Frank Russell Capra (born Francesco Rosario Capra; May 18, 1897-September 3, 1991) was an Italian-born American film director, producer and writer who became the creative force behind some major award-winning films of the 1930s and 1940s.
Born in Italy and raised in Los Angeles from the age of five, his rags-to-riches story has led film historians such as Ian Freer to consider him the American Dream personified.
Capra became one of America's most influential directors during the 1930s, winning three Academy Awards for Best Director from six nominations, along with three other Oscar wins from nine nominations in other categories.
Among his leading films were It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can't Take It with You (1938), and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939); Capra was nominated as Best Director and as producer (for Academy Award for Best Picture) on all three films, winning both awards for the first two. During World War II, Capra served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and produced propaganda films, such as the Why We Fight series.
After World War II, Capra's career declined as his later films, such as It's a Wonderful Life (1946), performed poorly when they were first released. In ensuing decades, however, It's a Wonderful Life and other Capra films were revisited favourably by critics.
Outside directing, Capra was active in the film industry, engaging in various political and social activities. He served as President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, worked alongside the Writers Guild of America, and was head of the Directors Guild of America.
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Capra was born Francesco Rosario Capra in Bisacquino, a village near Palermo, Sicily. He was the youngest of seven children of Salvatore Capra, a fruit grower, and the former Rosaria Serah Nicolosi. Capra's family was Roman Catholic.
The name Capra, notes Capra's biographer Joseph McBride, represents his family's closeness to the land, and means goat. He notes that the English word capricious derives from it, evoking the animal's skittish temperament, adding that the name neatly expresses two aspects of Frank Capra's personality: emotionalism and obstinacy.
In 1903, when he was five, Capra's family emigrated to the United States, travelling in a steerage compartment of the steamship Germania, the cheapest way to make the passage. For Capra the journey, which took 13 days, remained one of the worst experiences of his life.
The family settled in Los Angeles's East Side (today Lincoln Heights) on avenue 18, which Capra described in his autobiography as an Italian ghetto.
Soon after graduating from college, Capra was commissioned in the United States Army as a second lieutenant, having completed campus ROTC. In the Army, he taught mathematics to artillerymen at Fort Point, San Francisco. His father died during the war in an accident (1916).
Living at home with his siblings and mother, Capra was the only family member with a college education, yet he was the only one who remained chronically unemployed. After a year without work, seeing how his siblings had steady jobs, he felt he was a failure, which led to bouts of depression.
During this time, the 24-year-old Capra directed a 32-minute documentary film titled La Visita Dell'Incrociatore Italiano Libya a San Francisco. Not only did it document the visit of the Italian naval vessel Libya to San Francisco, but also the reception given to the crew of the ship by San Francisco's L'Italia Virtus Club, now known as the San Francisco Italian Athletic Club.
Capra read a newspaper article about a new film studio opening in San Francisco. Capra phoned them saying he had moved from Hollywood, and falsely implied that he had experience in the budding film industry. Capra's only prior exposure to films was in 1915 while attending Manual Arts High School.
The studio's founder, Walter Montague, was nonetheless impressed by Capra and offered him $75 to direct a one-reel silent film. Capra, with the help of a cameraman, made the film in two days and cast it with amateurs.
After that first serious job in films, Capra began efforts to finding similar openings in the film industry. He took a position with another minor San Francisco studio, and subsequently received an offer to work with producer Harry Cohn at his new studio in Los Angeles. During this time, he worked as a property man, film cutter, title writer, and assistant director.
Capra returned to Harry Cohn's studio, now named Columbia Pictures, which was then producing short films and two-reel comedies for fillers to play between main features. Columbia was one of many start-up studios on Poverty Row in Los Angeles.
Capra directed his first real sound picture, The Younger Generation, in 1929.
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Capra's films in the 1930s enjoyed immense success at the Academy Awards. It Happened One Night (1934) became the first film to win all five top Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay).
Written by Robert Riskin, it is one of the first of the screwball comedies, and with its release in the Great Depression, critics considered it an escapist story and a variation of the American Dream. The film established the names of Capra, Columbia Pictures, and stars Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in the film industry. The film has been called picaresque. It was one of the earliest road movies, and inspired variations on that theme by other filmmakers.
He followed the film with Broadway Bill (1934), a screwball comedy about horse racing.
In 1938, Capra won his third Director Oscar in five years for You Can't Take It with You, which also won Best Picture. In addition to his three directing wins, Capra received directing nominations for three other films (Lady for a Day, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and It's a Wonderful Life). On May 5, 1936, Capra hosted the 8th Academy Awards ceremony.
Although It's a Wonderful Life is his best-known film, Friedman notes that it was
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), which most represented the Capra
myth. That film expressed Capra's patriotism more than any others, and presented the individual working within the democratic system to
overcome rampant political corruption.
In 1941 Capra directed Meet John Doe (1941), which some consider Capra's most controversial film.
Within four days after the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Capra quit his successful directing career in Hollywood and received a commission as a major in the United States Army.
Capra was assigned to work directly under Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, the most senior officer in command of the Army, who later created the Marshall Plan and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Marshall chose to bypass the usual documentary film-making department, Signal Corps, because he felt they were not capable of producing sensitive and objective troop information films.
The films included the seven-episode Why We Fight series -consisting of Prelude to War (1942), The Nazis Strike (1942), Divide and Conquer (1943), The Battle of Britain (1943), The Battle of Russia (1943), The Battle of China (1944), War Comes to America (1945)- plus Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), Here Is Germany (1945), Tunisian Victory (1945), and Two Down and One to Go (1945) that do not bear the Why We Fight banner; as well as the African-American related film, The Negro Soldier (1944).
The Why We Fight series is widely considered a masterpiece of war information documentaries, and won an Academy Award.
After the war ended, along with directors William Wyler and George Stevens, Capra founded Liberty Films. Their studio became the first independent company of directors since United Artists in 1919 whose goal was to make films without interference by studio bosses. However, the only pictures completed by the studio were It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and State of the Union (1948).
Capra directed two films at Paramount Pictures starring Bing Crosby, Riding High (1950) and Here Comes the Groom (1951).
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By 1952, at the age of 55, Capra effectively retired from Hollywood filmmaking; he shifted to working with the California Institute of Technology, his alma mater, to produce educational films on science topics.
From 1952 to 1956, Capra produced four science-related television specials in color for The Bell System Science Series: Our Mr. Sun (1956), Hemo the Magnificent (1957), The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays (1957), and Meteora: The Unchained Goddess (1958).
These educational science documentaries were popular favourites for school science classrooms for around 30 years. It was eight years before he directed another theatrical film, A Hole in the Head (1959) with Frank Sinatra and Edward G. Robinson, his first feature film in colour. His final theatrical film was with Glenn Ford and Bette Davis, named Pocketful of Miracles (1961), a remake of his 1933 film Lady for a Day.
In the mid-1960s, he worked on pre-production for an adaptation of Martin Caidin's novel Marooned, but budgetary constraints caused him to eventually shelve it.
Capra's final film, Rendezvous in Space (1964), was an industrial film made for the Martin Marietta Company and shown at the 1964 New York World's Fair. It was exhibited at the New York Hall of Science after the Fair ended.
In 1985, aged 88, Capra suffered one of a series of strokes. He died in La Quinta, California, of a heart attack in his sleep in 1991 at the age of 94. He was interred at Coachella Valley Public Cemetery in Coachella, California.
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the other two: mathematics and music.
Frank Capra
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