A Wonderful Man 

One night when I was ten, I stayed up alone (it was Christmas vacation) and watched an old movie on TV. I thought it was the best movie I’d ever seen. I wanted to cry and cheer at the same time when the hero, played by Gary Cooper, decided not to commit suicide by jumping off a skyscraper at the end.

The movie, as you may have guessed, was Meet John Doe. I’d never heard of it, had no idea it was a classic, and had never heard of the director. At that age, I didn’t know movies needed directors. I thought they just needed actors, a script, a cameraman, and maybe some horses. This was the first Gary Cooper movie I’d seen with no horses, but it was awfully good anyway.

A lot of my favorite old movies in those days starred Gary Cooper or James Stewart. What I didn’t know yet was that many of them had been directed by the same man, Frank Capra.

Born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1897, Capra came to this country with his parents when he was six. He grew up in California and drifted into the film industry in his early twenties, and soon found himself directing silent movies.

He came into his own in the 1930s. His 1934 comedy It Happened One Night, with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, was a sensational hit, winning all the top Oscars. He followed up with smash after smash: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), You Can’t Take It with You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941). Frank Capra became a veritable brand name for great entertainment.

Capra cheered the whole country up during the Depression. His films are suffused with sweet optimism, their innocent heroes, boosted by warm, wise heroines (usually Jean Arthur), typically standing alone against powerful forces of corruption (usually Edward Arnold). The dialogue is crisp, the plots crackle, the humor is riotous. Good always triumphs in the end.

It was a great formula for its time, forcing even cynics to smile: Time magazine called the result “Capra-corn.” It wasn’t deep, but it seldom failed to rouse strong emotions: affection, patriotism, hope, joy.

Warm and gentle, Frank Capra was exactly the right man to make Frank Capra movies. Nobody in Hollywood was so dearly loved. The actors and even crew members who worked with him always recalled the experience as the happiest of their careers. He directed with a light hand, encouraging everyone. He welcomed and adopted suggestions from anyone on the set, making all feel that his work was theirs too. Despite his huge success and great power in the competitive film industry, he never managed to acquire an ego. Or make an enemy.

During World War II, the Roosevelt administration chose Capra to make the propaganda series Why We Fight. Even now these dated films make great viewing, touching powerful chords of emotion. They aren’t nuanced: the Japanese are “Japs,” with “their grinning yellow faces.” The Germans are depicted as a congenitally aggressive race. The Russians, by contrast, are heroic, and the word Communism is carefully avoided.

Still, Capra was able to bring emotional warmth even to war propaganda. You are made to feel that the Allied cause is fundamentally good and decent. As in Capra’s comedies, the soul of America is shown as essentially innocent; only the villains have changed, Hitler and Tojo replacing Edward Arnold. Capra brought both brilliant technique and conviction to the documentary film.

After the war and Depression had passed, Capra was never able to repeat his earlier triumphs. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), with Stewart and the adorable Donna Reed, was a box-office failure, though it received many awards and has grown in popularity ever since. Both Capra and Stewart always considered it their best film.

Despite Capra’s cheerful and even naive view of America, he was not without bite. When Mr. Smith goes to Washington, he finds the U.S. Senate a den of corruption; one senator called the film “vicious.” Imagine showing politicians as crooks!

But nobody came close to Capra at portraying America as we love to imagine it. His faults are so forgivable that they hardly seem to be faults at all.

Joseph Sobran