The American: A Frank Capra Retrospective

What does it mean to be an American? 

As a kid, my understanding drew from stories of adventurers like Teddy Roosevelt, the paintings of Norman Rockwell, old Twilight Zone episodes, and above all, the films of Frank Capra.

Decades ago, when I first watched Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) to prepare for a tour of the Capitol, I was delighted to learn that the director was the same man behind the movie my family watched together at the end of every Christmas Day. Because our video tape of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) was colorized, it took me years to realize that the original was perfectly shot in glorious black and white. 

The heroes of each film moved me deeply. Both as Jefferson Smith and as George Bailey, Jimmy Stewart plays a righteous man standing up for the little guy against mass corruption, armed not with a gun, but with his wits, perhaps a prayer, and always a shrewd and spirited woman by his side. 

One of those performances still is for politicians the image of American statesmanship, and the other still points families towards the true meaning of Christmas. But those are pieces, not the whole. 

So what does it mean to be American as such? Not just what should an individual citizen be like, but what is our national spirit most essentially? Frank Capra, who made over fifty films, mastering both genre and medium, from silent and sound spectacles to wartime propaganda, screwball comedies and earnest dramas, even trying television and literature, helped forge our answer.

An innovator, he reinvigorated camerawork, quickened film pace, and exercised singular control as director and producer. So successfully in fact that Capra, notes Martin Scorsese, created a sensibility that became synonymous with his name: Capraesque. But what does that word entail? 

Frank Capra was, according to John Cassavetes, simply “the greatest filmmaker that ever lived.” He taught Americans “a feeling of belief in a free country,” that “there is goodness in bad people,” and all anyone “really wanted was to have compassion for other people and live in a spirit of friendliness and brotherhood.” His idealism expressed “a practical philosophy” that “validates a hope for the future.”  

When Cassavetes confessed, “Capra gave me hope,” it was no small admission, coming from the gritty realist known for films like The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976). Even he admits: “An aesthetic experience that leaves the spectator vacant is no form of art.”

So what was the body of work that Capra left us with? On the level with Hitchcock and Ford for pure visual storytelling, Capra was as funny as Cocteau and as resonant as Kurosawa. His greatest films, from It Happened One Night (1934) to State of the Union (1948), turned his madcap farce and trademarked comic hero into a steady analysis of our institutions that stood on ever shakier ground, from politics, media, and business, to the small town.

Born in Sicily to an illiterate family of shepherds, Capra’s family immigrated to the United States, an Atlantic crossing that meant weeks in steerage without bathing or changing clothes. Then, like so many others, they kept going West. When they arrived in Los Angeles, his parents kissed the ground, watering the earth with their tears.

Working odd jobs, Capra read voraciously, studying chemical engineering at Caltech under scientists Robert Millikan and Arthur Noyes. Enlisting in the Army for the Great War but drifting around when it ended, Capra talked his way into directing amateur films, later working as a gagman for Our Gang and Will Rogers. His career took off when he directed silent star Harry Langton in several films that constituted his own spin on Chaplin’s character with his own hapless but honest tramp who succeeds precisely because only God can save him.

This archetype came from Frank Capra himself. A nearly-lapsed Catholic who popped into church during times of crisis and intellectually borrowed from Christian Science, he was not so unlike his characters. He married Lucille Rayburn, later the mother of his four kids, for example, only after she threatened to marry a mysterious doctor if he didn’t commit. (He never knew and never asked if the doctor even existed.)

In essence, his art imitated his life and his life imitated his art, whether as a director fighting for final cut amid the production chaos of Tinseltown, or as a stressed-out sinner uttering half a prayer to Heaven above. Believing in the God-given power of any man to shape his life and find redemption, he extended his philosophy beyond his fictional characters to real people, including cast and crew.

He treated all actors equally, whether as stars or extras. All had an important part to play. Most of all, Capra thought, actors needed to believe they inhabited a real story. He sought natural portrayals without the artifice that came from the “stagier” style popular in earlier films. He also sped things up, had actors interrupt each other, and moved shots efficiently to capture audience attention. He wanted to focus on the magnificence of ordinary life: “All that meets the eye is larger than life,” he wrote, “including life itself. Who can match the wonder of it?” 

Capra understood his method, but not yet his purpose. 

That all changed as he began collaborating with screenwriters Myles Connelly and Robert Riskin. He started asking himself bigger questions: “Who is man? Why is man?” His films grew bigger as well, retaining his technique, sense of humor, attentiveness to the ordinary, but in order to deal with deeper issues as much as to entertain, covering things from religion in Miracle Woman (1931), to economic depression in American Madness (1932), and interracial relationships in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1934). 

Connelly, a practicing Catholic, stirred Capra to fully embrace of his childhood church. In this renewed faith, the director found an artistic connection to the saints and heroes, the martyrs and poets of old. The recommitment gave Capra new life and distinct shape to his work: the playfulness, the comedy just snatched from tragedy, that would color the rest of his work. In Lady for a Day (1933), for example, beggars and gangsters pretend to be aristocrats to help out the Times Square shrew who rules over them. Capra showed misfits banding together to help one of their own, unharden wicked hearts, and unite rich and poor together. 

Then the next year he invented the road movie. In It Happened One Night (1934), nearly every character is vain, silly, but, it turns out, redeemable, with the transformation happening via travel through the American countryside from Florida to New York. After rebellious Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) escapes from her rich father (Walter Connolly), the rugged, hard-drinking, paycheck-to-paycheck journalist Peter Warne (Clark Gable) follows her for a story, but soon falls in love. Together, they encounter slices of American life that would be imitated by nearly every subsequent road movie. 

When asked “Do you love my daughter?” Clark Gable’s aggrieved response, after evasion, threats, and psychological assessments, typifies the Capraesque hero: “Yes, but don't hold that against me. I'm a little screwy myself.” Amid unemployment and bankruptcy, love can still cross class lines between the working man with old morals and hidden wiles and an establishment heroine with an independent streak. 

Capra’s later films like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941), flipped these roles, making the hero the naïve sightseeing boy scout new to the big city, and the heroine a cunning working girl, either journalist or secretary, under pressure from a crooked boss. Eventually conflicts are resolved with a court case, political debate, or the hero deciding to jump from a great height on Christmas Eve. While most big institutions fail, the good guys live in a remnant community of humane life. 

In Lost Horizon (1937), for example, when globetrotting writer Robert Conway (Ronald Colman) finds Shangri-la, this secret Tibetan paradise is preserving all of human wisdom before the great nations destroy each other. “When the strong have devoured each other,” explains the centuries-old founder, High Lama (Sam Jaffe), “the Christian ethic may at last be fulfilled, and the meek shall inherit the earth.”

There’s also the Vanderhof house in You Can’t Take It With You (1938). Grandpa Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore) runs his home as a sanctuary for artists, dancers, and tinkerers, but these “lilies of the field” are threatened when an ambitious banker (Edward Arnold) wants to build a munitions factory where they live. But as his son (Jimmy Stewart) yearns to marry the Vanderhof granddaughter (Jean Arthur), the banker escapes the spiritual damage that his membership in the Military-Industrial Complex was costing him. 

Consistently for Capra, modern organizations, if regimented and impersonal, corrupt even decent men with temptations of praise, power, and plunder. From Shangri-La to the Vanderhofs, the few, local, and weird exceptions practice the virtues, put their goods in common, and take no worry for the morrow. 

That said, their distributive justice is voluntary. Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) donates his millions to put thousands of farmers to work; Jefferson Smith wants to sustain his national boy’s camp through microdonations; while George Bailey’s Building-and-Loan runs on shared member savings. A lifelong Republican, Frank Capra is a localist enchanted with nature, weary of government assistance, and devoted to self-sufficiency. 

How sustainable is that set-up? Gradually, the hero’s chances seem to grow flimsier with every later film. If Clarke Gable’s hero is “a little screwy,” then his successor, Longfellow Deeds, the humble tuba-playing eccentric, is nearly committed to the asylum by his lawyers. 

It’s worse in the unofficial sequel.

Jefferson Smith faces a patronage machine, newspapers and radio, senate colleagues, even a heroic mentor stacked against him, smashing his literal boys club. What saves him are events as arbitrary as the governor’s coin-flip that got him appointed, from the serendipitous smile of a senate president to his mentor's guilt over Smith’s martyred father, who knew only one rule: “love thy neighbor.” 

If that sounds too cute, well around this time, Frank Capra’s name actually became a punchline. 

In Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Preston Sturges, Old Hollywood’s greatest director of slapstick, parodies himself with John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrear), a comedy director trying to do something serious in times of hunger and war. “I wanted to make you something outstanding, something you could be proud of, something that would realize the potentialities of film, as the sociological and artistic medium that it is,” Sullivan expounds, but of course “with a little sex in it. Something like...” 

“Something like Capra,” a producer suggests. “What's the matter with Capra?” he retorts. Here Sturges was exploring, but resisting, the path Capra blazed from burlesque to buskin, but he was not alone in feeling the pressure. Capra felt it too and showed how, effectively answering Sturges’ question, in Meet John Doe.

Here, Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper) is an unemployed ex-pitcher recruited by Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) to play John Doe, a character she created who promises to jump off a skyscraper come Christmas time to protest modern injustice. This fake campaign to drum up newspaper sales actually takes off, too well in fact—as genuinely localist initiatives pop up everywhere with Willoughby as a standard-bearer. Our hero just wanted a job, read some lines, and wasn’t expecting to become the common man’s champion.

In depicting a giant social movement headed by an alleged but well-meaning impostor who cannot escape his newfound fame, Capra was depicting himself. A bit like a studio peddling sentiment to control audiences for commercial gain, the industrialist (Edward Arnold) funding the thousands of John Doe clubs across the country wants to weaponize them and run for president. Long John, now an actor convinced his performance is real, finds out about the plot, but is denounced before and mobbed by thousands of now ex-supporters.

Capra actually filmed and test-screened five alternative endings for this flick. Should John jump off the building? Should he live and get the girl? Should he get the girl and they both jump off? 

Come Christmas eve, he plans his suicide, but Ann pleads: “You don’t have to die to keep the John Doe idea alive. Someone already died for that once: the first John Doe. And he’s kept that idea alive for nearly two thousand years.” Taking his cue from audience suggestion, Capra had John agree with the advice: “if it’s worth dying for, it’s worth living for.” 

Eventually a few John Doe club members regain their senses and come to his aid in the finale, but their number is small. Capra chose the happy ending, but prospects for the larger society—with its passion for sensationalism and obsession—were left, like the other endings, in the furnace. But that was modern industrialized America, not the older rustic one full of eccentrics. Our Italian-American, it seems, had a soft spot for WASPs. 

In Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), the cynical writer Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant), known for his pro-bachelor and anti-marital views, capitulates to love and marries Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane), a minister’s daughter. But his quirky family, the Brewsters, keep getting in the way of their trip to Niagara Falls. 

One of Mortimer’s brothers believes he is Teddy Roosevelt, daily charging up the stairs while under the impression he is taking the San Juan Hill, and nightly digging the Panama Canal in the basement. Another brother is a worldly super-criminal running from the law with a  surgically-altered face reminiscent of a certain horror movie star. This not to mention that his kindly aunts have taken up what might be called a ministry of murder: they habitually poison lonely gentlemen and style the funeral according to the victim’s denomination. (All are mainline Protestants.)

In the end, every Brewster is arrested or committed to the insane asylum by Mortimer, who then finds out, much to his relief, that he was adopted. Born out-of-wedlock to working-class parents, Capra’s All-American Hero was assimilated into the older family—graciously established, if completely bonkers—who as a noble lie paternalistically obscured his origins. Surprisingly, even as the WASPs dwindle away, local officialdom—police, ministers, even columnists—seems to be in working order. Well, at least in 1940s Brooklyn. 

Then came the war. After Pearl Harbor was attacked while Arsenic and Old Lace was being filmed, Capra re-enlisted. Commissioned by General Marshall to create films to counter Triumph of the Will (1935), Major Capra boosted a copy from classified Pentagon archives. Aghast at Leni Riefenstahl’s film, it dawned on him: don’t tell the soldiers what to believe. Inform them. Americans can think for themselves. 

"This is the artistry of the film director,” Capra remarked: “convince actors that they are real flesh-and-blood human beings living a story.” His approach to actors was also his approach to servicemen. Thus he made, using BBC newsreels and Disney animation, the Why We Fight series, thereby later earning the Distinguished Service Medal. 

Politically, Capra believed in an ecumenical Christian republicanism that, Dickensian at heart, despised hypocrisy and drew on the world's perennial traditions. His art betrayed a sympathy for the most miserly and cynical who could find salvation if only they sought it, yet he put his total devotion into American war mobilization. This time the machinery had to work.

After the war, Capra made It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and State of the Union (1948), his last great film. In the latter political comedy, Grant Matthews (Spencer Tracy) is a high-minded aircraft magnate inspired to run for president by a newspaper tycoon (Angela Lansbury), but his wife Mary (Katherine Hepburn) sees her maverick husband dilute his principles with every new backer.

Realizing he sold out his integrity, Matthews resigns from the race, denounces his backers live on television, and plans to hold accountable voters and candidates alike at the conventions. Even after victory in war, American elections remain inescapably corrosive. Also, his heroes are self-critical with a narrowing window to succeed. Indeed, by this time Capra made his endings depend on sheer grace.

His protagonists had taken on country roads and wealth gaps, industrial collusion and foreign crises, political rackets and a world gone mad for fakery—not to mention a serial killer who looks like Boris Karloff. But where did the road lead the man who missed the war, the move to the city, the inheritance money, Shangri-la, and the U.S. Senate? 

That road led to suicide. It’s called It's a Wonderful Life. 

George Bailey sacrifices his ambitions to help others—never traveling the world, attending college, or building skyscrapers and bridges—and his local satisfactions seem themselves to be on the verge of destruction. How can a selfless man intent on drowning be saved? With some divine judo, make him save a man seemingly doing the same thing. Then suddenly Capra turns a melodrama into a Rod Serling nightmare in which Jimmy Stewart gives the greatest dramatic performance by an American lead actor, ever.  

This past December, after a number of deaths in our family, I took my nephews to an old movie theater to watch the film. They didn’t make it past intermission, but, having brought them home, I came back to the theater. 

There I was, jetlagged, grieving, and finding it was Dark George Bailey who spoke to me: angry, threatening his uncle with jail, yelling at the school teacher over the phone, criticizing his kid’s bad piano playing, storming out of his house. Scary George Bailey getting drunk, losing a fight at the bar, and crashing his car. Loony George Bailey stuck in a timewarp and growing frantic. As some people watch Michael Douglass’ rampage in Falling Down (1993) for catharsis, the whole thing went straight into my veins!

When George famously prays on the bridge, "God, I want to live again..." that image was originally a wide shot from far away. Frank Capra knew what Stewart had just delivered, so he spent weeks in the dark room blowing it up again and again, until he got the close-up.

The Capraesque hero doesn't need anything grand. The cross he bears turns out to have carried its own distinctly Christian, even Catholic, blessing. What starts with the intercession of the saints—as St. Joseph sends Clarence Odbody, Angel Second Class, to help George after nearly all of Bedford Falls pray for him on Christmas Eve—ends with the greatest eucatastrophic ending in cinematic history. The joyful reunion with his family, rather than the fate of another banal Willy Loman, brought even David Lynch to tears.

Here, Frank Capra did not just teach us how to be American; he taught us how to be human. He taught us that the man who can go bankrupt may also become, by grace, the king of the yuletide feast and the most befriended man in town. When it comes to love, those who sow shall also reap. 

Afterwards, Capra did a few comedies with Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Glenn Ford, generally to amusing if lackluster results. When his final feature, A Pocket Full of Miracles (1961), came out as a remade version of Lady for a Day, his career had come full circle. 

Much as Mark Twain—who, Clarence reports, is still writing books in heaven—kept retelling and refining his life story through his novels, Frank Capra kept putting his own journey into his movies. Indeed, a telling detail is seen when Clarence, who took a copy of Adventures of Tom Sawyer with him to earth, later gives it to George. Capra was with this allusion putting himself in the tradition of American humorists who, as much as they parodied their countrymen, deeply loved their people, foibles and all, because they also shared in them.

If director D.W. Griffith was—as Sergei Eisenstein argues—the rightful heir to novelist Charles Dicken, Frank Capra was a kindred spirit whose art proved what Eisenstein charged: that “our cinema is not altogether without parents and without pedigree, without a past, without the traditions and rich cultural heritage of the past epochs.”

He carried on a very old torch with It’s a Wonderful Life, a pinnacle of American storytelling. Capra could on a dime create nonstop gut-busting laughter, but over that streak his comedy was veering towards tragedy that was averted only by divine intervention. As the film he had been working towards his whole career, it was his own American tale. 

Around this time,  Lucille secretly converted to the Catholic Church and  the two of them were finally sacramentally married (in a mission church in India, no less).  After this, Capra began experimenting: he pondered nature, putting his Caltech education into good use by making several science documentaries for children’s television. His final film, Rendezvous in Space (1964), speculates about human space travel with animations of future technology while classical music plays behind shots of outer space. 

Is there life elsewhere? “Our Father’s house has many mansions,” one interviewed priest answers. “We only know one.” At the end, the host declares: “The sun still lights up and gives life to our planet, but only the mind of man can light up and give meaning to the universe.” Well, the only thing from earth, that is. In his final cinematic statement, Capra was contemplating human destiny amid the haunted stars and, as one of the interviewees adds, pretty stewardesses. 

Done with filmmaking entirely, Capra wrote an unpublished  novel that spurred his editor to request what became his memoir, The Name Above the Title (1971). In one of Lynch’s favorite books and perhaps the greatest autobiography in Hollywood history, Capra finally became his own comic hero.

This story of a life of countless ups and downs, going from rags to riches to rags and back again, is a heavily-stylized American Dream that puts into text what he had put into film for years. Even as he lamented the collapse of auteur filmmaking, ironically the New Hollywood generation was reinventing movies with nearly two decades of director-driven cinema. That was not the only paradox.

For someone who critiqued the 1960s-70s antiheroes, Capra’s biggest impact was not only on those straightforward seemingly family-friendly types like Steven Spielberg, but also on risqué directors like Cassavetes and Lynch who adopted his idealism and set American instincts and sins against that standard. The countless interviewees in the Ron Howard-hosted documentary, Frank Capra’s American Dream (1997), include Robert Altman and Arthur Hiller, Bill Duke and Andre de Toth, as well as John Milius, Martin Scorsese, and Oliver Stone—diverse types all looking up to the old master.

As Capra crafted his own mythos that acted out his ideal of the nation, it became a question where one ended and the other began. “Maybe there really wasn’t an America,” wondered Cassavetes, “maybe it was only Frank Capra.” Yet that is too dismal a view. Perhaps Capra’s own explanation for the countercultural years, which paradoxically left behind his values but cemented his legacy, makes the best sense of it all: “The apparent chaos in methods is but the trials and errors of man's evolution toward the divine.”

This is not the singularity promised by transhumanists or AI doomers alike, but reflects the eschatology promised by the Church Fathers and Catholic teaching, albeit heavily colored by the sunny optimism of a faithful son of LA. When accelerating technology makes us question the value of artists, and political tumult makes cynicism seem almost natural, Frank Capra shows how human ownership over our tools allows us to create works that extol and further the dignity of all men and women as icons made and loved by God, who Himself is the great Artist and the original Auteur.

 “The art of Frank Capra is very, very simple,” he told the American Film Institute in 1982. “It's the love of people,” along with “the freedom of each individual, and the equal importance of each individual.” Nevertheless, he asked, “how in hell did I get up here?”  

Recalling his “sixth birthday in the black dark hole of a creaking ship crammed with retching, praying, terrorized immigrants,” Capra related that his father took him to the ship deck and pointed to the Statue of Liberty, saying: “It's the light of freedom, Chico. Remember that freedom.” Then Capra turned to his family: “Remember the day we arrived at the Southern Pacific station here in Los Angeles, and Papa and Mama kissed the ground.” For the AFI’s Life Achievement Award, “I am thanking them and all my friends who came here,” he concluded, “but for America, just for living here, I kiss the ground.”

This Sicilian son showed our country a comic American Christian, poor and heroic and wise and in love, who dreams of the heavens and kisses the earth of his prized homeland. 

May we be blessed again with such American dreamers. They’re sorely needed.