Mr Gillard Goes To Town

11 weeks to go

A few words from David Gillard (MBE) on the man and the myth that was Frank Capra:

The nice thing about catching up with classics is that the longer you leave them the greater the resonance. For instance, last weekend I saw for the first time the famous 1936 ‘feel-good’ movie ‘Mr Deeds Goes To Town’, in which Gary Cooper plays a hick, small-town poet (he writes homespun verses for greeting cards) who unexpectedly inherits a fortune and is condemned as mad by the Big City luminaries when he naively tries to do good ‘Deeds’ with the money. It’s a silly, sentimental wallow but done with enormous panache and cinematic flair. And the ‘resonances’ for me came because it was directed by Frank Capra, who won an Academy Award for for it. I’ve been rather involved with Capra of late, because he is, of course, one of the major characters in ‘Mack and Mabel’ - and splendidly played in our production by the enormously talented Stephen Hutt.

In ‘Mack and Mabel’ we first meet Capra as a 16-year-old ‘gofer’ on Mack’s Brooklyn set. Later, Sennett thrusts him into the spotlight by telling his potential financial backers, Kessel and Bauman, that Frank is ‘that jewel in the crown of American literary talent’ (he wasn’t, but they don’t know that). It’s implied that Sennett gives Frank his big breaks (which may or may not be true, though he certainly worked as a gag writer for Sennett in the 1920s). And by the end of the show Mack is lamenting his departure: ‘It really hurt when that sonofabitch Frank walked out. Suddenly he became “Frank Capra the big shot.” Quit me to write and direct comedies for Columbia Pictures.’ Big shot he certainly was, making his name with oddball romcoms like the Clark Gable/Claudette Colbert classic ‘It Happened One Night’ (1934) and winning a reputation as a humanitarian with a light touch through such wholesome movies as ‘Mr Deeds’, ‘You Can’t Take it With You’ (1938), ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ (1939) and, of course, the evergreen if schmaltzy Jimmy Stewart fable about a man prevented from committing suicide by an elderly angel, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (1947) - ‘Every time you hear a bell ring, it means some angel just got his wings.’

So who was Frank Capra? He was born in Sicily in 1897 and came with his parents to America at the age of six. He began his career as a prop man in silent movies and he was to go on to win six Academy Awards (later successes included ‘Lost Horizon’ in 1937 and ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ in 1944). He was widely perceived as an inspirational patriotic libertarian (he devoted much of the Second World War to making propaganda film). He was undoubtedly an anti-Communist Republican. Yet his reputation has not gone unblemished. As the excellent film critic David Thomson makes clear in his ‘A Biographical Dictionary of Film’, Capra’s biographer painted a warts-and-all portrait. Says Thomson: ‘Then there has been Joseph McBride’s careful and horrified biography. I say “horrified” because McBride was once a leading fan of the director. Yet in the research he did on Capra’s archive he found all kinds of flaws in the man: a hypocrite, a careerist and credit grabber, a rearranger of facts, a liar, a reactionary, a bogus liberal, an anti-Semite, a self-serving fabulist, and an informer. And a big admirer of Mussolini.’ Hmm.

Capra’s career declined in the 1950s and he made his last movie in 1961 - ‘A Pocketful of Miracles’ with Bette Davis and Glenn Ford, an overlong re-make of his own 1933 hit ‘Lady for a Day’. But Capra’s day had passed and it was savaged by the critics - ‘The effect is less one of whimsy than of being bludgeoned to death with a toffee apple’ and ‘The story has enough cracks in it for the syrup to leak through.’ It was his last cinematic gasp, though he lived for another 30 years and made a good living on the lecture tour, recalling those halcyon Hollywood days. He died peacefully in his sleep at his home in California at the age of 94. A wonderful life? You bet.


David Gillard