First became aware of Frank Capra, born on May 18, 1897, by seeing his book The Name Before The Title: An Autobiography at the public library and learning that his moviemaking career stretched back to the 1920's.
Capra worked for comedy-meisters Hal Roach and Mack Sennett and wrote gags for both the Our Gang series and the highly original, unorthodox comedian Harry Langdon.
Was thrilled and delighted to stay up way past my bedtime to see Capra, along with fellow directors Mel Brooks, Peter Bogdanovich and Robert Altman, on The Dick Cavett Show.
Later, after finding myself the only person in my high school class who did not think It's A Wonderful Life was an unbearably corny, hokey and interminable piece of crap, delved deeply into Capra's cinematic catalog. Fortunately, his best known flicks - Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, You Can't Take It With You, Meet John Doe - were shown frequently on TV way back when.
NOTE: for a fascinating bill, watch It's A Wonderful Life with Hitchcock's Rope or one of the Anthony Mann westerns starring Jimmy Stewart (more akin to the Jimmy from Vertigo than to the Jimmy who starred in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington) - then top it off with Frank Capra's WW2 documentaries from the Why We Fight series.
The Oscar-winning IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, which would now be described as a "rom-com," remains an all-time favorite film of the gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog. It is both consistently funny start-to-finish and chock full of hilarious character actors.
By the time the 1980's rolled around, had seen numerous Frank Capra films, including the lesser-known Broadway Bill, thanks to repertory cinema retrospectives.
Also saw Mr. Capra on the NBC version of Late Night With David Letterman, the best show on the cathode ray tube not named Blackadder or SCTV at that time. Could Dave have been a crazed diehard classic movie buff? To paraphrase Gary Cooper in two aforementioned movies, yep.
In the 1990's, David Packard's Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, CA did this film buff a tremendous favor by presenting extended and absolutely epic Frank Capra retrospectives. Got to see a bunch of the Capra films which weren't seen often on TV - including Lady For A Day, The Bitter Tea Of General Yen, Lost Horizon and others - in vivid big screen glory.
Watching these great classic movies at the Stanford Theatre, found that the Frank Capra pre-Codes, such as The Miracle Woman and Platinum Blonde, were particularly wonderful.
Hard-boiled firebrand Barbara Stanwyck lets 'er rip in several Capra flicks.
Make no mistake about it, Babs is NOT to be messed with in The Miracle Woman (1930).
The Bitter Tea Of General Yen is beautifully photographed, features the always intrepid Stanwyck (who made five feature films with Capra) and remains a fascinating and largely successful attempt to deliver cinematic high style a la Josef von Sternberg on a Columbia Pictures budget.
Bear in mind, as gorgeous a classic film as The Bitter Tea Of General Yen is, it definitely strays at times into the WTF category, even while its visual style successfully plunges into terrain only explored by F.W. Murnau and Josef von Sternberg.
The late Robert Osborne elaborates:
Favorite all the lesser known Frank Capra flicks? The Great Depression epic American Madness (1932), which explores themes seen later in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Meet John Doe and It's A Wonderful Life.
The part of Capra's later career that intrigues this film buff is not his 1950's and 1960's feature films (Riding High, Here Comes the Groom, A Hole in the Head and Pocketful of Miracles) as much as the Bell System Science Series documentaries he produced and/or directed for Bell Laboratories.
Even wiseguy comedian Steve Martin was impressed by the remarkable movie career and legacy of Frank Capra!
For the last word on Capra, here's film historian and author Leonard Maltin.
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