FRANK CAPRA
Frank Capra
Born Francesco Rosario Capra May 18, 1897 – September 3, 1991
He was raised in California and was the only one of his siblings to have gotten a college education and the only one to be chronically unemployed.
After a number of odd jobs and riding the rails he bluffed his way into a job with a new film company and then started moving up the ladder.
He became a gag writer for Hal Roach’s Our Gang comedies and also for Mack Sennett. He also wrote some scripts for Harry Langdoen and claimed to have invented his character of “an innocent fool living in a naughty world”
When sound came out, he went to Columbia pictures where he had worked on silents earlier when it was known as Harry Cohn’s studio. Capra was happy with sound in contrast to others in the field. Perhaps because of his engineering background.
Capra’s salary and social status increased his discomfort with his own family rose.
He worked with writer Robert Riskin and cameraman Joseph Walker. He and Riskin were a kind of dream team with Riskin’s snappy dialogue
It happened One Night was a huge hit and is the inspiration for the “road” movies. It has been labeled picaresque which means a lower class hero who lives by his wits makes it in a corrupt society.
Shortly after Capra made Broadway Bill a race horse film in screwball style and discovered “subtext” He said:
“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.”
So he began to put “messages” in his films and his awards started to grow.
Political beliefs
Capra’s political appear clearly in his films. They promoted and reveled in the spirit of American individualism. Capra was conservative Republican, and was strongly opposed to the democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his time as governor of New York State. Capra also strongly opposed his presidency during the years of the Great Depression. Capra was like most Republicans anti government and governmental intervention at that time.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is the strongest statement of what has become known as the “Capra myth”. It showed that the individual working within the democratic system overcoming rampant political corruption."
Although many felt that showing the US government as corrupt was not a good thing he wanted to release it.
"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’s films appealed to a depression age audience and after that ended his films with their “meanings” which were seen as rather simplistic fell out of favor with them. Possibly the current depression and seeing the corruption again in the political system with crime rates and the numbers of homeless on the rise and people being evicted from rent controlled apartments in NYC and elsewhere is the reason they have been seen as more positive again.
Capra felt that the film industry was collapsing. He said:
"The winds of change blew through the dream factories of make-believe, tore at its crinoline tatters.... The hedonists, the homosexuals, the hemophiliac bleeding hearts, the God-haters, the quick-buck artists who substituted shock for talent, all cried: "Shake 'em! Rattle 'em! God is dead. Long live pleasure! Nudity? Yea! Wife-swapping? Yea! Liberate the world from prudery. Emancipate our films from morality!".... Kill for thrill – shock! Shock! To hell with the good in man, Dredge up his evil – shock! Shock!"
Directing style
Capra's directing style relied on improvisation to a great extent. He was noted for going on the set with no more than the master scenes written. He explained his reasoning:
"What you need is what the scene is about, who does what to whom, and who cares about whom ... All I want is a master scene and I'll take care of the rest – how to shoot it, how to keep the machinery out of the way, and how to focus attention on the actors at all times."
According to some experts, Capra style was an iinvisible one. He was unhappy with those directors, who distracted the audience with "fancy technical gimmicks". Some have described Capra's style as one "of almost classical purity." His style relies on editing to help his films sustain a "sequence of rhythmic motion." Since many of his films are rather chaotic screwball comedies, there is a good deal of chaos in the films, which Capra tends to impose order on. While his films may move at a roller coaster speed, the acceleration of pace seems to come from some sort of release. This is again a kind of explanation of comedy in that there is tension which is somehow released.
Typically films can speed up or slow down by lengthening or shortening the duration of the shots and and making more crosscutting and jump shots which emphasize the kind of insanity of what is happening in the story.
Capra's films have a naturalistic quality which is caused by having the actors speak over one another, (overlapping dialog) as happens often in ordinary conversation.
Some have tried to summarize Capra's common theme:
Capra's film messages deal with the basic goodness in human nature, and show how values of unselfishness and hard work. His movies have what has come to be known as "wholesome, feel-good" themes" and this has caused some cynics (or realists depending on whether you agree or not) to term his style "Capra-corn." People who like his films prefer the term "Capraesque".
Capra's films involve:
ARSENIC AND OLD LACE
Frank Capra
1944
Three Little Pigs
Filming the stage play. Is it a funny movie? Is it a funny play?
Verbal vs visual comedy. Do the specific techniques of film making add to the humor?
The play, Arsenic and Old Lace is by Joseph Kesselring. Although the film was released in 1944 it as made in 1941, but as is sometimes the case with filmed plays, there is a stipulation in the contract that the film cannot be released until the Broadway run has closed. (Now it seems that plays are being made from movies rather than the other way around).
Adair, Hull and Alexander all got leaves from the B’way show, but Karloff did not since he was an investor and its main draw. It was filled in 1941 because of the availability of Cary Grant, Bob Hope Jack Benny and Ronald Reagan were all considered until Grant accepted.The film was budgeted at 2 million and was made for 1.2 million!
Reviews were uniformly positive and felt the adaptation as tight and worked well. Twenty-four years after the film was released, Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg wrote Hollywood in the Forties where they stated that "Frank Capra provided a rather overstated and strained version of Arsenic and Old Lace".
After the film
The play was written by Joseph Kesselring, son of German immigrants and a former professor at Bethel College, a pacifist Mennonite college. It was written in the antiwar atmosphere of the late 1930s. Capra scholar Matthew C. Gunter argues that the deep theme of the play and film is the conflict in American history between the liberty to do anything (which the Brewsters demand), and America's bloody hidden past.
Since he didn’t write it, the question is what in it might have appealed to him? It is hard to know. Does this sound like something Capra would have said or been interested in?
The first question to ask is – is the film funny filmically? Is it funny because of the lines in it? Does it seem “Capra-esque” or “capra-corn”?
What in the film is funny? There are funny lines between Jonathan Brewster and Dr. Einstein when they argue over which of them has more “kills” – Jonathan or the aunts. This is almost an early comedy about serial killers. Certainly the idea that one would hardly suspect the “old ladies” of a kind of self-decided euthanasia is potentially humorous, but unlike those slapstick films where no one gets hurt, this is a bit unlike that. They wind up dead. \ In the film the identification is not with the victims, they are basically never seen. In Fargo there are similar places where the murders are of unknown people or done in odd ways (the feathers coming out of the jacket when Wade Gustafson the father is shot. Carl Showalter is done in off camera, but we get to see his foot sticking out of the wood chipper. These are incongruous but the incongruous is not always funny. The idea that the plastic surgeon made Jonathan look like Boris Karloff is lost in the film since Karloff is not playing Jonathan.
Teddy “Roosevelt’s” Charge up the stairs?
Does this argue that somehow insanity is funny? Even though we might argue it isn’t acceptable today, the movie still makes people laugh.
The editing is certainly properly timed for the humor. The editing speeds up as the chaos increases. There are a number of reaction shots which focuses the audience's attention in ways the stage could not.
The lightening shifts for scenes which are potentially comedic to those that are potentially scary. The latter often use chiaroscuro lighting, shadows and so on. Jonathan's shadow alone appears on the wall behind the stairs leading to the basement. The flaahes of light off the knives that are to be used on Mortimer accent them dramatically.
The lightening in scenes which tend to be comedic, for example, reverse the situation and are brightly lit and have far fewer shadows.
The film could easily have appealed to Capra with its attitude toward people doing what they want if it makes them happy and not hurting others. (It is Teddy's horn blowing that is the problem since it disturbs the neighbors).
It is interesting that in the middle of the cdnsorship period the two aunts get away with a dozen murders and simply wind up committing themselves to a mental institution (which might be what the courts would have suggested anyway)