Frank Capra

The most disputed populist in Hollywood

Capra is the director whose name became an adjective, and the adjective is a slur as often as a compliment. "Capra-corn" — the sentimental fable in which the decent little man shames a corrupt system and the town comes good — is so legible that it hardened into a genre he alone was blamed for. The condescension misreads the work. What Capra actually built, across the worst decade the American economy ever had, was a durable machine for staging the argument between the individual and the institution, and then rigging it so the individual wins. The rigging is the point. Nobody made propaganda for a functioning democracy this expertly, which is presumably why the U.S. Army eventually hired him to make the real thing.

Sicily to Columbia

Born Francesco Rosario Capra on May 18, 1897 in Bisacquino, Sicily, he crossed to America in steerage in 1903 at the age of five and grew up on the East Side of Los Angeles. The rags-to-riches arc is almost parodically complete: he took a chemical-engineering degree from Caltech in 1918, drifted through odd jobs, then talked his way into directing a one-reeler in 1922 on a bluff about experience he did not have. Rehired by Harry Cohn's Columbia in 1928, he turned a Poverty Row studio into an Oscar factory and became its most trusted director, most often writing with Robert Riskin — the pair Hollywood rated its finest writer-director team. He won the Academy Award for Best Director three times in five years: It Happened One Night (1934), which became the first film to sweep all five top Oscars; Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936); and You Can't Take It With You (1938). Four days after Pearl Harbor he took an Army commission, rose to colonel, and made the seven-part Why We Fight series for George C. Marshall. In 1946 he co-founded the independent Liberty Films with William Wyler and George Stevens; it produced only It's a Wonderful Life (1946) before folding. He effectively retired by the mid-1950s, collected the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1982 and the National Medal of Arts in 1986, and died in La Quinta, California on September 3, 1991.

What the numbers say

Our library ranks Capra #46 among all directors, composite 13.54 across 11 films — respectable, but well below the Depression-era reputation, and the internal order explains why. It's a Wonderful Life leads at #91 (3.52), followed by It Happened One Night at #120 (3.27). Here the aggregate and the citations agree: It's a Wonderful Life draws the most citations of any Capra film — 13 of our source lists to It Happened One Night's eight — and outscores it too. That breadth is the film's afterlife in miniature. A 1946 box-office disappointment reborn on public-domain television as a Christmas fixture, it is cited everywhere; breadth of mention and height of regard, for once, land on the same film. Below the pair the curve collapses hard — Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) at #559, Mr. Deeds down at #968, Lost Horizon (1937) at #1410 — the mark of a director our sources honor for two peaks and treat the rest as period furniture.

Where to start

It Happened One Night for the machine at its lightest and most perfectly tuned — the template every screwball romance still runs on. Then It's a Wonderful Life for the dark undertow beneath the uplift, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington for the populist argument staged at full, filibustering volume.