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This chapter focuses on Capra’s life after retiring from films. Capra initially threw himself into the ranching business with the energy he once had devoted to his films. He planted thousands of new avocado and citrus trees, and built quarters for the Okies and braceros he brought in to pick them. But within a year of his first retirement to Red Mountain Ranch, Capra was back at work on film projects. These included making The Sun, a pilot film for a children’s television series to boost AT&T’s corporate image; the Caltech recruiting film Careers for Youth; and a film on communism for the State Department.

This chapter focuses on the film American Madness, which featured a banker for a hero at a time when the public image of the banker was near its lowest. It describes Capra’s embrace of a Rooseveltian economic viewpoint in American Madness, which was in part opportunism—he could recognize a good script when he saw it, and the mood of the country was swinging unmistakably in that direction—but also marked the beginning of a genuine, if short-lived, liberal-leftist influence on his thinking.

This chapter recounts Capra’ army experiences during World War II. Capra accepted his wartime anonymity, managing to subordinate his ego to a higher loyalty. He performed brilliantly in carrying out official policy, surrendering his increasingly troublesome creative independence and transforming himself into a cog in the American propaganda machine. While in service, Capra’s Why We Fight series of troop indoctrination films won him great praise and honor, yet his own name never appeared on the screen.

This chapter recounts Capra’s college years at Throop College of Technology in Pasadena. The snobbery Capra had encountered at Manual Arts High School fueled his drive for acceptance in mainstream American society. Capra believed that his path to success in America was to become an engineer. He majored in chemical engineering and most of the courses he took were technical. During his first year at Throop, Capra won the Freshman Travel Scholarship Prize, which provided $250 for a six-week trip around the United States and Canada to visit schools, laboratories, and factories, with a concentration on the chemical field. In Capra’s last months at Troop another passion was taking the place of science in his life: motion pictures.

This chapter recounts Capra’s life after being discharged from the army on December 13, 1918. Capra found his first verifiable full-time job in the movies in 1919, at the Christie Film Company, a leading producer of slapstick comedy. He then enrolled in the Plank Scenario School, which was opened in Los Angeles by a former actor named W. M. Plank. Capra next found work with a new movie company that was scrabbling for a toehold on the fringes of Hollywood. The job brought him under the employment of a man who later would become his most important patron in Hollywood: Harry Cohn.

This chapter focuses on Capra’s successful film career. Lady for a Day was the first film for which Capra received an Academy Award nomination for best director, and was also an artistic and financial success that established his status as one of Hollywood’s master directors. It Happened One Night won an unprecedented five major Oscars in 1935—for best picture, actor, actress, writer, and director. However, Capra experienced manic-depressive mood swings in the wake of the film, which he described as “the torture of constantly proving [I] was number one.” He had schemed and sweated since childhood for the fame that was now his; but when it came, it left him feeling strangely unworthy.

This chapter recounts how Capra turned his back on his colleagues and joined the ranks of witch-hunters seeking to purge Hollywood of “subversive” influences. It describes Capra’s involvement in the controversy over the Screen Directors Guild loyalty oath for members, the climax of three years of turmoil within the guild over the blacklist issue.

This chapter looks at how Mr. Deeds Goes to Town remakes Platinum Blonde, to decisive effect for the account of Capra's sense of his medium, and at how Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in turn remakes Mr. Deeds, with an unprecedented focus on the issue of “film power” and his own wielding of it. It analyzes how Capra's relation to the film medium in these films and Meet John Doe is astutely registered in Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels (1941). It concludes by examining the multiply recursive aspects of It's a Wonderful Life.

This chapter recounts Capra’s stint as a Hollywood gag man between 1924 and 1927. Capra started with the Hal Roach Studios in Culver City, and also worked for the Hollywood Photoplay Company on two college-humor shorts in its Puppy Love series starring Gordon White. He later moved to Mack Sennett Studios, which he describes a his graduate school, the “Custard College” from which he would emerge as an expert in the creation of visual humor.

This chapter details Capra’s early film career. Capra went to work for Columbia Pictures on October 1927, who he claimed called him in for interview because his name appeared at the top of an alphabetical list of unemployed directors. But production chief Harry Cohn would have heard about Capra from his much-heralded feature-directing debut on The Strong Man. Capra’s embellished accounts of the job that resulted in his “marrying the harlot,” to quote his revealing metaphor for his grudging commitment to a film career, were designed to show not that he was not desperate for work but that he was “trading money for power.”

This chapter focuses on Capra’s career after his leaving the army. Capra was hoping to pick up where he had left off in Hollywood when Pearl Harbor interrupted his career. Just as he was doing then, he was looking for a safe haven as a studio contract director, preferably with a long-term deal. But unlike in 1941, studio offers were not forthcoming. Like it or not, going independent was Capra’s only postwar option. In the fall of 1944, while still recovering from the shock of learning that no studios wanted him, Capra formed Liberty Films, Inc., in partnership with William Wyler, George Stevens, and Sam Briskin.

This chapter discusses the films of Frank Capra, including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946); how Capra appeared to realize the long-term significance of television sooner than many directors of his generation; the preoccupation with the Capraesque in the cinema of the 1990s; the publication in 1971 of Capra's autobiography, The Name above the Title; and the link between Capra's claim to auteurism and the issue of his sentimentality.

This chapter, which focuses on Capra’s career after severing ties with Columbia in October 1939, describes the making of the films Meet John Doe and Arsenic and Old Lace. On December 12, 1941, five days after Pearl Harbor, Capra agreed to join the Signal Corps with a major’s commission. According to Capra, joining the army not only enabled him to avoid signing “enslaving” Hollywood deals, it also “gave one a superior aura of patriotism and self-sacrifice.”

This chapter focuses on how the film Lost Horizon caused lasting damage to Capra’s career. The film went over its budget and took more than five years to recover its cost. It caused a grave financial crisis for Columbia, and the tensions it engendered broke the partnership not only between Capra and Cohn but between Capra and Riskin as well.

This chapter details Capra’s film career in the 1930s. Capra’s films during this period sometimes espoused positions that he personally opposed, and under the pressure of the social unrest of the Depression he temporarily softened some of his conservative views, such as his instinctive distrust of organized labor. Capra’s championing of what he initially referred to as “The Man in the Street”—or what the press liked to call “the common man”—was a calculated response aimed at giving his audiences what they wanted.

This chapter recounts Capra’s grueling voyage to and arrival in America with his family in 1903. The journey took thirteen days. Eight days out, on May 18, Capra marked his sixth birthday. On Sunday morning, May 24, his feet made their first contact with American soil on Ellis Island. Capra’s family later boarded a train to California and arrived in Los Angeles on June 3, 1903 to start their new life.

Chapter 2 notes the beginning of the film industry and the downfall of vaudeville, causing Langdon to move from stage to screen. In March 1923 at the Hillstreet Theatre, Langdon was “discovered,” and his career as a silent film comedian began. Much of the focus is on Langdon’s early contracts and films, including detailed descriptions of his performances. This chapter also touches on Langdon’s work with Frank Capra and the personal and professional conflicts that plagued Langdon’s life and career.

This chapter describes Capra’s return to his birthplace, the Sicilian village of Bisacquino, on April 29, 1977. His visit was part of an elaborately orchestrated Italian tour on behalf of the U. S. government, an event described in one Italian newspaper as “grotesquely programmed ... [a] propagandistic parade disguised as a cultural enterprise.” After returning to the United States, Capra was asked what he had felt on his visit to Bisacquino. “I felt nothing,” he said. In his native land, Capra time and again found himself called upon to justify his role as an official apologist for the American way of life, a position that exposed the deepest ambivalences in his character.