for a chance like this. That is a pathetic way to treat your audience, but it works. Capra is about as far away from that form of degradation as you can imagine. In both “American Madness” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” just to name two of his films that take advantage of this narrative setup, the main character is pushed to the brink of suicide. In the former, the crisis for Thomas Dickson is due to a sudden and thorough disillusionment with his trusted inner circle, especially his beloved but secretly unhappy wife. In the latter, the crisis for George Bailey is the fact that his sustained struggle against Old Man Potter, while motivated by his love for his father and many other such noble (yet not blindly so) intentions, has cost him the fulfillment of his youthful ambitions, and whatever meagre accomplishment can be located in maintaining this “business of nickles and dimes” appears to have been demolished by a tragically innocent mistake. In both films, the crisis expresses and compounds its miserable nature through the hopelessly narrow-minded panic of the crowd, the mob, or the community, however you happen to be looking at it. You wonder if Thomas Dickson and George Bailey are fools to place their trust in people who are unable to see past their immediate needs, needs that are patterned such that they are fully exploited by the Potters of the world (the various Potters in Capra’s world come in different shades; some of them you even have to admire a bit). But a transformation occurs – as blind and unthinking a mass as the community may be at first, the community members are not unredeemable. They will listen, and they will act. The crisis is then promptly solved through the outpouring of love and support by the community. This has the feeling – the markings – of a miracle. Nothing like this happens in real life – if there’s a crisis, it isn’t answered lovingly by the universe, and most of the time there isn’t a crisis anyway, as the misery of life just drags on and on beyond anyone’s control – so what is the point of this? Why is this something other than a feel-good cop-out, that sickly relationship between filmmaker and audience that I described at the beginning of this paragraph?

I will not attempt an analysis in response to this type of question here, but what I will do is point you in the right direction: this type of question is best addressed and most fully understood by watching more and more of Frank Capra. You may be surprised to discover that not all of his films resolve so bloodlessly; not all of them end with close-ups of flawless American smiles. You may also be surprised that your reaction can change – what appears to be a wham-bam formula becomes more of a principle that mutates before you and unfolds in a myriad of ways. I was talking to a five-year-old girl earlier today who asked me if I was ticklish. I said I was practically invulnerable with one small exception: the bottom of my feet. Then she attacked the bottom of my feet. After I called truce, she said that the most ticklish part of the body was a particular spot on the neck, just above the collar bone but towards the center. I told her that there was no such thing – we had already established that I, for one, was ticklish solely in the foot region, the point being that people are ticklish in different places. What works on one person will not necessarily work on another. She remained unconvinced of this and asked me to tickle her neck. I said that, furthermore, I didn’t believe she could effectively experience a tickle if she knew in advance that I was going to tickle that specific spot. She insisted, so I tickled her, and she laughed madly and sweetly as only a child can. And just like that – at some point, Frank Capra will disarm you, too. He will get at the bottom of your feet, if you see what I mean! Capra’s films are full of peculiarities, dark angles, a genuine celebration of side characters (Oscar Shapely, my friends!), and an ability to penetrate into the hopes and loyalties that are indispensable to an individual until the moment they are willing to dispense with themselves. Yes, I am talking about Capra’s films – everything from Rain or Shine to Mr. Smith to Lost Horizon.

They are waiting to be discovered, and rediscovered, by you.


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* I'm sure you can think of many others - Vidor, Welles.
** You have to go back further than that, of course, but that is not the point that I am trying to establish.