Frank Capra: Mr America, the documentary by Matthew Wells receiving its world premiere in Venice Classics, profiles the legendary US director of It Happened One Night (1934), Mr Smith Goes To Washington and It’s A Wonderful Life(1946). Capra was the diminutive Sicilian-born outsider who gatecrashed Hollywood and made a series of hugely popular films which always seemed to stand up for the “little guy.”
He was also (as Wells’ portrait shows) a deeply contradictory figure – a Republican supporter who enjoyed the trappings of wealth and despised his own parents for their lack of education.
“A left-wing collaborator called him a fascist, and meanwhile the American State called him some kind of subversive. You look at his life and you see how those confusions were drawn,” Wells (the British director whose previous credits include the shorts Never Just A Dream: Stanley Kubrick And Eyes Wide Shut and Stanley Kubrick Considers The Bomb) says of his subject. “There is so much complexity there…his life and his films don’t quite make sense together.”
Watching Capra’s movies, Wells couldn’t help but think that they still seemed “incredibly topical. They are movies for hard times…you realise how vital entertainment is. We need it. It’s important and it brings people together.”
Working with producer Nick Varley (the former boss of distribution outfit Park Circus and who now runs production outfit Ten Thousand 86), Wells was able to get hold of rare material featuring Capra.
One of the main interviewees is Tom Rothman, CEO of Sony Pictures. (Capra made his best-known films for Columbia Pictures, which became Sony.) The Hollywood studio gave the filmmakers access both to clips from Capra’s movies and to behind-the-scenes footage of the director at work. “They had some incredible stuff,” Wells notes.
Alongside Rothman, other interviewees include author Sam Wasson, Capra biographer Joseph McBride, director Alexander Payne, critic and curator Farran Smith Nehme, and academics Jeanine Basinger and Eric Smoodin.
“We had great interviewees. We were really quite lucky. When you are going this far back in time, you can’t talk to the people who were there because they are not with us any more so you have to think differently.”
Wells decided early on that he didn’t want to “overstuff” the documentary with too many talking heads. Instead, he wanted to give his interviewees the opportunity to talk in depth. Basinger had known Capra late in his life. Wasson has a book coming up on Capra. McBride is an acknowledged expert on Capra and author of the definitive study of his life and work. Rothman, meanwhile, gives an industry view of Capra’s life and career.
The filmmakers were in touch with Capra’s family who provided extra archive material. The director’s grandson Frank Capra III, with whom Wells was in contact, is an assistant director and producer who has worked on projects from A Few Good Men (1992) to Fast & Furious 8 (2017).
“But I didn’t really focus on the family at all in the film. I was really much more interested in the symbolism of Frank Capra’s rags to riches story, what it came to mean and how that resonates with his movies.”
Capra was prone to make offensive and racist remarks about every ethnic group imaginable. In today’s culture, he would have been cancelled very quickly. At the same time, though, he comes across in archive interviews as a charming and articulate figure. He was a fabulist with a hint of Walter Mitty about him. His autobiography ‘The Name Above The Title’ is considered to be a far from reliable memoir. “Virtually all of it is fictitious,” McBride later concluded.
How does Wells deal with Capra’s prejudices and lack of truthfulness? “There have been a lot of people feeling very betrayed by that, especially by the bigoted things he said but also by the nature of his political views. People took him to be socially progressive and to have a generous view of humanity, but his politics don’t really match up to that.”
Some context is required. Most of Capra’s more noxious remarks were made late in his life at a time when he felt embittered and forgotten by Hollywood. Capra’s best movies also always had a fair amount of darkness in them anyway. James Stewart’s character George Bailey comes close to suicide in It’s A Wonderful Life. His other pictures pick up on the poverty and suffering of the Depression era as well as the corruption of politicians and media magnates.
Capra had some notable failures even in his heyday. His Utopian adventure fantasy Lost Horizon (1937) cost a fortune but didn’t match up to the box office success of his earlier pictures. “For me, it’s one of those great objects in Hollywood history, in the dangers of letting your ego run away with itself,” Wells suggests of Lost Horizon. “For me, it doesn’t quite work but there are things in it that are really interesting and things in it that are great. As a whole, it is overwhelmed with its own ideas – and very bogged down.”
In spite of his Italian roots, Capra was (as Wells puts it) “pure American” as a filmmaker. “The fact that he wasn’t born in America only adds to that, as an emblematic American story. For me, what is so interesting about him is his Americanness,” Wells concludes of the director of several of Hollywood’s greatest ever films.
